When the Levees Break Again

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/opinion/new-orleans-floods-levees.html

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NEW ORLEANS — Saturday is the official start of hurricane season. And the Army Corps of Engineers recently predicted that our levee system may soon be obsolete.

The corps announced in April that, because of global sea level rise and because Louisiana is sinking, “risk to life and property in the greater New Orleans area will progressively increase” without substantial improvements. As early as 2023, the levee system may no longer protect New Orleans and its suburbs against a so-called 100-year storm, or a hurricane with a 1 percent chance of happening here each year.

We might expect such a storm soon. But we may feel the effects of the levee system’s decline evens sooner. That’s because our flood protections must be certified to the 100-year standard in order for us to participate in the National Flood Insurance Program.

The Corps of Engineers did not respond to my inquiries about what would happen if the New Orleans system lost its certification. In fairness, the corps is busy with what it calls a “flood fight that is historic and unprecedented” on the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers. But the likely scenario is that many people here would lose their discounted federal flood insurance rates, making coverage more expensive, in some cases prohibitively so.

Meanwhile, Congress has struggled to pass even short-term extensions to the troubled flood insurance program itself, making a worst-case scenario more possible: Louisianans trapped in homes that they cannot insure, cannot sell and cannot safely live in.

It’s a reminder that a warming world has many hazards. A surging wall of water might announce the climate apocalypse in your town, but rising seas also can cause insurance premiums to skyrocket or property values to collapse. Your mortgage can go underwater even while your house remains dry.

The plan is to do the bare minimum. The corps is studying how to strengthen the levees just enough to keep the system certified, at an estimated cost of $820 million. But even if the funding is forthcoming, piecemeal fixes like that are what got us to this point, and they won’t get us much further.

The crisis looming in New Orleans already reflects what one reporter here described as a “devil’s bargain” that Louisiana made after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

After the storm, the one thing that nearly everybody in the state agreed on was that New Orleans needed strong levees. Louisianans lobbied the George W. Bush administration for projects that could protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane, which the Corps of Engineers estimated to be a 400-year event. But the White House balked at the cost.

Instead, the Bush administration supported only the 100-year protection necessary for the city to qualify for the flood insurance program, and it offered, as both carrot and stick, to let New Orleans remain eligible for coverage as the corps rebuilt the broken levees.

Louisiana was forced to accept flood insurance at the expense of meaningful flood protection. The recent announcement suggests that we could end up with neither.

Louisiana’s levee system stands, for now, as a sinking monument to America’s dangerously shortsighted climate policies.

The corps acknowledged as much from the start. While it had called its pre-Katrina levees a “hurricane protection system,” it described the post-Katrina project as only a “risk reduction system.” A 2011 corps report estimated that if a storm surge overtopped the levees, it could kill nearly a thousand people. The Association of State Floodplain Managers recommends a 500-year standard as a minimum for urban areas.

In a better world, the systemic response to the climate crisis that New Orleans needs, like the one backed by proponents of the Green New Deal, would not seem revolutionary. New Orleans needs substantial investments to survive in a warming world. It’s not just hurricanes we have to worry about, either, with streets that flood when it rains, and the Mississippi River so high.

Just as important as levees, though, New Orleanians need substantial investments in jobs, education and health care in order to thrive. All Americans do. We need to rebuild the country’s public works so that they offer robust protection for all of us.

The same goes for our public programs and institutions, because good infrastructure makes life possible, but it does not make life worth living. Louisiana’s levees stand, too, as an emblem of our dangerously precarious social contract. Engineering alone cannot resolve the problems the climate crisis poses.

Among the hundreds of pages of technical evaluations in a 2009 internal corps’ review of the New Orleans levee system, the one that was inadequate on arrival, there are a few arresting sentences that diagnose a more fundamental problem.

“We too often optimize based on immediate cost and accept short-term gains instead of long-term solutions,” the review team observed. “This is a national cultural malady that can only be reversed if the public demands a change in policy.”

One day soon, when the streets flood, as they do with ominous regularity here, the water will not recede. But by then, the banks and the insurance companies and the people with the means to do so will have already left. There are no more short-term gains to be had.

Andy Horowitz (@andydhorowitz), an assistant professor of history at Tulane, is writing a book on Hurricane Katrina.

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