This is a reprint of a diary published last year. As the years have passed since our troubles here, I have hoped that with the tide of books, films and articles about "Katrina," people would better understand the greatest shame and tragedy of what happened four years ago.
Unfortunately, the key lesson of "Katrina" seems to be receding even farther from public consciousness. News stories continue to talk about the "natural disaster that devastated New Orleans" and "the administration's failure after the storm."
But what creamed my town wasn't natural. And it happened long before 2005. It needs to be said again, I'm afraid.
Sat Mar 22, 2008 at 11:44:28 AM CDT
Can you stand one more Katrina diary? I hope so, because this one busts one of the most enduring myths you'll hear from Republicans regarding what happened to my town:
"Well, sure the government should have gotten in to help sooner, but you can't say that Bush caused the flood to happen."
Um, yeah, I can, in fact. And this isn't the usual baseless yammering about levees getting blown up in the night. They didn't need to blow up the levees. The levees were dead already.
In 1995, the Army Corps of Engineers announced the consolidation of levee projects in Southeast Louisiana into the "SELA" district and set a 10-year goal of comprehensive inspections and repairs.
Under the Clinton administration, the work proceeded more or less on schedule. Under the Bush/Cheney administration, however, Corps budget requests were steadily cut by the White House.
Between 2001 and 2005, the Corps requested $496 million in funds for work on levees in the SELA district. The White House responded with budgets that included $166 million. Congress, bless their hearts, raised the ante to $250 million, about half the Corps' declared needs.
With the invasion of Iraq already being planned, despite operations in Afghanistan being incomplete, the administration began cutting more non-war-related expenses. In early February of 2002, the White House proposed a budget of only $4.175 billion for the entire Corps of Engineers, compared with the Corps' request of $6 billion.
On Feb. 27, Asst. Secretary of the Army Mike Parker, testifying before the Senate Budget Committee, blasted the administration's proposed cuts to the Corps' budget, saying, "After being in the administration and dealing with them, I still don’t have warm and fuzzy feelings for them. I’m hoping that OMB (White House Office of Management and Budget) understands we’re at the beginning of the process. If the corps is limited in what it does for the American people, there will be a negative impact."
A week later, Parker resigned his post. That the move was not entirely voluntary is suggested by an anonymous administration official, who told the Washington Post, “Either you’re on the president’s team or you’re not.”
In 2003, project director for the SELA district requested a budget of $11 million for levee work in the 2004 Corps budget. The White House called for an outlay of $3 million. Again, Congress upped the number to half the original request, $5.5 million.
By mid-2004, the underfunding of levee work had worsened to the point where SELA director Al Naomi was begging local government to increase their share of project funding so that work on raising and repairing the levees could continue. While Jefferson Parish was able to provide a small increase in levee work money, in the summer of 2004, for the first time in 37 years, work on the levee system stopped.
Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for the Parish, explicitly linked the underfunding of the Corps to the war in Iraq, telling the Times-Picayune, "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
The 2005 budget was no better for SELA than its predecessors, and 14 flood-control projects in the SELA jurisdiction were. In a May 2005 memo, Corps officials complained that funding would be inadequate for needed construction in the 2005-2006 period.
In June of 2005, the White House and the House of Representatives slashed the budget for SELA even more drastically, causing Naomi to complain, “I’ve been here over 30 years and I’ve never seen this level of reduction.”
In August of 2005. . .
Most of these events have already been discussed here. A comprehensive overview and timeline of the SELA project budgets under Bush/Cheney can be found at Cooperative Research, along with numerous links to source articles and interviews.
My purpose in presenting this information again is to remind people that the greatest tragedy of Katrina isn't that it took a week for uniformed government help to appear in the city after the flood--and that those uniforms were worn by Canadian Mounties. The greatest tragedy wasn't that thousands were left to bake in the Dome and the Convention Center. Nor was it the larded contracts, the poisoned trailers, the meaningless photo ops or the ongoing housing crisis.
The greatest tragedy of the federal flood of 2005 is that it didn't have to happen. It was predicted and preventable. The people with the most knowledge and skill were on site and knew just what they had to do to stop our city from being drowned. But there wasn't the money for it. Someone had decided a war against a country that had done us no harm was more important.
Baghdad fell in 21 days. New Orleans held for another two years. In the end, they were both casualties of the same war.