The Slow Drowning of New Orleans

"When there's no cost share, everyone wants their project to be a Cadillac," said G. Edward Dickey, a former Corps chief of planning. "But when there is a cost share, important projects don't always get the support they should."

The levee board also opposed a Corps plan for smaller floodgates at the mouths of three drainage canals stretching from Lake Pontchartrain into New Orleans, saying they would be too expensive to maintain. So Congress directed the Corps to build taller floodwalls along the canals instead of gates designed to keep water out of the canals.

Two of those floodwalls collapsed during Katrina.

"The feeling was always: Let's hope it doesn't come on our watch," Landry said.

* * * Local stinginess was a problem but not an insurmountable problem. The Mississippi delegation, for example, persuaded Congress to waive the local cost-share for the world's largest flood-control pump, even though economists declared the project a boondoggle. And Louisiana's politicians have been the undisputed champions of the Corps funding game; the second-place state, California, has eight times as many people.

"It was a contest among all of us to see who could make the best case, who were the best politicians, who could get the numbers up for your projects," recalled former representative W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-La.).

Retired Gen. Elvin R. "Vald" Heiberg recalled that when he commanded the Corps district in New Orleans, House Armed Services Chairman F. Edward Hebert (D-La.) promised him he would always get whatever resources he needed. "He kept his word," Heiberg said. In 1976, investigators reviewing the Lake Pontchartrain project noted that the district never lacked money: "To the contrary, the Corps has not been able to use all moneys allocated."

But the delegation tended to steer the Corps toward business-backed navigation projects -- damming and dredging rivers, deepening ports and building locks for barges. "They could have built the Hoover Dam around New Orleans with the money they brought home," said one former aide to Johnston, the senator. "But they always pissed it away on politically attractive projects."

Johnston had his own pet project, a $2 billion effort to subdue the Red River between the Mississippi and Shreveport, La. Five presidential administrations opposed it, but Johnston pushed it through Congress; four of its dams were named for Louisiana politicians, and the handcuffed section of the river is now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway. But it has been an economic flop, attracting only a tiny fraction of the barge traffic.

"I never felt like the Louisiana delegation had flood control on its mind," recalled Dawson, the former assistant Army secretary. "They were focused on navigation." Indeed, Dawson said Johnston threatened to block his nomination if he opposed the Red River waterway, relenting only after he agreed not to go out of his way to attack the project.

The Corps could also be swayed by politics, as it demonstrated when it approved a $750 million shipping lock for the New Orleans Industrial Canal. According to a transcript of an internal Corps meeting in 1980, Louisiana politicians, New Orleans port officials and navigation lobbyists wanted the lock to accommodate deep-draft ships, but the agency's economists balked. "There's no way you can economically justify that," one said.

A Corps official explained to Sands, then the Corps colonel in New Orleans, that "the regular decision process" would never approve the lock, but a "political decision process" might.

"Let's throw in the political considerations right here," replied Sands, who later became a consultant to the Port of New Orleans. Years later, a barrage of "Herculean" lobbying (according to a port memo) by the Louisiana delegation persuaded the Clinton administration to reduce the port's cost-share from $90 million to $27 million. The project was justified by predictions of increasing ship traffic. But traffic has rapidly declined ever since.

Local activist Pam Dashiell said she begged Vitter, Rep. William J. Jefferson (D) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) to fight the project and focus on hurricane protection for her low-income neighborhood, but she said they told her the port was too important to the economy. Katrina's surge later overwhelmed floodwalls along the Industrial Canal -- just a few feet from the lock project. "I'm not saying they didn't want stronger levees, but it wasn't as important to them as their pork," Dashiell said after Katrina.

The most controversial project was the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, known in St. Bernard Parish as "Storm Surge Alley." It has never lived up to expectations as a freight channel, and local officials have urged shutting it down. The Corps studied closing it, although it concluded in 2004 that the project was still economically justified. The Bush administration, noting that the study ignored environmental considerations, ordered the Corps to try again.

The agency spent $13 million dredging the outlet this year. The Louisiana State University Hurricane Center believes the "funnel" it forms near the Industrial Canal may have amplified Katrina's storm surge as much as 40 percent.

"There were endless meetings," coastal scientist Sherwood "Woody" Gagliano said. "But nobody ever did anything about it."

* * * Gagliano was the first scientist to warn that Louisiana's coast was disappearing, and that wetland losses would intensify storm surges. "We're creating deathtraps," he declared in speeches in the early 1970s.

At the time, ecology was in vogue. Congress was passing sweeping environmental laws. Wetlands were appreciated not only as nurseries for wildlife, but as water filters and flood sponges. But the Corps still focused on moving dirt and pouring concrete. "We were going through wetlands with abandon," Heiberg recalled, "and we didn't think twice."

In 1990, Breaux won passage of the Breaux Act, securing as much as $50 million a year for coastal restoration projects. But wetlands still eroded much faster than they could be rebuilt, and the Louisiana delegation helped promote the destruction.

For example, Tauzin, an artful Cajun with a bayou constituency who switched to the GOP when Republicans took over the House in 1995, sponsored a "takings" measure designed to help landowners dredge and fill wetlands on their properties. Michael Davis, a Clinton appointee overseeing the Corps, said he told Tauzin that the ragged marshes along the sole of the Louisiana boot helped protect the coast from hurricanes. But he said Tauzin lectured him about the administration's misplaced sympathy for wetlands.

Thanks to Tauzin and Livingston, who became chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Louisiana retained its purse power after the Republican takeover. And the delegation secured funding for several projects designed to extend Category 3 protection along the coast.

But there appeared to be no clamor for Category 5 protection. "Everyone knew we didn't build levees for worst-case scenarios," said Jim Smyth, a longtime planner in Corps headquarters. Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio), who chairs the subcommittee that funds Corps projects, recalled similar silence on Capitol Hill.

"No member, nobody in the Corps, nobody in the administration, nobody in the press, nobody in Louisiana ever came to me and said, 'The sky is falling! Help!' " Hobson said.

W. Clifford Smith, a Louisiana appointee to the Mississippi River Commission, said there would have been no point to a concerted push for enhanced levees. "We could hardly get funding out of Congress and, frankly, locally for Category 3," Smith said. "How would anybody listen if we wanted to double funding to get up to Category 5?"

In 1998, when Hurricane Georges veered just east of New Orleans, LSU professor Joe Suhayda, then also working at the Corps, urged his Corps bosses to push for stronger safeguards. Many residents had ignored calls to evacuate, and Suhayda argued that they would be sitting ducks without Category 4 or 5 protection. "They told me: 'We build levees. Evacuations are other people's job,' " Suhayda recalled.

Suhayda wanted to upgrade the city's defenses immediately. But he was advised to take his idea through the normal "stepwise process" -- find a local sponsor, seek what was known as a "reconnaissance" study, then perhaps a full feasibility study, and maybe start construction in a decade. "We knew this would drag out for years," Suhayda said, "but we figured that's the way it goes."

Around that time, federal officials showed Tauzin a simulation of a Category 4 storm leveling New Orleans. "This thing is real, and it is going to happen," they told him. Chastened, Tauzin jump-started that unwieldy stepwise process, pushing a study of Category 4 or 5 protection through Congress in 1999.

Tauzin also began to see the link between wetlands and security. His state was losing a football field worth of marshes every 45 minutes, and the Gulf was creeping closer to his constituents. Scientists now believed that every few miles of marsh could reduce storm surges by a foot, and Tauzin joined forces with an eclectic array of Louisiana politicians, Army engineers and interest groups behind a $14 billion plan to restore the ecosystem.

It was the largest environmental initiative in history, outstripping the $8 billion Corps project to revive the Everglades, and its support extended well beyond environmentalists. Shell Oil, worried about its offshore drilling platforms, put up several million dollars for a PR campaign to rebrand Louisiana's marshes as "America's Wetland." Gov. Mike Foster (R) declared a "holy war" against coastal erosion.

"We all came together around America's Wetland," Tauzin said. "That was the most coordination I ever saw."

Word was starting to spread about the vulnerability of New Orleans. Weatherwise magazine dubbed the city "The Death Valley of the Gulf Coast." A direct hit by a Category 4, Ted Steinberg wrote in his 2000 book "Acts of God," would "turn New Orleans into a huge lake 20 feet deep." Articles in Scientific American and the New Orleans Times-Picayune essentially forecast Katrina. And in his book "Bayou Farewell," Mike Tidwell conjured the image of a Category 4 flattening Louisiana cities "like a liquid bulldozer." Foster bought 1,500 copies of the book, sending one to President Bush, every member of Congress and every state legislator.

But in recent years, Tauzin, Livingston and Breaux left Congress, and $14 billion became a tough sell. The Bush White House supported the idea of the project, but with deficits mounting, its budget office told the Corps and the Louisianans to scale back their request. The administration's last budget proposed $540 million for restoration over four years.

"White Houses past and present always seemed to be about money -- penny-wise and pound-foolish," said Sidney Coffee, the top restoration aide to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). "They kept telling us to prove our projects were justified. Do they think we've proved it now?" Coffee broke down in tears, then composed herself. "Excuse me if I sound strident, but what's the cost benefit of this disaster?"

* * * Man-made hurricane defenses have not fared much better in the Bush era.

Bush has proposed cuts for the entire Corps, and when his appointee to oversee the agency complained publicly in 2002, Bush fired him. The rollbacks were a response to mounting criticism of economically dubious and ecologically destructive Corps projects, reinforced by withering reports by independent agencies. New Orleans hurricane defenses have felt the pinch as well.

For example, while Landrieu pushed for maximum funding for the Lake Pontchartrain project, $98.7 million over the past five years, the administration proposed $22.4 million and Congress agreed to $42.5 million. On the eve of Katrina, it was still a decade from completion, and the Corps could not even guarantee it would withstand a Category 3. "Continuing land loss and settlement of land in the project area may have impacted the ability of the project to withstand the design storm," the agency warned.

The study of Category 5 protection has languished, too. The first phase was completed in 2002, and the Corps recommended a five-year, $12 million feasibility study. But there has been no money to continue, so the study is on hold.

Meanwhile, the Louisiana delegation has continued to push for projects with much fewer life-or-death consequences. For example, after the Corps concluded that the cost of a New Iberia port-deepening project was more than three times the benefits, Landrieu tucked a provision into an emergency funding bill for Iraq that ordered the Corps to restructure its cost-benefit analysis.

The delegation asked for more money for hurricane protection, too, but it had become the boy who cried wolf. Everyone in Washington knew that the state was already teeming with levees and other Corps projects. No one wanted to hear the perennial winners of Washington's water resources game say that they had been losing all along.

But every now and then, they tried. On the eve of his departure from Congress in 2004, Tauzin, fighting intestinal cancer, took a break from chemotherapy to testify for the bill that would have started funding for the Louisiana coastal restoration project -- legislation that is still stalled, in part by Vitter's disputed logging provision. Tauzin raised the by-now-familiar New Orleans doomsday scenario, then threw aside his script.

"We'll be faced one day with thousands of our citizens drowned and killed, people drowned like rats in the city of New Orleans," he said. "Our paradise is about to be lost."

He continued: "You've been watching the 9/11 commission hearings, people . . . saying if only, if only we had talked to one another . . . if only. I'm telling you now, before this disaster, please don't let it happen in Louisiana. It won't be al Qaeda, it won't be some other enemy of this country. It will be Mother Nature . . . because we could have acted in time but we didn't.

"Please don't let's have a commission where all of us, red-faced, say we saw it coming and didn't do anything. Please don't let that happen."