The Slow Drowning of New Orleans

By the eve of Katrina's landfall, the city's most vital hurricane project was decades behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget, and the Corps's own analysts warned that it might not protect New Orleans from a Category 3 storm. Congress and the Corps were "playing the odds game," as former senator John Breaux (D-La.) put it.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to point fingers, but Breaux said it's unrealistic to expect government officials to focus on events unlikely to occur during their lifetimes.

"San Francisco sits on an earthquake fault," Breaux said. "So do you say: Move 'em all out of there?"

In New Orleans, the worst-case scenario came true after Katrina churned through the Gulf at Category 4 strength. Its initial surge, amplified by a controversial Corps canal, overwhelmed modest floodwalls on the east side of town, a stone's throw from another controversial Corps navigation project.

A much smaller surge from Lake Pontchartrain on the north end of town poured water into drainage canals where plans for floodgates had been dropped to save money. The surge buckled Corps floodwalls that were apparently either poorly designed or shoddily constructed. Journalists, scientists, engineers and politicians had predicted this, but no one in power had been determined enough to prevent it.

"We all should have paid more attention to the levees," said lobbyist Robert K. Dawson, a staff director of the House public works committee in the 1970s and an assistant Army secretary overseeing the Corps in the 1980s. "But I don't recall that any of us really did."

* * * In 1718 , French pioneers founded New Orleans on a crescent of high ground overlooking the Mississippi, a "natural levee" formed by silt the river had carried to its delta. The original settlement was above sea level; the Crescent City's historic French Quarter would remain relatively dry during Katrina. The city was always vulnerable to hurricanes that could roar up the Gulf into nearby lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne, but it had a measure of natural protection, thanks to a buffer of hundreds of square miles of coastal swamps that helped absorb the energy of storm surges before they reached dry land.

But the French focused their attention on the annual floods of the Mississippi, not the occasional storms from the Gulf. The initial settlers began work on a 3-foot-high, mile-long earthen levee to block overflows from the river, and by 1727, a colonial governor declared New Orleans just about floodproof. He was spectacularly wrong.

For more than a century, landowners on the river built their own levees, which were regularly swept away and rarely replaced. In the mid-1800s, the responsibility for flood-fighting shifted to appointed levee boards with the power to collect taxes and draft slaves, but the unruly river continued to overwhelm their flimsy dikes. New Orleans was earning a reputation as a vibrant port city, but also as an outpost in a watery wilderness.

Americans yearned to control the water, and tame the wilderness.

In 1879, Congress created the Mississippi River Commission to stop the recalcitrant waterway from mutinying. Mark Twain scoffed that "ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, 'Go here,' or 'Go there.' " But Congress also assigned the Army Corps to control the commission. The can-do engineers of the Corps -- whose motto is "Essayons," French for "let us try" -- believed they could tell rivers to go where they wanted.

Corps engineers did not have much experience with flood control, and some critics urged them to consider reservoirs and floodways to give the Mississippi room to spread out. But the Corps insisted a "levees-only" policy would confine the river for good.