Preventing Katrina

With the 2007 hurricane season officially begun and forecast to be an active one, it's a good time to reflect on the terrible storm two years ago, Katrina, that showed with the deaths of more than a thousand people just how unprepared we are for security threats right here at home.

We've heard a lot about the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its botched response to Katrina, led by Michael "Heckuva job Brownie" Brown. Aside from being a Bush crony, Brown's main qualification for the job was his leadership as Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association. Lacking any perceptible management skills or vision, Brown saw to it that FEMA was completely unprepared for a massive disaster.

But the untold story is how the situation got so bad in New Orleans in the first place, how a city protected with massive levees and pumps was unable to protect its citizens. The American Society of Civil Engineers this week released its report, "The New Orleans Hurricane Protection Systems: What Went Wrong and Why". The report was commissioned as a peer review by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which asked the nation's main professional organization of civil engineers (of which I'm a member) to select a panel of the world's leading experts on flood control engineering.

Now you might think a report like this would be a dry, technical tome with little political relevance. You would be wrong. The report is carefully worded for sure, but the diagrams, photos, and explanations are easy to understand. Most importantly, the report looks at the institutions that built and operate the flood control system, and exposes the ample lack of coordination, planning, funding, and competence, that led to the New Orleans disaster. The engineering errors, numerous big ones that compounded on each other, are clearly explained, but the subtext is how these errors could happen in a system that is supposed to prevent such errors.

And that's where we find the political lesson. The political world is full of people like Grover Norquist, who think government is useless and should be "drowned in a bathtub." Such people might be entertaining, but they have no responsibility and can say any stupid thing they like without worry about the consequences. Where we go wrong, is when politicians and voters actually listen to them, and think, as Michael Brown did, that government is nothing but a paid vacation.

The political officials, of every party at every level, who built and maintained the New Orleans Hurricane Protection System didn't take their jobs seriously enough and didn't think about the consequences of a poorly planned, incomplete system. FEMA, whose job is to identify and prepare for natural disasters, obviously did neither, nor did the state and local agencies that were closer to the danger. There is plenty of blame to go around, but that's part of the problem: everyone passes the blame and no one accepts responsibility to solve the problem.

New Orleans is one of the nation's largest seaports, located at the entrance to its largest inland waterway system and integral to such vital national assets as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But even bigger cities are vulnerable to hurricanes, or protected from nearby water bodies by levee and flood control systems, and others have engineered systems to protect them from earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, and other natural and man-made hazards. Colorado has such hazards and systems. Government is responsible for building and maintaining all these systems.

The lesson from Katrina is that we need leaders who understand the responsibility with which they are being entrusted, and are willing to take it seriously. Often, as in the case of Katrina, the main struggle of politics isn't about Democrats vs. Republicans; it's about those who care vs. those who are willfully ignorant.