Mike Tidwell and John Barry and Katrina

I was listening to an older C-Span BookTV program--I often download the audio and it takes a while to get to them all -- that occurred after Hurricane Katrina. John Barry is the author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (My review is here) an extraordinary book, and Mike Tidwell, author of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast that I have yet to read, but will.

The show, at the bookstore Politics and Prose in Washington, was taped not long after Katrina devastated New Orleans. Both of these authors had a great deal to say about that event and how the devastation could have been avoided. I remember there was lots of discussion at the time of the corruption of the New Orleans Levee Board, yet as Tidwell pointed out, that organization had no responsibility for the levees that failed. It was the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Government. And it must be remembered that while the hurricane was indeed strong, it was the over-topping of the Lake Ponchartrain levees and their failure (they were supposed to have been able to withstand much more than they did) that caused the disaster.

But New Orleans is sinking. It was built on the alluvial soil deposited by the Mississippi every year during its regular flooding. The New Orleans levees were built to prevent that flooding, so now New Orleans is the only U.S. city that is below sea level. Louisiana is losing 25 acres per day to erosion. Several university studies have made it clear that one solution is to rebuild the barrier islands. It could be done for $14 billion. That sounds like a hug amount, yet it was the cost of the Big Dig in Boston whose sole purpose was to speed traffic to Logan Airport and it was the cost of just six weeks in Iraq whose purpose was, well, just what was its purpose. Another $14 billion would be required to bring all the levees up to a better standard. Again, a lot of money. Yet the damage to repair New Orleans was the destruction of 300,000 homes and a cost of $125 billion of which on $80 billion was covered by insurance. So again, our failure to address infrastructure issues in this country in the face of increasing number of natural disasters, while we embark on outrageously expensive overseas ventures with little purpose or success, is nothing short of criminal. It's also symptomatic of a failed state.