[StBernard] . . . And How to Stop It

[Westley Annis]

. . . And How to Stop It

By John M. Barry
Sunday, May 14, 2006; B01



Someone once said that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Hurricane
Katrina was a crisis that has created a real opportunity: to bring some
rationality to the way we spend tens of billions of dollars on water
projects in this country so we can protect millions of Americans whose lives
are at risk.

The problem is that we have no overall policy for setting priorities on
water projects. The need for this has been evident since at least the 1993
Mississippi River flood, but nothing has been done. The answer is to create
a kind of deus ex machina, an independent commission to leapfrog the
political process and define a water policy to manage flood control and
development.

Indeed, our approach to water policy up to now has made about as much sense
as Alice's trip through wonderland. Consider that, because of an executive
order signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, the Army Corps of Engineers
can take only economic development into account in its cost-benefit analyses
of proposed projects. The value of a life -- or of 10,000 lives -- is not
part of the equation, nor is the catastrophic damage resulting from any
major flood.

Or consider that the United States protects most areas only against a flood
likely to come every 100 years. Yet a person born today has a better than 50
percent chance of experiencing a flood that will exceed that standard, and a
7.5 percent chance of experiencing a 1,000-year flood. It may make sense to
insure an individual building against a 100-year flood, but it makes no
sense to build levees, as we do, that would protect an entire city such as
Sacramento against that standard. (The Netherlands and Japan protect their
residents against a 10,000-year flood -- and worry that it is not enough.)

But these are mere symptoms, and fixing them would solve little. The real
problems run deep. One is the intrusion of the White House and Congress into
Corps decision-making. Another lies within the structure of the Corps
itself. Finally, there is the notion that, as one Corps official told me,
"all water is local," which leads to a persistently narrow focus on
individual projects rather than entire systems.

All these flaws came together in New Orleans to create a perfect storm that
exposed the weaknesses of our water policy.

Although hurricane protection was authorized after Betsy hit the city in
1965, it was never finished, partly because the Office of Management and
Budget slashed Corps funding requests and partly because Louisiana's
congressional delegation put a higher priority on projects with greater
economic payoff. When flood control did get addressed, the unintended
consequences of 1980s pork reform undermined it. The reform required local
interests to share project costs; in New Orleans, local officials saved
money by thwarting a flood-control project the Corps wanted and having
Congress force the Corps to build the floodwalls that failed during Katrina.

But in building those floodwalls, the Corps itself failed, despite warnings.
During Katrina, the floodwalls collapsed in the face of a storm they were
supposed to withstand. When outside contractors submitted the initial
floodwall design in the 1980s, Corps engineers questioned its safety -- but
allowed construction to begin. A separate Corps study predicted precisely
how the walls would fail, but it went unread. Then a contractor sued the
Corps, warning that the soil was too weak to support the floodwalls as
designed. In 1998, the Corps won the lawsuit -- and apparently only lawyers
reviewed the claim. Part of the Corps problem may be its move to a business
model, replacing engineers with program managers who often lack engineering
expertise.

John Koerner, liaison between the city's rebuilding commission and the
Corps, described the Corps to me this way: "Organizationally challenged.
Silos. No communication internally or externally. Good people individually,
motivated. The whole culture hides behind the term 'authorized' [meaning
congressional authorization]. They don't even know what each other's
responsibilities and duties are. Projects are awarded to unsuspecting
divisions. Quite a mess."

Unfortunately, Koerner was describing not history, but how the Corps is
functioning in New Orleans today, where, under supposedly emergency
conditions, it is trying to restore levees by June 1.

What, then, is the solution? Some recommend privatizing the Corps, or
separating it from the Pentagon. That would be a serious mistake. The Corps
has unique and extraordinary capabilities; it can build anything from sewer
systems to power plants and, as Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated, that
capacity needs to be in the military. Privatization would not address the
OMB or Hill problems and, by giving local officials more control, would make
it even harder to integrate projects affecting large areas. Notes retired
Gen. Gerald Galloway, author of a highly praised study of the 1993
Mississippi River flood: "We've been talking about basin planning and
integration since the 1920s, but we continue to fund individual projects."

A far better idea would be to create what I would call a Water Engineering
Board, which would define national water policy, set priorities, integrate
projects and apply peer review to proposals. It might, for example, demand
that the Corps bring hundreds of miles of Mississippi River levees up to
grade and reject expenditures on new flood-control projects that will spur
dangerous development -- such as that being planned outside Sacramento on a
site 20 feet below sea level.

The board could review Corps decisions during the public comment period, so
as not to delay projects. And just by identifying priorities, it could force
Congress to address them, at least before money is spent on less important
plans. A commission might even be set up in such a way as to limit the
choices Congress makes. There is a precedent for this. When the Pentagon
needed to close domestic military bases, it knew that it would face
guerrilla war in Congress over each proposed closing, and that the victors
would be determined not by the national interest but by which members of
Congress had the most power. So it created the Base Realignment and Closure
Commission; Congress still has a say, but it can only accept or reject a
package of recommendations.

There is another precedent as well. Much of the impetus for addressing
pandemic influenza has come from the scientific community. Now it's time for
another part of the scientific community -- and for the public as well -- to
demand action to prevent disaster.

If you think this proposal sounds like just some bureaucratic shuffle, try
telling that to the people in New Orleans, or those who endured the
Mississippi flood of 1993.

John M. Barry is author of "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
and How It Changed America" (Simon and Schuster). This article is adapted
from his 2006 Abel Wolman Distinguished Lecture at the National Academy of
Sciences.


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