Katrina: The Big One Or Just a Warning Shot?

Official Florida's initial reaction was denial. Afraid that hurricane publicity would scare off visitors and investors, Gov. John Martin (D) refused to call the legislature into session. Sharp accused state drainage officials of negligent homicide, but Martin lashed out at "reckless and foolish" critics who blamed human beings for acts of God. One local booster took out ads arguing that the big blow was nothing but a blip in paradise: "Sure, some lives were lost in the hurricane, but hurricanes come only once in a lifetime."

Martin and Chief Engineer Elliot did propose a $20 million drainage bond designed to tame Mother Nature for good, with new drainage canals and a 27-foot dike around Lake Okeechobee. Elliot was so confident the dike would be insurmountable he suggested building houses on top of it.

But the state legislature, dominated by North Floridians, refused to help pay for the bond to protect South Floridians; as Attorney General Fred Davis testified, "It is mighty hard to get people in other parts of the state interested in whether they perish or not." So South Floridians blocked the bond in court. And the chief of the Army Corps of Engineers told Congress that "until the resources of local interests and the State of Florida have been exhausted in providing flood control," the Corps shouldn't help.

Without the bond, there were no resources. Elliot managed to rebuild the gelatinous Okeechobee dike, but his plans for a stronger levee were shelved. "The state patched up the levee and folks went on about their business," a local historian recalled.

But in the summer of 1928, the lake started rising again, Elliot refused to empty it again, and Sharp started complaining again. "Advocates of a high lake level take a terrible responsibility on themselves," he wrote on Sept. 7.

Nine days later, another hurricane headed for Lake Okeechobee.

"The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The 200 mile an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

'De lake is comin'!' Tea Cake gasped.

'It's comin' behind us!' Janie shuddered. 'Us can't fly.' "

Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist--the winds of 1928 were about 140 miles an hour--but "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is still the most vivid description of the Okeechobee hurricane. The lake--the "monstropolous beast"--again slammed through its dike like a truck driving through pudding, generating another tsunami. The 1926 storm had breached a quarter mile of the dike; 1928 damaged or destroyed 21 miles of the patched-up muck pile. Black bean-pickers like Hurston's characters Tea Cake and Janie were stranded in the Everglades with no means of escape; for weeks, cleanup workers found their bloated bodies under beds, in trees and floating in the floodwaters. "Ugly death was simply everywhere," one worker recalled.

At first, denial reigned again. Martin refused to activate the National Guard, foreshadowing the lackadaisical early reactions to Katrina. But a grisly Everglades tour changed his mind; he counted 126 corpses along one six-mile road, and recognized that Florida could not let its pride stand in the way of its needs. "Without exaggeration, the situation in the storm area beggars description," he wrote in one appeal for aid.

One survivor -- the Kanye West of 1928 -- thrust the bones of a drowned friend at Martin, and shouted: "See what you have done by bringing this disaster!" But again, officials complained that they should not be blamed for another unforeseeable act of God. Like President Bush and his aides after Katrina, Martin and Elliot insisted that this was no time for finger-pointing, then proceeded to point fingers at critics for scuttling their drainage bond, as well as the Army Corps for ignoring their requests for flood protection. After presiding over his second calamity in two years, Elliot actually claimed vindication, pointing out that he had called for a bigger dike--even though his specifications would not have held back the surge.

In any case, it was clear the status quo was unacceptable: The people of the Everglades were in harm's way. They had been lured into a low-lying flood plain by unkept promises of flood control. One possible solution was to clear out the flood plain. "I've heard it advocated in certain districts that what the people ought to do is build a wall down there and keep the military there to keep people from coming in," Attorney General Davis told Congress.

But no matter how many disfigured corpses were floating in the Everglades, it was blasphemy to suggest the abandonment of the swamp. President-elect Herbert Hoover, a trained engineer who fervently believed in man's ability to control nature, paid a visit to the devastated Everglades after the storm and ordered the Army Corps to get to work. The result was the Hoover Dike, a truly insurmountable 38-foot-high wall around Lake Okeechobee. There would be no retreat; the battered region would be rebuilt and reborn.

The Corps later incorporated the dike into a gargantuan water-control project, replumbing central and southern Florida with 2,000 miles of levees and canals, converting an inhospitable frontier into a paradise for 7 million people, 40 million annual tourists and the heart of the U.S. sugar industry.

The project frequently prevents catastrophic flooding--most recently during the four Florida hurricanes of 2004--but it has also lured millions of potential victims into harm's way. One study estimated that a 1926-style hurricane would cause $80 billion in damage today. And the Hoover Dike leaks; a slow-moving 1928-style hurricane could buckle it.

The project also had disastrous consequences for the Everglades, which was once reviled as a pestilential swamp, but is now revered as a national treasure. Half the Everglades has been drained or paved; the other half is an ecological mess, cut off from its natural wellspring of Lake Okeechobee, sometimes too wet, sometimes too dry, always polluted by farms and suburbs, always fragmented by levees and highways. And now the Corps is overseeing the $10 billion effort to restore it.

In other words, we're still cleaning up the damage of the 1928 hurricane.

President Bush, as Hoover did in Florida, visited New Orleans shortly after Katrina and promised a new flood-control regime, "stronger and better than the previous system." And in New Orleans, as in the Everglades before it, suggestions of consolidating the city on its natural high ground have been dismissed as defeatist and even racist.

Katrina has sparked debates with echoes of 1928: Should ravaged cities retreat from coastal areas and low-lying flood plains? Does the government care about black people? And can the Army Corps fix its ecological mistakes?

For decades, Corps projects have ravaged Louisiana's coastal wetlands, which helped expose New Orleans to Katrina's surge. Now the Corps has a $14 billion plan to restore those vanishing wetlands; Everglades restoration may not be the world's largest eco-project for long. So far, though, these debates have been largely academic. The Corps is spending most of its energy trying to do what the state of Florida did in 1926: patch up the levees so that people can go about their business. It has not been authorized to provide "stronger and better" protection, much less Category 5 protection. It has not even explained how it will ensure that its patched-up levees will provide real Category 3 protection. And since no decisions have been made about the future shape of New Orleans, it is trying to rebuild its failed levees in the same failed places.

Katrina was only the third-most-intense hurricane of 2005, and it was nowhere near New Orleans when it made landfall. The Big Easy is still waiting for the Big One. And if it hits--when it hits--we're going to wonder why we ignored Katrina's warning.

grundwaldm@washpost.com

Michael Grunwald, a Washington Post staff writer, is author of "The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise," out this month from Simon & Schuster.