Harry Shearer: New Orleans, a Flood Away

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/opinion/letters/new-orleans-flood.html

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To the Editor:

Re “When the Levees Break Again” (Op-Ed, June 1);

Andy Horowitz correctly views with alarm the latest statement by the Army Corps of Engineers, that “risk to life and property in the greater New Orleans area will progressively increase” without improvement — a disguised acknowledgment that it routinely ignored the warnings of inside and outside experts and persisted in constructing an inferior system, as it did in the construction of the system that failed catastrophically in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina.

It is well past time to stop taking the corps’ assurances at face value.

New Orleanians would rather enjoy life and the Saints and buy the emollient words of the corps. But we can and must do better. It’s time for an agency whose business model seems to be to get paid to fail and then get paid to remedy the failures to stand down.

Let’s invite the Dutch in to apply their hard-learned lessons to rescue America’s cultural jewel.

Harry ShearerNew OrleansThe writer, the host of the radio program “Le Show,” wrote and directed a documentary about the 2005 flood, “The Big Uneasy.”