Par for the Corps

Themes such as unintended consequences, environmental destruction, shoddy economics and selfish politics.

The same themes that drowned New Orleans.

A City Drowned

After Katrina, the Corps said that all of its failed floodwalls had been overtopped by a hurricane too powerful for the Category 3 protection authorized by Congress, while Bush's critics said the administration's budget cuts had hamstrung the Corps.

Both were wrong. Katrina was no stronger than a Category 2 when it hit New Orleans, and many Corps levees collapsed even though they were not overtopped. Bush's proposed budget cuts were largely ignored, and were mostly irrelevant to the city's flood protection. New Orleans was betrayed by the Corps and its friends in Congress.

The Corps helped set the stage for the disaster decades ago by imprisoning the Mississippi River behind giant levees. Those levees helped protect St. Louis, Memphis and even New Orleans from river flooding, but they also reduced the amount of silt the river carries to its delta, curtailing the land-building process that creates marshes and swamps along the Louisiana coast. Those wetlands serve as hurricane speed bumps -- in Katrina, levees with natural buffers had much higher survival rates -- but they have been vanishing at a rate of 24 square miles per year.

After Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the Corps also began building levees to protect the city from the Gulf of Mexico, but its misguided plan led to even more destruction during Katrina. The Corps put most of its levees around undeveloped and highly vulnerable floodplains instead of focusing on protection for existing developments -- partly because Corps cost-benefit analyses did not consider the cost of human life or environmental degradation, and partly because powerful developers owned swampland in those vulnerable floodplains. Katrina destroyed many of the houses built on those former swamplands.

The Louisiana delegation and the Corps also deserve blame for the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, an alternative shipping route to the Port of New Orleans. The outlet was always popular with port officials and a few shipping executives, but it destroyed more than 20,000 acres of wetlands, created a "hurricane superhighway" into the city and never attracted much traffic. Now computer models suggest it amplified Katrina's surge by two feet.

And the outlet was only the most destructive of the pork projects the Corps has been building in Louisiana when it should have been upgrading levees and pursuing its plan to restore the state's coastal wetlands. In 2000, I described how the Corps had spent $2 billion wrestling the wild Red River into a slack-water barge channel that wasn't being used by any barges; four of its dams had been named for Louisiana members of Congress, and the entire channel had been named for former Louisiana senator J. Bennett Johnston (D). The Corps was also spending $750 million to build a lock that was supposedly needed to accommodate increasing barge traffic on the New Orleans Industrial Canal -- even though barge traffic was steadily decreasing. The Corps spent $1.9 billion in Louisiana in the five years before Katrina, more than it spent in any other state. But all that money didn't keep New Orleans dry.

Ever since Katrina, independent engineers have been pointing out grave problems with the Corps levee designs, and criticizing the agency for building on unstable soils. In congressional testimony last month, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the commander of the Corps, finally acknowledged "design flaws." But his damning admission got nowhere near as much attention as former FEMA director Michael Brown's e-mail about being a "fashion god."

Where's the Outrage?

So why aren't Americans angry? Because water resources policy is so boring? Because they're counting on the Corps to protect New Orleans from the next storm? Because they assume all the other Corps flood-control projects are properly designed and constructed?

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) are pushing a Corps reform bill that would require independent reviews of large projects, but they aren't getting much traction. By contrast, 81 senators have urged swift passage of a bill approving $12 billion in new Corps projects. And the Louisiana delegation has tried to use Katrina to pour billions into unrelated Corps pork, including a port-deepening project that even the Corps concluded would return just 30 cents on every taxpayer dollar.

Meanwhile, the Corps is rebuilding its New Orleans levees to mere Category 3 levels.

Maybe Americans will get angry after the next disaster.

grunwaldmr@washpost.com

Michael Grunwald is a Washington Post staff writer.