Mike Grunwald is arguably the best authority on Corps of Engineers’ water projects and how the federal agency has failed us both physically and economically. For much of Grunwald’s career, he has written on how the Army Corps consistently overstates the economic benefits of its boondoggles while understating risk to life and property.
Grunwald once ruefully joked to me in a phone conversation that he “wasted most of his career writing about the Corps.” But formerly with the Washington Post and now with TIME Magazine, Mr. Grunwald appears to have gotten respect while telling the truth about the largest civil works agency in the world.
So we draw your attention to a fantastic piece by Grunwald in this week’s issue of TIME called “Katrina: A Man-made Disaster.”
Grunwald gets right to the point in the opening sentences:
“It’s been five years since the levees broke and New Orleans drowned, since an unremarkable storm left behind unspeakable horrors. Five years since those indelible images of corpses floating in ditches and families screaming on rooftops, since that nauseating frenzy of buck-passing and blame-shifting. It was a heckuva job all around.
It took a while, but the prevailing narrative is finally starting to reflect that Katrina was a man-made disaster, not a natural disaster, triggered by shoddy engineering, not an overwhelming hurricane. Even the stubborn generals of the Army Corps of Engineers eventually admitted the “catastrophic failure” of the city’s defenses….”
The next three pages are jam-packed with the most important details you need to know about the New Orleans Flood during Katrina. This article is definitely a must-read.
