On this anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I’d like to join Grist magazine and others in pointing out one of the true criminals in this whole deal who have been spared their reasonable share of the blame in this catastrophe: The Army Corps of Engineers.
Let’s begin with a short excerpt from the Grist headline article:
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.
I must say when I was an undergraduate civil engineering student at Howard University, this is what I was taught would happen to me if I ever made a professional mistake that cost lives, much less took an intentionally negligent course of action. While we should not discount the foolishness perpetrated by the government agencies involved in this mess [most notably the offices of the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans], we must not withhold blame from whom blame is due. The failure of the levees is what caused the deluge of New Orleans. And the failure of the levees falls, among several parties, mostly on its builders and managers: The Corps of Engineers.
Now, I should be fair while ascribing blame there. First off, they have admitted their fault in the matter. Secondly, risk assessment and management, and infrastructure investment and maintenance, assume a time scale of decades. Keeping this in mind, we must understand that this failure was not the result of a one-time decision made by some obscure general at the Corps. It was also not likely the result of a one-time decision made by some misinformed politician. The New Orleans levee failure is the result of decades of poor choices by a complicated network of politicians, engineers, and the environmental consequences of over-development of wetland areas. Don’t believe me? Well, consider this, this, this or just do a Google search for “new orleans levee failure.”
Much more important is the fact that this levee failure represents a legacy of national negligence as far as infrastructure is concerned. The American Society of Civil Engineers has given America’s infrastructure a grade of “D” in its annual report. Now can anyone, engineering student or not, please tell me whether you would have received your undergraduate degree with a 1.0 GPA?
If not, why are we allowing our nation’s infrastructure the liberty of a failing grade?