Project Katrina

I have lived on the Mississippi River (St. Louis and Baton Rouge) for much of my 36 years. For those of you that don’t live on the Mississippi or near swamps in Florida, you might not know that much about the Army Corps of Engineers. Well they have always be a fairly disfunctional organization. Case in point is this story in the Washington Post. Keep in mind this is the organization that is supposed to protect New Orleans.

In 2000, when I was writing a 50,000-word Washington Post series about dysfunction at the Army Corps of Engineers, I highlighted a $65 million flood-control project in Missouri as Exhibit A. Corps documents showed that the project would drain more acres of wetlands than all U.S. developers do in a typical year, but wouldn’t stop flooding in the town it was meant to protect. FEMA’s director called it “a crazy idea”; the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional director called it “absolutely ridiculous.”

Six years later, the project hasn’t changed — except for its cost, which has soared to $112 million. Larry Prather, chief of legislative management for the Corps, privately described it in a 2002 e-mail as an “economic dud with huge environmental consequences.” Another Corps official called it “a bad project. Period.” But the Corps still wants to build it.

The rest of the story is worth a read, but keep in mind that last month, the Corps commander acknowledged that his agency’s “design failure” led to the floodwall collapses that swamped New Orleans. So my question is, why isn’t everyone asking questions about the
Corps?