The Louisiana coastline may have been so badly damaged by the hurricane because man-made engineering of the delta has led to erosion of natural defences, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The engineering of the past 100 years that has reworked the Mississippi delta with thousands of kilometres of levees and flood barriers to protect communities and aid navigation, has also disturbed natural barriers which traditionally prevented storm surges and protected against hurricanes, says the society.
In a paper last year it warned that ‘New Orleans and surrounding areas would now experience the full force of hurricanes, including storm surges that top levee systems and cause severe flooding as well as high winds”.
The damage done this time may also be linked to White House cuts in funding for hurricane defence to pay for homeland security terrorist defences.
Lloyd Dumas, professor of political economy and economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, criticised the government’s failure to oversee a more efficient evacuation. ‘It’s remarkable that with the massive restructuring of the federal government that took place with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, they don’t have more well thought-out plans to evacuate a city like New Orleans,” he said.
Dumas added that not enough provision seemed to have been made for poor people. ‘There doesn’t seem to have been much attention paid to people who didn’t have private automobiles. I didn’t hear anything about school buses or city buses being used to aim people out of town.”
He said there appeared to be little forward planning to cater to those on low incomes who would be unable to return to their homes for up to two months, but who would not have the money to pay for that time in a hotel.
The war in Iraq was also being seen as playing a part in the federal response to the crisis. Many members of the National Guard who would normally have been swiftly mobilised to help in evacuation are on duty in Iraq. Although US air force, navy and army units were deployed to assist, the locally-based National Guard is depleted by the demands of the war.
New Orleans, which is in a natural basin on the Mississippi floodplain, is on average about two metres below sea level and theoretically protected by the most sophisticated levee system in the world. According to the US corps of army engineers, which is responsible for maintaining flood defences, more than 1 920km of levees and floodwalls have been built to protect the city from the Mississippi and from hurricanes.
The corps has long wanted to strengthen some of the levees, which have been sinking, and on its website this week said it planned to build a further 119km of hurricane defences. But, according to local media, it was last year refused extra funding by the White House, which wanted to save money to pay for homeland security against terrorism.
‘In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for south-east Louisiana’s chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10,4-million, a sixth of what local officials say they need,” Newhouse News Service reported this week. Local officials are saying, the article claimed, that had Washington heeded warnings about the dire need for extra hurricane protection ‘the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be”. —