Levees

I commend to you a website: www.levees.org. It is a group in New Orleans that is working to get the word out that New Orleans didn't just flood after Katrina because it is below sea level and why rebuild a city below sea level, anyway? The site directs the reader to articles in major newspapers about the real reason why the city flooded: because the levees that were supposed to protect the city from storm surges even greater than Katrina were not built to the original design specifications, and huge, really stupid, engineering mistakes were made. One engineering consultant described it as the biggest engineering disaster in the United States.

I mention this because this weekend we are seeing stories about the twenty-year anniversary of the Challenger disaster. (I can hardly believe it's been twenty years. I remember I was sitting in an editorial staff meeting when someone brought the news to our editorial director and he announced it to the room. I knew this man wouldn't make up something like that, but I didn't want to believe it.) And at its heart, the Challenger disaster came about because someone decided to save money by using cheaper materials or parts, and in spite of having it pointed out that this was a bad idea, this "someone" went ahead and authorized it anyway. And seven people died and the space shuttle program got shelved for years. (The cause of the Columbia disaster was a little different, but it sent the engineers back to designing a new way to do things, too.)

At any rate...someone in the Vicksburg, Mississippi office of the Corps of Engineers questioned the plans for the levees back in 1990 and was told that, essentially, "this will do." But this didn't do. And this little mistake cost more than 1100 lives, with bodies still being pulled out of houses as of this week.

And there are people in Congress who are questioning whether to spend the money to rebuild the levees the way they should have been built in the first place, and President Bush is balking at providing federal funds to rebuild rental properties (by the way, New Orleans has far more tenant-occupied properties than homeowner-occupied properties; we are talking about not covering 180,000 homes here).

What makes me angry is that we would not be in this situation if the levees had been built the way they were supposed to be built in the first place -- the way we THOUGHT they were built, but you can't tell what the interior structure is like from looking at them on the side of the road.

My slogan for a sign I have yet to create, to carry in some future demonstration about the levees:

If you build it
RIGHT
They will come
BACK!

This city is in shambles. It probably will not recover economically in the remainder of my working years. It makes me angry, and it makes me sad.

Do you worry about terrorists attacking your city? Time and again as I drove through flooded neighborhoods in the weeks after the storm, I shook my head and thought, not even terrorists could do this much damage. It boggles the mind.

San Francisco came back after the 1989 earthquake. In time, New Orleans will come back too.