One of my favorite down home Louisiana songs is one by singer-songwriter Mike West, entitled “Corps of Engineers.” The lyrics are here. I’ll just give you the chorus:
folks round here got the fear of god
everybody say lawdy lawd
there’s only one thing we fear more
that’s the corps of engineers
The words seem particularly appropriate today as we learn that a federal judge has ruled that the Corps is (big surprise) responsible for the levee failures in Katrina–indeed, that the agency is guilty of “gross negligence,” “insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness”, and so forth. The Corps’ poorly maintained Mississippi River Gulf Outlet made the damage from Katrina’s storm surge worse, and the Corps knew it. It’s a sad fact, but can’t be ignored: Katrina was not simply an “act of God.” Neither was it simply an act of global warming. It was a disaster caused as much by human failures as by the workings of nature.
November 19th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Chris,
Agreed, this was a human caused disaster. But if you follow the link to my blog (at sig) you’ll see that I don’t buy the notion tha the Corps is the ONLY responsible party. And neither should you. Congress, afterall, has enormous and huge things to say about where and how the Corps spends its money . . . .
November 19th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
I hope the ruling is overturned soon because it’s outright stupid. The US Army Corps of Engineers is not to blame in any way. For the most part they can do no more than say “hey, we’ve got a serious problem here”. It’s not as if they have an unlimited budget (and unlimited skilled workers) to do the job which they believed was necessary. This is just a matter of shifting the blame from the people who do have control over budgets but refused to listen to engineers (or only pretend to listen). Why is the Corps of Engineers being made the scapegoat?
November 19th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
What Philip H and MadScientist said.
And it’s likely the land speculators who destroyed the wetlands around New Orleans contributed even more than the Corps. If we can have people blame government, as usual, and blame NO residents for living in a hurricane flood area, we should also blame private land corporations and developers and blame people who are so irresponsible as to destroy the natural breaks around a large city.