About Our Levees

The levees that we trusted, broke.
No resident here ever dreamt that they would break; we innocently thought that the Army Corps of Engineers had done their job adequately. The 17th St. canal levee had just been replaced @ 10 years ago. Katrina came ashore near the small town of Pass Christian, MS, pretty much wiping it off the map. We experienced Category 3 winds and Category 5 storm surge, but not a direct hit. The levees protecting much of the city were never over-topped. They didn't get a chance to hold the amount of water they were designed to accommodate; the levees failed from the bottom.

The levee protecting the lower Ninth ward at the Industrial Canal was slammed by a barge which contributed to the levee failure there and subsquent drowning of an entire New Orleans neighborhood.

Several weeks prior to the storm, a homeowner, whose land abutted the 17th St. canal in the Lakeview area, called the Sewage and Water Board because they noticed that water was seeping into their yard from the levee. They thought it might be a broken pipe. The Sewage and Water Board filed the complaint away; the Levee Board was never notified. The Sewage and Water Board had also dredged that side of the 17th St. canal, which separates the city of New Orleans from the suburbia known as Metairie, 2 years before the storm. They dredged to deepen the canal, so that it would accomodate more rainwater runoff during severe rainfalls. Unfortunately, the dredging may have also weakened the levee wall, which only failed on the Orleans parish side, not into Metairie.

As hearings were held post-Katrina, it was revealed that neither the Levee Board nor the Army Corps ever inspected the levees; they relied on the untrained guys who mowed the grass to let them know if anything seemed amiss. The Corps and Levee Board met once a year, ostensibly to take care of business, but they revealed under oath that their meetings basically were about lunch at a nice restaurant.

Incredibly, the levees which were funded in the 1960's, were still unfinished. During Congressional hearings, both Democratic and Republican senators grilled Carl Strock, then Corps leader, about why the levees were never completed. He replied that the system never had enough money; yet he couldn't come up with a good reason why the Army Corps had never asked for the money to finish.

Every year, pre Katrina, President Bush cut our funding for flood protection, as if it was just more pork barrel.
It was always front page news here and I always noticed. It always turned my stomach.

Every summer, on the front page of The Times-Picayune, there was a diagram of how deep the flood water would be if a hurricane hit New Orleans in the worst possible scenario- coming up the Mississippi River, pushing the Gulf into the city. Every summer, for at least the past 10 years the diagram was the same; every structure in the city, high ground included, would be covered by upwards of 20 ft. of water.

After the storm, I actually heard public officials say that they had no idea that this would happen. A mock drill called Hurricane Pam had been staged 2 months earlier, correctly predicting EVERYTHING that was to unfold during Katrina.

Ironically, we have an OEM office, a bureaucratic part of our government called the Office of Emergency Preparedness.
What, exactly, do they do?