Fortune Magazine
VII. A levee system fit for cows
To demonstrate his concern for the area, Bush visited New Orleans ten times between September and March. The administration has trumpeted its commitment to spending $107.8 billion to fight the impact of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma – a great deal of money, but it’s spread over all five Gulf states.
About two-thirds of it went to immediate disaster relief and flood-insurance payments; only about 17% is going to long-term rebuilding and recovery in the worst-hit areas, including levee repair and wetlands reconstruction. Bush did not ask Congress to allocate any money at all for levee repair until Oct. 28, two months after Katrina – and the requested amount, $1.6 billion, was less than a quarter of what the Corps had already stated was necessary.
Another month passed before he announced how strong the rebuilt levees would be. In mid-December he asked Congress for another $1.5 billion for levee repair, the bulk of which Congress quickly shunted to other, less badly affected parts of the Gulf Coast. (Bush was outraged, and said so publicly–three months later.)
In February, two weeks after being sharply criticized for devoting just 160 words to America’s biggest-ever disaster during his State of the Union address, Bush asked Congress for another $1.36 billion. (Congress finally appropriated $3.7 billion in June.)
All the while, the administration made no public effort to grapple with the emerging consensus that the flood-protection system it was slowly ponying up for was deeply flawed. According to Robert Bea, the Berkeley engineer, current levee designs contain decades-old misconceptions. Back in the 1950s, Congress asked the Weather Bureau to compare the likelihood of flooding in different parts of the country. The agency developed a unit of measure called the “standard project hurricane,” and calculated the likelihood such a hypothetical storm would hit a given area.
But Bea says that calculating the chances of a particular city getting hit by a standard hurricane is beside the point. The real issue is determining what you need to do to protect that city from the biggest hurricane it’s likely to see. “It’s as senseless as saying storms are three times as likely to be dangerous over here, so we need three-foot storm walls,” Bea explains. “There’s a three in each statement, but they have nothing to do with each other.”
Nevertheless, Bea says that after Betsy flooded New Orleans in 1965, the Corps incorporated this standard-hurricane yardstick into its engineering plans. The Weather Bureau flagged this fundamental error as far back as 1979, he says, but the Corps has not yet taken the necessary step of reevaluating its levee designs.
Equally dismaying, in Bea’s view, is the Corps’ handling of the uncertainties inevitable in planning for unpredictable events like hurricanes. “In the offshore [oil] business I come from, we design major structures in the Gulf for a 100-year wave height.” Because that height is an estimate, engineers add a safety factor of four to six for manned structures – that is, they build the structure to withstand a wave that is four to six times as high as the theoretical maximum. (Katrina did not wreck any of his platforms, Bea notes.)
By contrast, he says, the safety factor for New Orleans levees is 1.3. Surprised by this low standard, Bea and the NSF engineering team traced it back to the 1940s, when the Corps used a 1.3 safety factor to protect agricultural land – cows, in other words – against flooding. By applying the same standard to city levees, he says, the Corps has effectively been treating the people of New Orleans “as if they were as valuable as cattle.”
In spring, Bea visited a levee section under repair in eastern St. Bernard Parish and learned from the project manager that the levee was not going to be sheathed in concrete: “It was just a hill of dirt.” From the Corps he learned that the levee was simply being rebuilt to its previous design.
“At that point they kind of shorted out intellectually. I suddenly saw how the engineers in the New Orleans district got trapped into this. These are not noncaring people, they’re not evil, and they’re not stupid. When they were first building the levees [in the 1960s], there was 100 miles of marshes between them and the Gulf of Mexico. Now those wetlands have disappeared. By letting the marshes wash away, we’re turning New Orleans into a coastal city. They need seawalls there, and they’re not getting them.”
The levees could be rebuilt from the ground up, Bea says, “but someone in the federal government would have to ram through the solutions, and I’m not seeing that person.” In a 6,000-page report released June 1, the Corps formally admitted its mistakes were responsible for the levee failures.
“When that happened, I didn’t see the President get up and say, ‘We’re not going to let this stand,’ ” Bea says. “Did you?”
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