The Slow Drowning of New Orleans

The Corps had calculated its Standard Project Hurricane before Betsy, a Category 4 storm, so its nightmare scenario was based on 42 milder hurricanes, and topped out at Category 3. Vic Landry, a Corps engineer who joined the New Orleans district in 1965, said the agency concluded that stronger protections would be "cost-prohibitive."

The Corps was required to recommend the project with the most economic benefits -- no matter who received them -- compared to the cost to taxpayers. It could not consider whether the benefits would be fairly distributed, or the value of wetlands the projects might destroy, or even the value of protecting people from death. So the Corps settled on 200-year protection from storms, a sharp contrast to the 800-year protection from the river.

"At the time, we had nothing," Landry explained. "Category 3 was a start."

The Corps aimed to protect New Orleans from the Gulf with levees much shorter than the river levees, plus two huge floodgates designed to keep storm surges out of the lake. But the economic rationale for the plan would be derived by reclaiming pristine wetlands at the city's outskirts, extending the levees beyond New Orleans to "hasten urbanization and industrialization of valuable marsh and swampland." A subsequent report would find that only 21 percent of the land protected by the Corps project was already developed; the rest was soggy, vacant and well below sea level, just waiting for subdivisions. Katrina would put those lands back underwater.

At one hearing in the late '70s, a freshman Louisiana congressman named Robert Livingston Jr. blistered a Corps colonel for protecting swamps instead of people. "Perhaps I am being a bit too complex," he said. "It would seem to me that if hurricane protection to the people and properties is the paramount importance, the portion you would want to complete first would be those levees surrounding inhabited areas rather than those around uninhabited areas.

"Would that not be a priority, sir?"

* * * Hurricane protection was a priority of the Corps. But it wasn't the top priority of the Corps, or anyone else. "Generally speaking, there was less than moderate interest in hurricane protection," said retired Gen. Tom Sands, a former Corps commander in New Orleans. By 1976, federal investigators found that the Lake Pontchartrain project's completion date had already slipped 13 years. By 1982, the date had slipped even more, and the estimated cost had soared 1,000 percent.

One cause of the delays was a lawsuit filed by the group Save Our Wetlands, with support from fishermen and local officials, to block construction of two floodgates at the eastern end of Lake Pontchartrain. The suit argued that the gates would block tidal flows and damage the ecosystem. In 1977, a judge ordered the Corps to redo its cursory environmental analysis. The agency eventually abandoned the gates, deciding to build taller levees instead.

After Katrina, the controversy has been revisited, with some blaming the lack of floodgates -- and the environmentalists -- for the storm's destruction. But Corps officials recently told the Government Accountability Office that if they had gone ahead with the floodgate plan, Katrina's devastation would have been even worse, because the barriers would not have been large enough to keep the storm surge out of the lake -- and the levees around the city would have been even lower.

In any case, the decision to abandon the gates had as much to do with money as ecology. Local entities were required to pay all the operation and maintenance costs for federal hurricane projects, as well as 30 percent of construction, and New Orleans officials did not want to pay to maintain floodgates. Former senator J. Bennett Johnston Jr. (D) recalled that he supported the barriers plan but wasn't willing to "cram it down anyone's throat" once the Corps said the higher levees would be as effective and less expensive.

"We didn't really have any choice," Johnston recalled. "You've got to have consensus among the local sponsors."

Local officials resisted the goal of Category 3 protection for their communities as overly extravagant. In 1982, the Orleans Levee District urged the Corps to "lower its design standards to provide more realistic hurricane protection." The levee district, stocked with political appointees, could spend freely on private investigators, riverboat gambling and a $2.4 million Mardi Gras fountain. But it said it could not afford its share of protection from a 200-year storm, suggesting that 100-year protection would be fine.