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BLAMING ENVIRONMENTALISTS FOR KATRINA: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW! In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration has faced significant criticism due to failures preparing for and responding to the catastrophe that hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. Now the administration's emissaries are trying to deflect that criticism by blaming environmentalists. As they say in Louisiana, that dog won't hunt. At issue is the role that conservation groups played in two cases -- one almost 30 years ago -- involving levee projects proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers. The following is a quick summary of those projects and an accurate account of the role that those groups played. What the accusations have in common is that they mistake efforts to ensure good government decisions with a tragedy that had everything to do with bad judgment on the part of our government leaders. In each of the legal cases cited so far, conservation groups simply asked government agencies to look before leaping into projects that would have had major impacts on people and the natural systems on which they depend and to give local communities what our democracy requires: a say in projects coming out of Washington. That isn't just common sense; that's also the law. Here's what you need to know about the specific cases that have been mentioned: Save Our Wetlands v. Rush - 1977 In 1977, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed project would have built a 25-mile long barrier and gate system from the Mississippi border to the Mississippi River. As designed the project would have choked off water exchange into Lake Pontchartrain, dooming an incredibly productive fishery. Communities around the Lake and local fisherman opposed the project because of the massive impact it would have had on the economy and environment in the region. In addition, blockading Lake Pontchartrain would have left New Orleans unable to pump out water through the lake in the event of a flood from the Mississippi River or heavy rains from a tropical storm. In the end, that is why local groups advocated for building higher and stronger levees immediately around New Orleans as a simpler and safer alternative to the Corps’ plan. After the Army Corps of Engineers refused to evaluate the impacts of its proposed project and consider ways to reduce them, Save Our Wetlands filed suit and secured an injunction from U.S. District Judge Charles Schwartz, Jr., who concluded that the region "would be irreparably harmed" if the barrier project was allowed to continue and chastised the Army Corps of Engineers for a shoddy job. The Judge required the Corps to properly study its proposed massive new levee construction project before moving forward. The Corps has never bothered to do the work despite having nearly 30 years to do so. BOTTOM LINE: There was widespread local opposition. This project risked replacing one major threat with another. A Federal Judge demanded that the Army Corps provide more info, it never did, and it abandoned the project years later on its own. Mississippi River Basin Alliance, et al. v. H. Martin Lancaster -- 1996 In the mid-1990's, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed raising hundreds of miles of levees 100 miles north of New Orleans in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Conservation groups and others did not oppose the idea of raising the levees, but they did have strong concerns about the fact that Corps wanted to drain as much as 11,000 acres of bottomland hardwood wetlands, crucial to health and safety of the Lower Mississippi Basin, to supply the construction material for those levees. And they weren't the only ones who had concerns: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Environmental Protection Agency and the Louisiana Legislature all urged the Corps to look at how the proposed project would have impacted the area. It refused to do so. That led the Sierra Club, American Rivers, the National Wildlife Federation, Arkansas and Mississippi Wildlife Federations, and the Mississippi River Basin Alliance to take the Corps to Court. The case was soon settled, with the Corps of Engineers agreeing in 1997 to look at ways of minimizing the damage to the wetlands. But other problems plagued the project. According to a 1997 Baton Rouge Advocate article, "Corps officials said it will take them 30 years to finish the levee work. That much time is required because funding is lacking for the projects -- not because of the new environmental study, called an environmental impact statement." BOTTOM LINE: The project was 100 miles away from flood area and wouldn't have made any difference with Katrina. Conservation groups never opposed raising the levees; just the heavy handed way in which the Corps was going to do it. And it wasn't just conservation groups; even the LA Legislature had concerns. The case was settled one year later but the Corps never had the funding to move ahead on the project. WHAT REALLY WENT WRONG IN NEW ORLEANS Engineers and experts from the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University have initially concluded that the New Orleans flooding was not the result of the storm surge did not top the levees. Instead, there are two major culprits: poorly designed and maintained floodwalls and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. Post-Katrina computer modeling and direct observation by the Hurricane Center point to faulty design and inadequate construction of barriers and levees as a main culprit for the flooding. That analysis, as reported in the Washington Post, assigns most of the blame on the "'catastrophic structural failure'" of barriers that should have handled the hurricane with relative ease" specifically at the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals ("Experts Say Faulty Levees Caused Much of the Flooding," September 21, 2005). The other problem was a little-used canal known as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) which basically funneled the water from the storm surge directly into the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parrish. In fact, MRGO also contributed heavily to the flooding in New Orleans during Hurricane Betsy in 1965. The canal is currently used as a commercial shipping route but handles only handful of ships each week and costs the Army Corps of Engineers about $12 million to dredge and maintain each year. Local officials and engineers at LSU's Hurricane Center have been sounding the alarm about the canal for years, but the few commercial interests that still use the controversial route have wielded their political clout to prevent the channel from being closed. Regardless, the canal does not even have simple floodgates to keep out the storm surge from the lake. ("Canal May Have Worsened City's Flooding," Washington Post, September 14, 2005) WHY WE NEED AN INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION It is very clear that some leaders in Washington will try to use Katrina to further their own agendas rather than to identify what really went wrong and how our nation can keep people safe. That is why Americans deserve an independent investigation – modeled after the 9/11 Commission – into the government failures before, during and after Katrina. ### |
