Levees.org founder Sandy Rosenthal has released the second of four excerpts from her upcoming book, Words Whispered in Water: Why the Levees Broke in Hurricane Katrina (Mango Publishing, August 2020).
The excerpt is called Just Seven Weeks. It comes from Chapter 3; The Fairy Tale.
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Seven weeks after the 2005 flood, despite four different investigating teams, the surface had yet to be scratched on the who, what, where, and why of the levee-breach event. If one were to count the breaches on a graphic map created by the Army Corps, they would find a total of 52 breaches in the region.[i] It was simply not possible for any human being or group of human beings to explain what happened in so complex a scenario. Communication lines were still down, breaches needed to be plugged, and roads were impassable. Truth be told, it would be many years before all the facts were laid out for everyone to see.
Yet, just seven weeks after the 2005 flood, a small group of business people had decided where the fault lay. They called themselves the Business Council of New Orleans. On the day the floodwalls broke, this group had no phone number, no staff, no meeting minutes, no list of expenses, and no membership list. But, with the city barely dewatered, they had apparently already decided that blame belonged to local officials — people whose chief responsibility regarding floodwalls and levees was maintaining them after the Army Corps built them. By October 20, while some souls were yet to be discovered in their attics, this group had already devised a plan to reorganize the way levee officials (the Orleans Levee Board) were selected.[ii]
