We are going to hear a lot on this subject as August 29--the day two years ago that Hurricane Katrina made its final landfall, as a Category 3 storm, near the Mississippi/Louisiana border--approaches.
I plan to blog continuously about the upcoming anniversary from now until the actual date. To that end--and to set the tone--I'd like to start off by quoting the powerful opening paragraph of Michael Grunwald's recent Time magazine cover story about the continuing vulnerability of New Orleans and the many pathetic failures of the Corps of Engineers (and their congressional supervisors). The scathing Grunwald piece deserves, and will soon receive, an extensive post here, but for now, let's just hear his own resonant words, which really speak for themselves:
The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe.
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I am afraid NOLA will remain comparably vulnerable until it is struck by two major hurricanes within 5 years of each other.
As has been the case since the media obsession with the flooding of NOLA, the debacles of the Superdome and the Convention Center and the slow pace of recovery of the city, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, ground zero for Katrina's actual storm devastation (I live in Pass Christian in a FEMA trailer in front of my unrepaired 3 story family home which had shoulder height water (31') on the second floor) continues to be the forgotten story of Katrina's aftermath.
Gov. Barbour, so the storyline goes, did a fantastic job securing federal resources for the state's residents. The storyline is flawed however because for the most part those cities, towns, citizens and homeowners who suffered the most severe of Katrina's effects have made scant progress on the road to recovery yet the media still obsesses over NOLA.
To have your eyes opened, take a beach cruise from Waveland Avenue in Waveland, MS., to Jeff Davis Avenue in Long Beach, MS.
Everyone sympathizes with the plight of NOLA residents. However, the disproportionate share of media attention granted NOLA has the effect om making those of us on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Katrina's Forgotten Victims.
In case anyone is wondering what Aaron Adams is referring to, Katrina's storm surge exceeded 10 feet across the entire coastline of Mississippi, and, as Aaron notes, over 30 feet in some places. Since that region is quite flat, the waves, which ride on top of storm surge, went far inland. In fact - the relatively broad area of devastation sets Katrina apart in an important way: this year, as last year, and all too likely next year, it is not merely NOLA that is unusually vulnerable, but a much broader area, including essentially all of Mississippi's coastline.