This should be required reading for everyone who can’t understand how so many people didn’t have flood insurance in and around New Orleans (from USAToday, my emphasis):
WASHINGTON — Bowing to demands from news organizations, the Army Corps of Engineers revealed the locations Thursday of 122 levees nationwide that are so poorly maintained they could fail in a major flood.
Some of the substandard levees protect densely populated areas, such as Springfield, Mass., Albuquerque and Sacramento. Many others are in rural areas, where they shield valuable farmland but relatively few people.
Maj. Gen. Don Riley, director of civil works for the corps, said he does not know how many people live near the levees or what the required repairs might cost. He said communities have one year to fix the problems.
If a levee’s deficiencies are not corrected, people living nearby might have to buy flood insurance.
Once these levees were built, the community was responsible for maintaining them, and evidently the maintenance has been imperfect.
But I need to point out here that folks living under the protection of the levees don’t currently have flood insurance for one reason: they’ve been told they’re safe because of the levees.
And that’s exactly how the New Orleanians understood the situation.
NOLA’s residents knew (know) that their city was vulnerable to torrential rains, and that water could back up into the streets and yards from the canals… but rainstorms happen there all the time. The streets flood; the city survives.
The flood plain maps were drawn in response to the city’s elevation and its corresponding risk from rain events — not because anybody thought the levees would fail.
These communities are working under the assumption — as was NOLA — that the levees were built correctly. Given that all these levees were designed and built by the same Army Corps of Engineers, that’s not a safe assumption.
So — where’s the outcry about all these folks without flood insurance? And if when these levees fail, will the nation point its sanctimonious finger and say: Fools! You should never have lived there?
Gosh, I guess that if I were looking at a house, and noticed a large earthen structure designed to hold back water nearby, I might seriously think there was a reason for that structure to be there, and so (given that manmade structures tend to fail at times) I might be tempted to protect myself by purchasing insurance against the risk (which is, after all, what insurance is for.)
BTW, we have ‘levees’ in the Houston area too — in fact there are two not too far from your neck of the woods (called Barker and Addicks dam.) And, when the rain gets too much for the area, they are allowed to do their job – and the area behind them floods. I certainly hope the people who built on that property have insurance (or don’t come asking for funds to rebuild out of my pocket!)
~EdT.
OK, I read the article, and have a quetion: it doesn’t say the problems with the levees are due to design flaws (ACE’s responsibility), but due to maintenance problems/lack of maintenance (local community’s responsibility.) Assuming that the community knew their responsibility when the levees were built, why does this then become the fault of the ACE, and why should the feds be responsible for fixing the problem?
I suspect that each circumstance is unique, so I am loath to cast the blame on the local communities as a group without examining their situation, but at the same time I don’t think it is right to absolve them of any responsibility either.
~EdT.
I don’t think communities can be absolved altogether, either. Certainly the Levee Board(s) in NOLA dropped the ball also. The maintenance was shoddy, the positions were politically appointed, and the net result was a mess. (Although in NOLA, the levees that failed were relatively new; the problem with those specific breaches was not maintenance.)
But how can people in a community possibly know any of this? That really is the fundamental problem here.
Let’s say everybody maintains their little patch of levee perfectly. By federal guidelines, then, most of these people are not required to have flood insurance (and it’s very expensive…). And then, if the levee fails because of design failure?
Or conversely, if the people have been told the levee has been maintained, and they’ve designated funds for people to inspect them, are they still failing in their responsibility?
I wrote this post to point out these very discrepancies. New Orleanians have come under major fire for their lack of personal responsibility… but I fail to see how they were acting any differently than are people in Sacramento, or Springfield, MA.
A possible difference here is that Sacramento is not below sea level. And its not next to the ocean. And it hasn’t been told for decades that one day it would be hit by a tropical storm that would…you know, I’m going to buy the argument that people are just too poor to have flood insurance before I’ll buy that they felt so safe that they just didn’t need it. I’m sure that the odds of my house specifically being hit by a tornado are not that high. But it does happen. And if it hits my neighbor’s house instead, that’s still pretty close.
Also, if I remember, those levees were for protection from a Cat 3 level storm. Does this remove the odds of anything more destructive coming?
My opinion on this is that their major failing as far as ‘personal responsibility’ goes is that they insist on electing such idiots at the state/local level as they do. Most cities do NOT have a cultural policy of “I’ll happily blow my brains out, as long as some of the gore spatters on my opponent. Nyah Nyah.”
And, yes, I understand the history behind it, with the racism and all – but it still seems a very self-destructive mindset to me.
~EdT.
I logged into comments to thank you, Polimom, for still shining the light on the nation’s hypocrisy about New Orleans, and to tell you I wish you were required reading around the country. Then I read the other comments and realized it’s fruitless.
We are not “near the ocean” in fact, the closest beach is out of state. We are near the river which leads to the ocean.
The houses near the levees are above sea level. They are built along a natural ridge caused by many pre-levee decades of sediment deposit. What you are told living in New Orleans is that the city is shaped like a bowl, with the river and lake forming the ridges around the top. Excessive rain from strong hurricanes would, then, fill the bowl, with the areas near the lake and river (and hence levees) being on highest ground and therefore lowest risk.
I bought my house only a few months before the storm, in Algiers (11 feet above sea level) and I saw more than one home in the process that the real estate agent proclaimed as, “being near the levee, so you don’t need flood insurance.” I did not buy one of them, so I don’t know for sure, but I don’t know if I would have questioned that advice, and I am an educated person with a decent job who did buy flood insurance b/c I had to in order to have a mortgage. I think if I was being told by a lender that it was unnecessary, I would believe them. Precisely because it is a flood prone area, if an area doesn’t require flood insurance it must be safe.
The flooding that drowned New Orleans did not come over the top of a levee onto the homes next to it. The levees (along canals, not the river or the lake) gave way from underneath because they were poorly constructed, not just poorly maintained.
New Orleans does not hold the honor of being the only city to make repeated, bad electoral choices. How do you explain Marian Berry?
I could go on, but I’ll stop. I’m not even from here, I’ve only been here 6 years, but that is long enough to love the place and know that the federal government let us down before, during, and after the storm and it has little to do with political parties. It was messed up across the board. It’s frustrating and exasperating to live here. It is frustrating and exasperating to realize that people who don’t live here blame those of us that do.
-M
I don’t blame anyone for a hurricane. I don’t blame home owners in New Orleans for a levee braking. It is a very tragic disaster to occur. I don’t blame everyone there for expecting some level of property protection from a levee.
What is frustrating to me, is a basic tone that living that close to the Gulf, not the ocean, somehow is not a place to worry about hurricanes. I understand the levees broke. They were under stress. That happens. A hurricane does not have to be strong enough to push water over the levee to brake it, just to push enough force against it. The levees were not built to withstand such water forces from all hurricane strengths.
The idea that no matter what the storm strength was, this flooding should have never have happened is disturbing. Maybe some day in the future enough will have been done to the levees to protect NOLA from 90% of hurricanes in the Gulf. But the system there now was never made for that.
Jack- The levees were supposed to be built to withstand a catagory 3 hurricane, which is what Katrina was when it hit New Orleans.
Ed T. – Nagin won with 52% of the vote. He was reelected with the support of conservatives who saw Landrieu as too liberal, so there is more to it than just race. But please be aware that there are 48% of us here who didn’t vote for Nagin, and there are a great many of us here who are working very hard to try to make things better against what appear to be overwhelming odds.
And please remember when discussing flood insurance, it is capped at $250,000.
Yes, at the point when Katrina hit land it was a Cat 3 rating. But before that when it was out in the Gulf it was a Cat 5 storm. That massive energy churning up water doesn’t go away suddenly.
But I’m not really arguing about the strength of this particular storm. I’m arguing that there is an assumption that they levees would be a protection from all hurricanes. If the storm had been a Cat 4 at landfall, people would still have been amazed that a levee broke and would have been angry that someone didn’t make them stronger. If it had been a Cat 5, people would still insist that something was supposed to have stopped any significant flooding.
M —
I’m so glad to hear from you, and yes, if you’ve been reading comments (not really too bad here, actually), it’s got to be hurtful.
But don’t give up trying to get the information out there, cuz I haven’t. Sometimes, it feels like I’m saying things for the 10th or 20th (or 100th) time, and I just want to throw my hands in the air… but as long as the misconceptions persist, it’s worth the doing.
Jack —
New Orleans is less vulnerable (or should have been) than towns right on the Gulf (like Mobile, say… or Gulfport) to a full-strength hurricane,
I think it’s more like Houston, actually, in terms of distance, and nobody here would expect a Cat 5 to still be a 5 when it hit Spring Branch.
Tell me — why is it that Floridians, whose peninsula juts out smack into the path of nearly every storm that rolls in, don’t have to justify their existence?
Jack,
I really think you ought to do some reading on what happened to the levees and why. I’ll try to find a few good sources for you. There is not, as far as I know, an over-riding belief that levees ought to protect everyone from every storm. The outrage about what happened here is that the levees gave under due to force that did not come close to what the public had been told they should withstand — and what they would have withstood if they had been built correctly. The Army Corps of Engineers simply dropped the ball in making them. In several places, they gave way not due to the force of excessive water in the canal, but because the concrete walls had not been driven down deep enough to be anchored on solid material. They were resting on a porous, sand like material. The water had been leaking through this porous layer, so the wall was not stable, the bottom of the concrete walls shifted in the sand, causing the top to tilt and they gave way under what was actually very little force. According footage to firefighters who filmed one of the canals from their firehouse not long before it gave way, there was no more water in the canal than on any day with a substantial amount of rain. You cannot live in this city and not know you are not protected from a category 4 or 5 hurricane. The surprise was that this was not a 4, or 5, the hurricane itself did not cause much flooding, and then in the mayhem that ensued the cavalry never came. Of course, the city had no plan for getting people out before the storm other than telling them to leave. There should have been plans for people who couldn’t leave on their own, for sure.
On Nagin, for whom I voted the first time but abstained rather than vote the second time, I’m not so sure it wasn’t race related. There was an 80/20 split for Nagin and the same for Landrieu…which was heralded as fantastic crossover. I remain apalled that it fell so clearly along racial lines – if ever there were a time to look at the issues, this was it!
– M