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My first job was with the Waterways Experiment Station
and then, ultimately, the Mississippi River Commission
in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which had the governance, if you
will, of the flight control systems down into New Orleans.
And so I was very interested, as a young engineer,
on the flood control work that was done there.
When Katrina hit, there were a number of issues that arose.
Obviously, why did the system perform so poorly?
Why were there failures?
What lessons could be learned from it?
And particularly, since they knew, the Corps of Engineers
knew, that it had to be rebuilt, how would it be rebuilt
and to what standards?
The events surrounding the hurricane
and surrounding what happened in New Orleans
were exacerbated by, not only nature, but also
by the failure of the system, the hurricane protection
system that was there.
And so I was asked to chair a panel, a committee, that
would be formed.
I would give some advice as to who would be on it.
That would be sort of the 40,000 foot oversight.
First, you have to realize that this was a big hurricane,
but the circulation pattern was one
that was particularly detrimental to the city,
because the winds were such that they blew from east to west
across Lake Borgne, which is to the east of New Orleans,
and created a surge out of Lake Borgne.
And then, as the hurricane moved northward,
the winds then blew down across Lake Pontchartrain.
So you had a second surge coming out of Lake Pontchartrain.
It would have been one thing if the levees had stayed there
and offered some resistance.
And it would have been an overtopping event,
but was what happened.
When the surge came in, and it was a massive surge of perhaps
25, 26 feet out of Lake Borgne, that it fundamentally
just washed away a lot of the levees.
And so there was no resistance whatsoever
down in Plaquemines Parish.
In New Orleans itself, the primary failure
was as a result of the canals.
And so that was a second surge coming out
of Lake Pontchartrain, and it was coming from the north
to the south.
When we completed our technical evaluations,
getting information from different groups working
on the problem, we held public hearings
with the citizens of New Orleans, anyone
who wanted to speak to us.
And so I think we got a great feel for the technical issues,
the complications of the technical issues,
the political issues, and the human side
and the human suffering.
The damage could have been a lot less
and it could've been slowed and mitigated
over what actually happened.
They started building this levee system back
in the '60s when I was working for the Corps of Engineers.
Levee boards were not technically competent people.
And so you had very inconsistent standards
across the levee board jurisdictions.
You had some cases where a flood wall would be this high
and it would come in and go down like that.
And so you had a lot of inconsistency.
You had a lot of private levees as well.
And some of those were poorly designed.
So one of the lessons learned is that you
need to have consistency coordination
across your political jurisdictions
to get the right product that you need.
The other aspect of it was that the system that
was built for New Orleans had very little what
we would call resilience.
If one part of it begins to have difficulty,
you don't want the whole system to fail.
You don't want it to be a zipper effect, that if this fails,
the next thing will fail and the next thing.
Do it right.
It was simply not designed well, and it was not
designed recognizing the dangers inherent in the development
of the curve in New Orleans over quite a long historical period.
Clearly, they've built a much more substantial hurricane
protection system in New Orleans then the one that was there.
New Orleans still needs evacuation plans.
It still needs to be very, very diligent about particularly
getting people out of the city who
are disabled, who are incapacitated,
and who are poor.
The unfortunate fact is that we learn from disasters.
And so if you were to look at the east coast of the United
States, how many cities have done
a lot as a result of what they saw with Katrina and New
Orleans?
Not many.
Not much.
The lessons learned are hard for people,
I would say, in other communities
to absorb in some cases because everybody thinks New Orleans is
a special case because we don't have many cities that
are built below sea level.
New York is very actively doing something about its challenges
to respond to what happened in Sandy
and also I think they're doing a good job of thinking
through the climate change equation and sea level rise.
Any city on the east coast has an issue
with the potential hurricanes that we're
going to see in the future.
The challenge, of course, is partly money.
We don't have enough money today to maintain
our present infrastructure, much less
to say ten cities on the east coast each need $20 billion
to build in an infrastructure to protect them from an event that
may or may not happen.
Engineers have to be in this dialogue
because they recognize the risk and they should express this
very clearly in public forums.
Most politicians are thinking about getting elected
two years, three years from now, whenever the elections are
but engineers have to think about the long haul.
And, again, if you're going to invest billions of dollars
in a protection system, you probably
want it to last for 100 years.
And so we have to slow climate change down.
That is, we have to reduce the carbon we're putting
into the atmosphere, because when we reach a point where you
cannot build flood walls high enough to prevent the problems
we're going to have with sea level rise.
The country as a whole really is not
prepared for what the possibilities are, particularly
with hurricanes and events of this sort.
And it really deserves a national discussion
in a rational way, to talk about what's really
required to protect our cities and how much we
want to protect them and against what size events.
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