Go With Your Gut

Grab a clue.

The Corps has - by statute - full responsibility for design and construction of of flood works. Local partners have no control over that design.

The breaches in New Orleans were the result of shoddy design and contract administration by the Corps and no one else. Every report that has come out since then (and there are at least three comprehensive investigations, including two fully independent ones and the one from the Corps themselves) backs this up.

Had the outfall canal walls in New Orleans, like those along the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal, been designed and constructed properly they would not have failed. Instead, they failed when water was as much as four feet below the design heights.

As far as the contention that there are no major highways inside Corps-built levee systems, you might want to look at the Sacramento River valley, highways in St. Louis, and nearly every highway that runs along a major river in this country.

Other things that are flat wrong about your idiotic editorial:

1) There were no "worn out pumps" in New Orleans before Katrina. The drainage pumps in New Orleans have been in spectacularly constant service for decades, and are under the control of the local authorities. They and their electrical drivers were inundated by - in some cases - over 10 feet of water, and could not pump. The Corps has nothing to do with them, except for funding their repairs post-Katrina. Those repairs have been sluggish to say the least, and are still in progress. In fact, some pump station repair contracts remain unissued by the Corps almost two years after Katrina, despite the money being appropriated on Dec. 30, 2005.

2) The Corps _did_ build their own indepedently designed flood control system, a "system" in name only and one which remained uncompleted when Katrina struck, despite its authorization in the Johnson administration. Whatever locals thought in New Orleans, the Corps had the full responsibility to make their levees and floodwalls work. They hired the engineering firms, they hired the contractors, they oversaw the construction, and they turned the projects over to local control after completion, assuring New Orleans and other parishes that they were protected. The only power locals had was in granting rights of entry upon city land.

3) Keep in mind that everyone who pays flood insurance behind a levee system is relying on the idea that the Corps is not only telling the truth to locals, but also to FEMA, which runs the flood insurance program. Those flood insurance premiums are evidence of a compact between agencies that flood control works will hold up.

4) The "blame New Orleans" crap has got to stop. The person writing the editorial has obviously not been to New Orleans, and has gotten his warped view of Katrina through conservative news outlets and the Corps themselves. Why in the world would New Orleans deliberately want defective flood control works that would kill hundreds of people? Only the most callous and unfeeling individual with no direct experience of post-Katrina New Orleans would still trot out this talking point.

As a victim of the Federal Flood who put my life back together over the span of two very long years, with no additional assistance other than the generosity of my family, my friends, and my neighbors, I take extreme offense at someone telling me that I am somehow responsible for not steering a huge, dysfunctional government bureacracy with a multi-billion dollar budget and a Congressional mandate to do things right. How, does the author propose, that the citizens of New Orleans go back in time and reverse the following decisions by the Corps (all of which are well documented in the above investigations, had he bothered to read them)?

1) The Corps New Orleans District DECIDED to use an outdated model of the strongest hurricane that could hit New Orleans, despite having other agencies practically beg them to use better, more updated data. This decision stayed in place for 40 years.

2) The Corps New Orleans Distrct DECIDED to not account for subsidence of the levees and the ground underneath them, despite orders to do so from their headquarters years before Katrina. This resulted in levees getting built between 1 and 5 feet _below_ their design heights.

3) The Corps New Orleans District DECIDED to install a floodwall design that - according to their own studies - was likely to fail under circumstances far less severe than their design conditions. This decision was not made public until after Katrina, and was the proximate cause for much of the flooding throughout New Orleans.

4) The Corps New Orleans District DECIDED to build the Mississippi River - Gulf Outlet (MRGO) in the late 1950's, over the express and vocal objections of the folks in New Orleans and St. Bernard that doing so would result in 1) the massive destruction of wetlands critical for stopping storm surge from hurricanes, 2) the creation of a shortcut for storm surge to travel into the heart of the city. Those objections went unheeded for over 40 years, until that wetlands loss led to massive flooding in St. Bernard Parish and storm surge travelled up MRGO, into the Industrial Canal and destroyed the Lower Ninth Ward and many other neighborhoods. The Corps has now been forced to close the MRGO, admitting their errors in a report released earlier this week.

Now their idiotic decisionmaking continues, even to this day. The same people responsible for many of the decisions that led to Katrina - the ones that signed the damn drawings and reports - are now working on the "repairs." They are botching them tremendously, and are trying to cover up their misdeeds.

I urge you to check out http://fixthepumps.blogspot.com, which is the ONLY source of oversight of the work the Corps has done in New Orleans post-Katrina. I ran this blog for nine very long months, and it was very hard work. If there had been oversight like this when the floodwalls along the outfall canals were erected (which was only about ten years ago, not in some distant past), then it's likely Katrina might not have happened. Preventing Katrina would have had everything to do with keeping the Corps from botching things, not with keeping the locals out of it.

I find it interesting that the City has a Trinity website on which NOTHING has ever be posted concerning the actual plans, location, size, method of construction, etc., about the proposed Tollroad; however, if you look at the City's website today, there is a lovely PDF document dated June 25, 2007, about how the City wants to re-write the current planned development district to construct much more height, density, use, etc., along the areas fronting the Trinity River along Levee Road and Levee Street and where the "tollroad" will be AS IF it is going to be inside the levees as currently proposed no questions asked.

Jim:

I intend to call my sources to verify your column this week. If you are correct then many people have a lot of explaining to do, especially the Army Corp of Engineers. They have been consulted every step of the way and have had full knowledge of every rendition of the proposed tollway. They have not dismissed the tollway within the floodway and they control the entire project.

Why don't you let your readers learn about the five different road configurations proposed and let them decide which one they like? The sixth alternative was called "no build" and this was fully discussed within the council and was rejected. These arguments took place almost 10 years ago. If you do not have the analysis done on each proposal I will get it to you.

There does not seem to be any outrage for Sylvan Ave flooding. You have pictures of it. It floods every time we have a significant rain and it runs through the park. These are the very reasons for the Trinity petition. The Trinity Vote people do not seem to care about the many people that must divert their way home to accomodate the flooded road. Where are the champions for the Sylvan Bridge promised years ago?

The Army Corp of Engineers have not been easy to work with on this project but they are finally giving guidelines to work with the city. If you prefer another alignment for the Trinity please point it out and give your reasons. I do not know of anyone who is not open minded but scaring people to believe we will have another disaster like Katrina in Dallas is just irresponsible.

Jim Schutze's article on the flooding in New Orleans is outrageous. I find almost everything in the article offensive, except his comment that "people are stupid". That remark is on target if he is referencing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Congress. To say that the people of New Orleans in any way are to blame for the disaster known as Katrina is completely absurd.
Mr. Schutze would better serve the public if he shut-up and spent some time in New Orleans to see what is really happening here. On some completed levee repairs on the Industrial Canal, one side is approximately one foot or more lower than the other side!!! There is the proof that the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.
So to sum-up everything and since advice is so freely spent by "armchair quarterbacks", MY advice is "put-up or shut-up!
Peter M. Braswell

No, wealthy developers wouldn't team with politicians to develop swampland necessary for existing areas to not flood.
No, Congress wouldn't authorize a project and then withhold the annual appropriations until the local elites got what they wanted.
No, there's no pressure on agencies to build things in a certain way and not regulate or cut off access in a certain way so that land deals can go down.
No, local elites wouldn't sell out their own people for financial gain, to the point of putting them at risk of a natural disaster.
No, government agencies always listen to throngs of local middle class gadflies with blogs before they act in order to do what's right, rather than take their cues from elite local developers with millions at stake.
No, everyone who lives in a high crime drainage ditch below sea level in an area that gets hurricanes at least once every ten years is a victim and has no responsibility whatsoever for their choices.
I don't know what kind of drugs you're buying with your Katrina money, Matt and Pete, but it's some good stuff and the Dallas Citizens Council will be interested in using some of our moonlighting cops (including some former NOPD no doubt) to distribute said drugs to the wider populace before any sort of vote occurs on this Trinity highway. You may now return to your quaint fantasy about how the world works.

Pollyanna says, "I don't know what kind of drugs you're buying with your Katrina money, Matt and Pete..."

I say to Pollyanna: Ad hominem

That's you do when you don't have good talking points so you attack the author personally.

Sheldonville: See all sentences beginning with "No."

And by the way, if I wanted my morals or ethics graded by someone, I'd talk to a priest. My response to "ad hominem" or similar sniveling "tone" arguments, which are always the argument of first resort for people without an argument, is "Get in the ring, chickensh!t."

As Jim Shutze likens the Trinity River and its proposed tollway to snakes, beasts with round snouts, he suggests the best course for Dallas is to "go with your gut". He goes on to suggest that the citizens of New Orleans were responsible for their own demise.

Well, Jim, in New Orleans we did do exactly what you now suggest for Dallas: we went with our gut.

In 1965, Congress passed the Hurricane Protection Act. That law specifies the United States Army Corps of Engineers as the one and only party responsible for the design and construction of New Orleans' flood protection system. That law did more than give us a "gut feeling"; the legislation specified, in writing, that New Orleans that we would be protected from the "the most severe storm characteristic of the region". Our local duty was limited to keep the grass mowed and to report any visually obvious problems.

On August 29, 2005, New Orleans discovered that the Corps' floodwalls were not "cheap", they were not really floodwalls at all. Many of them collapsed or toppled four feet below their design heights, a fact made known only after independent investigators refuted the Corps' initial claim that the floodwalls were overtopped.

These failed levees and floodwalls were not designed or built by the City of New Orleans, the State of Louisiana, or even the "quick-money guys". They were all built by the Corps with the exception of the Orleans Outfall Canal, built by the local levee board and which ironically was the only structure not breached after Katrina. It had nothing to do with New Orleans "peddling the land", as the Corps had 40 years to exercise eminent domain.

New Orleanians were naturally suspicious of the Corps' plans to cut off Lake Pontchartrain or build floodgates in Lakeview, given that these were the same folks trying to put a dam in the Grand Canyon at the time. (Had that project gone forward, the Grand Canyon today would be mostly lake, with mouth of Havasu Creek under 89 feet of water). New Orleans' Lakeview district may not be a natural resource of the same order as the Grand Canyon, but the Corps' proposal to build stopgap floodgates at the canal outfalls would have largely ruined this historic lakefront park built by the WPA in the 1930's. (Imagine building large steel sheetpile walls in the middle of your Arboretum, and you get the idea). In a recent letter to the New Orleans Times Picayune, the retired commander of the New Orleans District acknowledges the "biggest mistake" of his 35 years as an Army officer was to give up fighting for the barrier system preferred by the Corps. Rather than develop an alternative, the Corps quietly gave up and erected floodwalls with minimal engineering.

If these floodwalls had functioned to specification, Katrina in New Orleans would have yielded nothing more than a few downed branches and "wet ankles", in the words of an independent forensic analysis of the Corps' errors.

So, Dallas, take it from one New Orleanian whose hometown suffered at the hands of the very same Corps that is grappling with your proposed Trinity River tollway. Leave behind the all the animals and Uncle Waldo and other "common sense" analogies between your city and mine, and get behind the effort to put the Corps under independent, non-political oversight. That way, whatever decisions you make, you can go with your gut as Mr. Shutze suggests and not end up with a suckerpunch.