It’s hard to believe, now that it’s been overrun by 7 million residents and 7 jillion strip malls, but southern Florida was once America’s last frontier. As late as 1880, the census recorded just 257 residents in a county covering most of the region — because most of the region was a watery wilderness called the Everglades. Mapmakers weren’t sure whether to draw it as land or water. Politicians dismissed it as uninhabitable swampland. Explorers described it as a “godforsaken” and “hideous” and “abominable” morass, “suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles.”

When good wetlands go bad.

Photo: usgs.gov

Those explorers never would have imagined that the Everglades would get so dry that it would burn out of control, or that desolate southern Florida would become a sprawling megalopolis. But those two weird developments are intimately related. The wildfires raging through nearly 40,000 acres of the Everglades this week are the direct legacy of the elaborate water-management system that made southern Florida safe for human civilization. The system has functioned according to design for decades, but it’s killing the Everglades, and it’s ultimately unsustainable for human South Florida as well.

Environmentalists like to say that the Everglades is a test; if we pass, we may get to keep the planet. I wrote a book about the death and possible rebirth of the Everglades that was basically dedicated to the proposition that southern Florida is where we’re going to find out whether humans can live in harmony with nature, and perhaps avoid the water wars that could otherwise dominate the geopolitics of the 21st century. The fires are a vivid, symbolic reminder that we’ve got a long way to go. History’s bill is coming due for a century of bad decisions, and we haven’t yet figured out how to pay it.

When It Drains, It Pours

For all its famous sunshine, southern Florida has always been one of the rainiest swaths of North America; with 60 annual inches, it’s significantly wetter than Seattle. And for thousands of years, most of that water ended up in Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, a panoramic sheet of shallow water flowing through 100 miles of serrated sawgrass from the lake all the way down to Florida Bay. In fact, the fires that are now raging in the northeast corner of Everglades National Park are incinerating one of the wettest sloughs of the original “river of grass.” Another fire ravaging 25,000 acres around Lake Okeechobee is actually burning drought-exposed lakebed.

The scientific term for this phenomenon is FUBAR. Sloughs and lakes are not supposed to be flammable. Sure, there were fires in the natural Everglades, but they were caused by lightning strikes during summer rains, and were quickly extinguished by the waterlogged landscape. The Everglades is incredibly flat, declining just a few inches per mile, so its original wetlands were incredibly wet, storing rainfall and recharging underground aquifers in the summer so that there was still water on the ground when the rains stopped in the winter. If you were a glutton for punishment, you could have walked across the entire marsh without getting your hair wet, and without stepping on dry ground.

But starting in the 1880s, Americans determined to subdue Mother Nature started trying to drain the Everglades with canals, hoping to create a new paradise for agriculture and development. A few lonely voices warned that ditches could turn the swamp into a desert, but most Floridians agreed with Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who declared in the early 1900s that if drained swamps could really burn, “the great bogs of Ireland would have been ash heaps long before St. Patrick drove out the snakes.”

But sure enough, the early ditches started sucking the marsh dry, ruining wells, damaging soils, and, yes, igniting fires so smoky that children in Miami had to cover their faces at school. And in the summer, southern Florida’s torrential downpours overwhelmed the ditches, converting farmland back to swampland, inspiring the first jokes about buying Florida land by the gallon. The jokes seemed a lot less funny in 1928, when a hurricane blasted Lake Okeechobee through a flimsy muck dike, killing 2,500 pioneers in the Everglades.

Enter my friends in the Army Corps of Engineers, the ground troops in America’s war against nature. They built the massive Hoover Dike around the lake, forever cutting off the Everglades from its wellspring. Then they built America’s most ambitious flood-control system, with more than 2,000 miles of levees and canals, plus pumps so powerful the engines were cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The project gave water managers power to move almost every drop of rain that fell south of Orlando, allowing them to whisk floodwaters into the lake, the Everglades, or its estuaries for the convenience of thirsty farms and communities that only wanted water when they wanted it.

These waterworks made southern Florida safe for 400,000 acres of sugar fields, as well as one of the spectacular development booms in human history. On the southeast coast, suburbs like Coral Springs, Miami Springs, Sunrise, Miramar, Weston, and Wellington began sprouting west of I-95, paving over the eastern Everglades. And on the southwest coast, Naples and Fort Myers started marching east into the western Everglades.

Unfortunately, most of that boom took place back when wetlands — which absorb stormwater, cleanse drinking water, and nourish wildlife — were still considered wastelands. The result is a dying ecological treasure, but also a megalopolis that still seesaws between dangerous floods in the wet season and harsh droughts in the dry season.

Today, half the original Everglades has been lost, along with its ability to smooth out high-water and low-water events. The other half is a mess — usually too dry, occasionally too wet, always polluted and discombobulated. The ecosystem hosts 69 endangered species, including the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, which exists only in Everglades National Park, and could use some flame-retardant pajamas this week. Water is supposed to be the lifeblood of the Everglades, but these days it barely reaches the park.

With Trends Like This, Who Needs Enemies

Meanwhile, since the leaky Hoover Dike is at risk of a catastrophic failure, and water managers don’t want a repeat of the 1928 disaster, they often blast billions of gallons out of the lake when it gets high, ravaging the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries to its east and west, wasting fresh water they need in times of drought. For example, they dumped tons of water into the sea to prepare for the 2006 hurricane season — just in time for a two-year drought that has left Lake Okeechobee three feet below its normal level.

That’s how southern Florida got into its current predicament. Raindrops that used to fall on wetlands, recharge aquifers, and dribble across the landscape all year long now land on yards, roads, and parking lots, migrate into canals, and get whisked out to sea. And now the exurbs have moved to the doorstep of the Everglades, where they constantly stick new straws into the aquifers. So now the Everglades is parched enough to burn out of control when some yahoo gets careless with matches. And millions of people in the surrounding suburbs suddenly have to worry about smoke and particulates as well as unbearable traffic, overcrowded schools, skyrocketing insurance rates tied to the omnipresent threat of a hurricane, and a disappearing sense of place.

The good news is that in 2000, Congress decided to fix all these problems, enacting the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan to restore some semblance of southern Florida’s natural hydrology. It’s a complex project, but the basic idea is to spend $12 billion on reservoirs and high-tech wells that will store rain that used to be stored by wetlands, then redistribute it to people, farms, and the Everglades when it’s needed.

The project passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both Washington, D.C. and Tallahassee, because everyone agreed that the Everglades was a national treasure. It’s supposed to be a model for ecosystem restoration work in the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, and even southern Iraq’s Garden of Eden marshes.

The bad news is that the project is deeply flawed, particularly when it comes to getting water to the Everglades. And now it’s stalled by money problems, engineering problems, and political problems. The Everglades is as sick in 2008 as it was in 2000.

Eventually, it will stop burning. But it will still be dying.

Imagine the Pentagon had been caught red-handed concocting its justification before launching the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Imagine that after the scandal died down, the Pentagon admitted Saddam didn’t really have WMDs — but proposed an even larger invasion, because there was a remote possibility things might change someday. Then imagine Congress had rewarded this logic with overwhelming bipartisan support.

It’s a silly thought experiment, because Congress — for all its flaws — takes war at least somewhat seriously. But there’s still one part of the Pentagon that can count on overwhelming bipartisan support no matter what it proposes.

In 2000, the Army Corps of Engineers was caught red-handed concocting its justification before launching a $1 billion project on the upper Mississippi River system. After the scandal died down, the corps admitted there wasn’t really enough barge traffic to justify construction — but proposed a $4 billion project, because there was a remote possibility things might change someday. And yes, the project recently sailed through a united Congress, where water projects are a time-honored form of political currency that steer jobs and money to the constituents and contributors of powerful members.

By corps standards, pouring thousands of tons of concrete into the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers to relieve nonexistent barge congestion with seven new locks is no environmental disaster; those rivers are already highly engineered and degraded. But it is a stark example of the dysfunction of the corps — its dishonest analyses, anachronistic priorities, predilection for makework, and desperation to please its congressional patrons and special-interest clients. And that dysfunction is itself an environmental disaster — not only because some of the porky boondoggles it produces destroy pristine rivers and enormous swaths of wetlands, but because an honest corps with better priorities could help revive America’s ravaged ecosystems.

The upper Mississippi scandal was the start of my morbid fascination with the corps and its enablers in Congress. I was a Washington Post reporter then, and I had stumbled into America’s bumbling water resources agency after hearing that it was spending billions of dollars damming and dredging rivers with little barge traffic. Soon leakers were sending me a stream of hilarious internal corps memos about “getting creative” with economic analyses in order to “grow the program” with ginned-up projects. I remember my editor saying the corps bureaucracy reminded him of covering communist Czechoslovakia. And I remember thinking — after independent investigations by the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and even the Pentagon inspector general confirmed that the corps was an unholy mess — that since the mess had become public, it would have to be cleaned up.

I thought wrong. Since 2000, corps leaders have repeatedly promised more environmental sensitivity and better economic analyses. But they keep rubber-stamping the same wasteful and destructive pork that soured their reputations in the first place. As I have written in Grist, the dysfunction of the corps and America’s water resources system drowned the city of New Orleans and killed more than 1,000 people in 2005. And not even that catastrophe has prompted change. So I was pretty naïve to expect the debacle on the upper Mississippi to lead to reform.

Situation Normal: All Porked Up

My first corps story was about the Red River, where the agency had spent $2 billion building dams (named after Louisiana congressmen) to create a liquid highway (named after a Louisiana senator) for barges that never came. My second was about the Missouri River, where the corps was flouting the Endangered Species Act to maintain a reliable waterway for barges that rarely came. And with that I figured I had given more than enough attention to an obscure public works agency with an addiction to concrete.

Don Sweeney.

Photo: Mark Hirsch

Then I got a pile of documents from a corps economist named Don Sweeney.

In 1993, the corps had begun a $60 million study of navigation improvements on the upper Mississippi, its largest study ever. Sweeney was tapped to lead the study team. His task was to calculate whether the economic benefits that private shipping interests would receive from larger locks would exceed the costs to the public. If so, the corps would recommend the project, and Congress would approve it.

Sweeney knew the corps tended to overestimate the need for giant navigation projects with powerful congressional sponsors. The agency had predicted 27 million tons of barge traffic for the first year of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, 25 million tons too high. He realized the corps was using a hopelessly primitive economics model that assumed shippers would use barges at any cost. So he developed a more sophisticated model that was hailed inside and outside the corps as a supermodel. And in 1998, he concluded there was no need to spend a billion dollars on larger locks; the river’s occasional barge delays could be eased with decent scheduling.

But this was not the answer his bosses wanted. The barge industry — dominated by influential conglomerates like CSX, ConAgra, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland — wanted bigger locks. So their friends in Congress, led by Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.), were pushing as well. Corps generals disbanded Sweeney’s team and ordered a new team to come up with a “reasonably plausible” rationale for the project.

The No. 2 corps general ordered the team “to develop evidence or data to support a defensible set of capacity enhancement projects.” In an email summarizing the orders, one corps economist wrote: “If the demand curves, traffic growth projections and associated variables … do not capture the need for navigation improvements, then we have to figure out some other way to do it.”

Eventually, the team managed to inflate enough benefits, ignore enough costs, and skew enough data to produce a positive benefit-cost ratio. It made just one mistake: It kept copying Sweeney on its emails. And Sweeney’s lawyers relayed them to me. I also got a copy of a secret “Program Growth Initiative” that corps military leaders had developed to try to boost their agency’s budget, as if they were dot-com executives trying to expand market share. “We have been encouraged to have our study managers not take no for an answer,” one corps official wrote. “The push to grow the program is coming from the top down.” When I read excerpts to Joseph Westphal, the assistant Army secretary who was supposed to be overseeing the corps for the Clinton administration, this was his response: “Oh my God. My God. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Good times! Army Secretary Louis Caldera, who once told me he wished it could be the Navy Corps of Engineers, promptly announced some gentle “management reforms” reminding the corps brass to obey its civilian overseers. He might as well have sent the 101st Airborne to storm Capitol Hill. Congress considers itself the only true overseer of the corps, and Caldera was promptly forced to retract his reforms. It was clear that I had stumbled into the journalistic equivalent of a full-employment program.

I spent six more months investigating how the corps had twisted its analyses to justify billions of dollars worth of white elephants, from a flood-control pump in the Mississippi Delta that would have drained 200,000 acres of wetlands to a dredging scheme for the Port of Baltimore that was so preposterous it became a subplot on HBO’s The Wire. My final article was supposed to be about the corps redeeming itself by restoring the damage it had done to the Florida Everglades, but the story turned out to be a lot more complex and interesting than that — so complex and interesting that I ended up writing a book. Let’s just say that the corps is a lot better at draining wetlands than it is at fixing them.

In December 2000, the Pentagon wrapped up its internal investigation of the corps, concluding not only that the Mississippi study was rigged, but also that the agency had a systemic bias in favor of large-scale construction. It was a shocking admission, but by then no one was paying much attention. A few corps officers were reprimanded, a new commander renounced the Program Growth Initiative, and the Mississippi study went back to the drawing board. Otherwise, it was business as usual. In fact, after a National Academies report that trashed the corps for cooking its books also included a few caveats acknowledging that even Sweeney’s model couldn’t always predict the future — the economic equivalent of acknowledging that evolution is a theory — corps officials tried to blame the whole controversy on Sweeney and resurrect their discredited model.

“It was surreal,” says Sweeney, who filed a successful whistleblower complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, and is now a professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. “But facts don’t count for much at the corps.”

Gaining the Upper (Mississippi) Hand

These days, the Bush administration’s environmental reputation is about as good as Eliot Spitzer’s marital reputation, but credit where it’s due: The Bushies have tried to rein in the corps. All administrations talk about reining in the corps, but Bush’s has consistently proposed zero funding for the worst corps oinkers, although it’s been just as consistently overruled by Congress. Corps projects hate to die, but the Bushies somehow managed to kill a ridiculous $108 million jetty scheme in North Carolina in 2003, and they’re about to kill that $220 million pump nonsense in the Mississippi Delta. And Bush’s budget office delved deep into the details of the upper Mississippi study, publicly trashing that discredited corps model, forcing the agency back to the drawing board yet again.

The prospects for larger locks were starting to look bleak. In 2000, the project’s rationale had depended on an agribusiness consultant’s study predicting huge increases in grain shipments, even though shipments had been declining slightly for over a decade. Since 2000, grain shipments have continued to slow, and the rise of the corn ethanol industry should mean fewer grain exports in the future. “You’d need significant growth to justify a project,” the new corps study leader, Denny Lundberg, admitted to me in 2003. Right now, the seven locks are in use less than half the time, and barge traffic is so light that Sweeney says there’s not even a need for a schedule, much less a megaproject. But the corps wasn’t about to let 20 years of no-growth experience trump its big-growth dreams. “You’ve got to think about the potential for growth,” Lundberg explained. “If you only made these judgments based on past history, you’d never do anything.”

Sounds like a plan!

Unfortunately, the corps can’t stand to do nothing — its motto is essayons, French for “let us try” — so it decided instead to adopt a new approach, basing its recommendations on “scenarios” instead of forecasts. For example, under a mildly optimistic flat-growth scenario, it calculated that the costs of new locks would be five times the economic benefits. And under a highly optimistic modest-growth scenario, the costs would be 2.5 times the benefits. But under an outlandishly optimistic high-growth scenario, the benefits would slightly exceed the costs. That was good enough for the corps, which liked the high-growth scenario so much it recommended expanding the original $1 billion plan to expand seven locks into a $2.2 billion plan to build seven new locks. A triumphant Sen. Bond called it “a plan that gets the corps back in the business of building for the future rather than haggling about predicting it.”

Corps boondoggles thrive because they provide benefits to a few — in this case, barge interests, farm interests, and unions — at the expense of the many. You pay for this foolishness, but you probably won’t come to Washington to fight it. There are a few corps reformers on the Hill, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and especially Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), but most members of Congress consider it bad form to oppose another member’s water project. Usually, the strongest voices in opposition are environmentalists. And the corps devised a brilliant strategy for dealing with them on the upper Mississippi: It bought them off.

In addition to the $2.2 billion in navigation improvements, the corps proposed $1.7 billion in environmental improvements. Groups like the Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy were delighted with the green pork, especially after Congress included toothless language pledging “comparable” spending on restoration and navigation. (My house is “comparable” to the Sears Tower; it’s smaller.) And the project’s supporters got to brag about saving the earth as well as bringing home jobs. “The funding for ecosystem restoration will keep the land around these mighty rivers clean and beautiful,” crowed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

The entire $4 billion bonanza was stashed into the Water Resources Development Act of 2007. Most environmental groups ended up supporting the bill, because it also included $5 billion for the Everglades and the devastated Louisiana coast, along with $14 billion worth of more traditional pork. But as I have already whined at length on this website, there was nothing in the bill to reform the troubled corps for the 21st century. Obama supported some proposed reforms, such as independent reviews of corps projects, but he didn’t fight for them because he “didn’t want to slow the process down.” That’s an understandable sentiment for an Illinois senator. But the water resources bill had pork for every state; that’s why it was so popular. And that’s why, once again, nothing is going to change.

Some corps projects are true ecological nightmares, like the pump in the Delta, or this flood-control fiasco on the Mississippi. But the real ecological nightmare of the corps is the opportunity cost. If it didn’t have to spend another $2.2 billion pouring concrete into the Mississippi, maybe it really would spend $1.7 billion restoring the Mississippi. And if it wasn’t the kind of agency that spent its time finagling ways to pour concrete, maybe it would be the kind of agency we could actually trust to restore the Mississippi properly — along with the Everglades, Louisiana’s coastal marshes, and so many other ecosystems the corps has helped to destroy in the first place.

The fate of this navigation channel on the Louisiana coast, shown in 1970 (left) and 2001, offered a glimpse of things to come.

Photos: White House OMB

 
If an unsafe building collapsed and killed 1,000 people, we wouldn’t blame the building’s manager, even if he bungled his evacuation plan, or its maintenance crew, even if they had shirked their jobs before the disaster, or the rescue squad, even if it was terribly slow to respond. We wouldn’t shrug and blame Mother Nature. And we certainly wouldn’t blame the victims — especially if they had been assured the building was safe.

We would blame the architects and engineers who produced the unsafe building. And we might ask some tough questions about the way our buildings get produced.

Apparently it’s different with unsafe levees. Otherwise, the fingers of an outraged nation would point directly at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that drowned New Orleans a year ago. And the Hurricane Katrina anniversary coverage would focus on America’s dysfunctional system of funding water projects, a system owned and operated by shameless porkers in Congress and their environmentally destructive servants at the Corps.

Mother Nature took it relatively easy on New Orleans; Katrina was not even close to the Big One the Big Easy has dreaded for decades. It was a Category 1 or perhaps 2 when it hit the city; the Corps was supposed to protect against a Category 3. If the Corps had done its job, the New Orleans bowl never would have filled, families wouldn’t have suffered on their rooftops, and the Superdome wouldn’t have devolved into chaos. No one would have cared that FEMA director Michael Brown was a former Arabian horse commissioner, or that he wrote stupid emails about being a “fashion god.”

But somehow, America decided the scandal of Katrina was the federal response to the disaster, not the federal contribution to the disaster. The main scapegoats were Brown and FEMA, the feckless rescue squad of the opening paragraph. Mayor Ray Nagin, the building manager with the lame evacuation plan, also became a pariah. Some critics even blamed the corrupt Orleans Levee Board, which was certainly a laggard maintenance crew, but was mostly responsible for mowing the grass atop the city’s levees. The Corps was responsible for designing and constructing them.

Corps Col. Richard Wagenaar (right) points out damage to Bush and others four days after the storm.

Photo: White House

Incidentally, President Bush deserves criticism for the lousy response; FEMA deteriorated on his watch, and the Department of Homeland Security was his creation. But while some Democrats have accused Bush of betraying New Orleans by proposing budget cuts for the Corps, the city’s destruction was not his fault. The Corps is the only federal agency funded almost entirely by “earmarks,” individual pet projects requested by individual members of Congress. In fact, the Corps was spending more money in Louisiana than any other state before Katrina, but most of it was wasted on fiscally and environmentally disastrous pork that had nothing to do with protecting New Orleans — including one little-used navigation channel that actually amplified Katrina’s surge. Most of Bush’s proposed cuts for the Corps were aimed at boondoggles, which is why Congress ignored them.

No, the failure of the levees was a failure of the Corps, and by extension a failure of its congressional overseers, who used its projects to steer jobs and cash to constituents and contributors. Three separate independent investigations concluded that Corps design failures left New Orleans under water. And after ducking responsibility for eight months, the Corps finally admitted in April that its shoddy levees created the American Atlantis; the agency’s commander, General Carl Strock, resigned in August.

But you probably didn’t know that, because the media have ignored the Corps. Maybe it’s because the levees failed instantly with no witnesses, while the response failed over the course of a week on national television. Perhaps it’s because the Corps shrewdly deflected blame during the early days of the crisis, falsely proclaiming that its levees had been overtopped and overwhelmed by storm surges far exceeding the project’s design.

In any case, the Corps has now adopted “12 Actions for Change” to transform the agency. For example: “8. Assess and modify organizational behavior.” And: “11. Manage and enhance technical expertise.” Don’t you feel safer? The point is that the Corps is clearly focused on the future, so there’s no point dwelling on past mistakes.

Well, America has spent the last year dwelling on the mistakes of FEMA and DHS, while Congress has given the Corps even more money and power. So let’s do just a bit of dwelling on the mistakes of the Corps, so we can understand exactly what went wrong.

Five Big Easy Pieces

I should acknowledge I’ve got a history with the Corps. I spent most of 2000 investigating the agency for The Washington Post, showing how it was cooking the books of economic studies to justify wasteful and destructive projects that kept its political patrons happy and its employees busy. For what it’s worth, the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Pentagon inspector general later published harsh reports that reached similar conclusions.

The one thing I didn’t really question was the engineering competence of the Corps. I did point out that the Corps had been fired from a Pentagon renovation project, which should have raised red flags, and that it had bungled a flood-control study that left a California community vulnerable. But I didn’t develop the theme. I’ll always regret that, because bad engineering helped destroy New Orleans.

But bad engineering was only the proximate cause; the dysfunction of the Corps and the skewed priorities of its leaders and their congressional allies were the underlying causes. In fact, the Corps and its projects shafted New Orleans in five separate ways:

1. Wetland destruction. The Corps has been at war with the Mississippi for a century, and the massive levees it built along the river have helped keep middle America dry. But this war on nature has had unintended consequences, choking off the river’s natural land-building process. The straitjacketed Mississippi no longer carried as much silt from its banks and its floodplain down to its delta, so it no longer created as many of the coastal wetlands that served as natural hurricane protection for New Orleans. The city was now safe from the river, but dangerously exposed to the gulf; 25 square miles of protective wetlands vanished every year — partly because of the oil industry, but mostly because of the Corps. And since the huge silt infusions that had shored up the city’s foundations no longer arrived, New Orleans began to sink.

Overall, scientists believe these land losses raised Katrina’s surge by several feet.

2. The Gulf Outlet. The Corps motto is “essayons,” or “let us try,” and its engineers love to build projects. But they especially love projects that benefit their influential allies in industry and Congress. One example was the $62 million Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a 76-mile navigation shortcut to the Port of New Orleans. An official Corps history conceded that “the costs were shown to be high and the benefits … speculative,” and critics denounced it as a storm-surge shotgun pointed at the city’s gut. But under pressure from its friends at the port and Louisiana’s congressional delegation, the Corps approved it. It has destroyed 20,000 acres of marshes, and has never attracted many ships. But the Corps has defended it, and still spends $13 million a year dredging it.

Scientists believe the outlet intensified Katrina’s surge by as much as 40 percent.

3. Levees for development instead of safety. The Corps began building hurricane levees for New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy in 1965. But the Corps designed its project to maximize economic benefits — regardless of who got those benefits, or the cost of destroying wetlands, or the cost of human lives. So instead of protecting the city, it focused on building levees around low-lying swamps on the city’s outskirts, which would “hasten urbanization and industrialization,” making some landowners and developers rich. Only 21 percent of the land the Corps project aimed to protect was already developed. The rest was wet, but the Corps made it dry, encouraging the development of thousands of homes in a vulnerable floodplain.

Katrina put it all back under water.

4. No Category 5 protection. Corps levees on the Mississippi are designed for an 800-year storm. But the Corps only designed its hurricane levees for a 200-year storm — which the Corps calculated as a Category 3 hurricane, even though Betsy was Category 4. And the Corps was in no hurry: by 1976, the project’s completion date had already slipped 13 years, and federal investigators noted that the Corps never asked for more money: “To the contrary, the Corps has not been able to use all moneys allocated.”

That’s because the Corps focused more on building pork for its powerful friends. Like a $750 million lock designed to handle steadily increasing ship traffic on the New Orleans Industrial Canal — even though ship traffic was steadily decreasing. Or a $2 billion effort to convert the wild Red River into a placid barge channel. The channel didn’t attract barges, but the Corps did get to name four of its dams for Louisiana Congress members, and the entire channel for the project’s godfather in the Senate.

The Corps and the delegation knew the danger to New Orleans, but nobody tried to do anything until it was too late. It was a priority, perhaps, but never a top priority.

5. Shoddy engineering. In the end, New Orleans didn’t even get Category 3 protection. The Corps built badly designed floodwalls in overly soggy soils with inadequate reinforcement, so they collapsed even though they weren’t overtopped. The worst mistake by the Corps was failing to fight for floodgates that could have kept Lake Pontchartrain out of the city’s drainage canals. Local officials balked at paying their share, and the Louisiana delegation backed them, so the ever-accommodating Corps backed off.

And a great city was ruined.

Lend Me Your Earmarks

It would be nice to report that Katrina has changed everything, but it hasn’t.

After the storm, the Louisiana delegation immediately organized a “working group” of industry lobbyists to put together the state’s relief request. The result would have cost more than the Louisiana Purchase after inflation. It included $40 billion for Corps projects, including the Industrial Canal boondoggle and a port-deepening project for New Iberia that the Corps had rejected before Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language requiring a restudy into an emergency funding bill for Iraq.

Note to Corps: you sank this city.

Photo: NOAA

Congress ignored Louisiana’s gargantuan funding request, but it is poised to pass a bill stuffed with $13 billion in new Corps goodies. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) offered a modest amendment requiring the Corps to prioritize its most important projects, but the Senate overwhelmingly rejected it. The Senate did pass another amendment requiring independent reviews of Corps projects, but it’s not clear if that will become law. And “earmark reform,” which gained momentum after the Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham scandals, has predictably stalled in Congress.

The Corps has supposedly rebuilt its New Orleans levees back to Category 3 strength, but no one is sure they will hold. The Corps is also studying Category 5 protection — but instead of focusing on New Orleans, it seems eager to dike most of coastal Louisiana, which would presumably destroy more wetlands and promote more floodplain development. The Corps also has a $14 billion wetlands restoration plan on the table, but that’s gone nowhere. Since Katrina, Louisiana has gotten nearly 6,000 percent more funding for levees than wetlands. And while there’s a lot of talk of closing the Gulf Outlet, it hasn’t happened yet.

It’s only a matter of time before the real Big One hits New Orleans, and the Corps won’t be able to save the city. At best, it might be able to follow Action Nine of its new plan: “Effectively communicate risk.” But it tends to leave that job to others.