ESSAY
Natural and Unnatural Disasters
Reflections on a city made possible and made vulnerable by reliance on technology
Brian Hayes
Esprit de Corps
After Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the Army Corps of Engineers drew up a
plan to reduce the risk of flooding in New Orleans and other
communities on Lake Pontchartrain. The key element of the plan was a
system of movable gates to be erected in the narrow passages that
connect the lake with the sea. Most of the time, the gates would be
left open to allow the free ebb and flow of tides. When a major
storm approached, the gates would be closed to seal off the lake
from rising Gulf waters. The idea was inspired by the tide gates in
the Netherlands designed in the aftermath of a 1953 flood. Another
gate guards the Thames basin in Britain.
The Corps' proposal for a storm barrier in Lake Pontchartrain was
approved by Congress in 1966, but a dec-ade later construction was
just getting under way when a federal court halted the project
because of concerns about its effects on the lake environment. By
the mid-1980s the storm-barrier proposal had been shelved, and the
Corps embarked on a more modest plan for extending and shoring up th
network of levees and floodwalls. Even that project has been going
slower than expected. A fact sheet issued by the Corps in May of
2005 states, "The major remaining construction is the parallel
protection along the London Avenue and Orleans Avenue canals.
Completion of this work is scheduled by 2010." (A Corps news
release on September 7 said the failures in the 17th Street and
London Avenue canals were in places where all scheduled upgrading
work had already been completed.)
State and city officials have complained of delays and skimpy
budgets for flood-control projects in the past five years. In fiscal
year 2005 the Corps requested $22.5 million for the Lake
Pontchartrain project, but the budget proposal submitted to Congress
by the Bush administration allocated only $3.9 million; Congress
increased the amount to $5.5 million. The Corps' fact sheet notes
that "Seven contracts are being delayed due to lack [of]
funds." For fiscal year 2006 the administration's proposed
appropriation fell further to $3.0 million, and the overall budget
of the New Orleans District of the Corps was cut by $71.2 million.
Meanwhile, other critics argue that the Corps has done too much
rather than too little. Flood-control measures, they say, have
hastened the loss of coastal wetlands that might have shielded the
city from the storm. At the southern margin of Louisiana,
land can remain above the waves only with continual
replenishment from river-borne sediment. Dams on the upper
Mississippi and its tributaries have reduced the river's load of
silt, and much of what remains pours directly into the deep waters
of the Gulf instead of spreading out over the flood plain. As a
result, the land area of southern Louisiana is shrinking by 25 to 35
square miles per year. The Corps has denied that the loss of
wetlands "was a contributing factor in the situation." On
the other hand, the Corps also stands ready to solve the problem of
wetland loss, through a $14 billion restoration project called Coast
2050. But apart from small pilot studies, the plan has never been funded.