Editorial: Pinning Rap On The Corps A Bit Much

A blurb in the August 19 St. Louis Post-Dispatch says it all:

It’s been nearly two months since the Time magazine article of July 2 came very close to accusing the Corps of everything but setting Hurricane Katrina in motion. You’d think the Chief of Engineers had sent a request heavenward.

What writer Michael Grunwald actually said was, “the drowning of New Orleans…was a man-made disaster,” and “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.”

The Time article drew a response from Maj. Gen. Don T. Riley, director of civil works for the Corps, who said the story (titled “The Threatening Storm”) contains “many errors and misrepresentations of facts with respect to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Hurricane Katrina, and ongoing efforts to improve hurricane and storm damage reduction to southeast Louisiana…The article’s reckless regard for the truth undermines the real science and risk information citizens need to make informed decisions about rebuilding,” he said.

The Corps had provided a great amount of information to Grunwald in addition to granting interviews. Gen. Riley said much of that information was ignored. It was based on work done by the independent Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET), a group comprised of more than 150 national experts from eight government agencies, 25 universities and 23 private firms.

Did Time disregard the IPET evaluation because Grunwald thought it was loaded to protect the Corps? Considering growing criticism of how the Corps manages water resource development projects in recent years, it’s hard to believe participants would circle the wagons, particularly when they knew they would be subjected to intense public scrutiny.

The article gives the Corps a bad rap. The construction of levees in Louisiana began more than 300 years ago and grew like Topsy. We can liken it to a patchwork quilt, with many pieces not matching. They worried then about the river, not hurricane protection. Nature provided it. In recent years, the Corps has run into opposition at every turn. So if the protection system for New Orleans was inadequate—and it was— the Corps had lots of help and many detractors.

The Time article highlighted three areas of failure: “lousy engineering,” “misplaced priorities” and “pork-barrel politics.” It is easy to agree with the latter two. But the business of lousy engineering is not so easily explained by simply writing, as Time did, “the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.”

The Corps once pursued a plan to build twin barriers at the east end of Lake Pontchartrain, but opponents fought the agency to a standstill, and a federal judge ordered that the design be stopped. Millions of dollars have been redirected from Corps projects to others thought to be more desirable by the agency’s critics. So much of what the Corps wanted to do, it couldn’t do.

But we cannot dismiss the criticisms in Grunwald’s article so easily. It seems a given that when mankind began trying to control nature by redirecting rivers and interrupting the natural flow of water, undesirable results took place. When he wrote, “It was a man-made disaster,” he was probably right. A case in point: channels were cut through the Gulf Coast marshes to move oil rigs to sea. Today we question some actions taken decades ago in the name of progress.

In the wake of Katrina, the Corps was given $7 billion dollars to begin the fix. Critics say the money is being spent for traditional engineering—huge structures to control nature rather than restore it. The Time article says Congress is about to authorize massive levees along the entire coast. G. Edward Dickey, former Corps chief of planning, was quoted as saying, “Nothing has changed, [and] it’s the same engineering mentality, except now they’ll build the levees even bigger.” Must the mentality change?

Grunwald admits that big levees aren’t bad. But he and others contend that the coast must be restored, that the approach to handling water resources development must change.

Can we change our approach? Is it impossible? A few years ago engineers decided major components of an Ohio River lock could be built cheaper at an upriver site and floated to the construction site. It worked. Some probably considered it a radical idea.

Water resource development is a long-term undertaking. It takes cohesiveness of thought to promote long-term planning. But long-term efforts too often give way to political haggling, power struggles and outside influence. Even now President Bush has threatened to veto the Water Resources Development Act so highly approved by both houses of Congress. (It is said that they will pass it over his veto if it comes to that.)

We think power struggles and pork-barrel spending represent a big part of what got in the way of Gulf hurricane protection. We don’t know when her big sister will come along, but we’re told she will. Chances are we will not be ready.

All stakeholders need to behave themselves and work together to figure out how best to protect New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, then pursue it. The work will require steady funding year after year, and it will take many years. We cannot divert funds to build “highways to nowhere.”

It’s all a matter of doing what we know must be done and avoiding disruptive activities that divert our attention away from the primary goal.

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