New Orleans Revival Recipes (Letter to the Editor‪)‬

In "Rethinking, Then Rebuilding New Orleans" (Issues, Winter 2006), Richard E. Sparks presents a commendable plan for rebuilding a limited and more disaster-resistant New Orleans by protecting the historic city core and retreating from the lowest ground, which was most severely damaged after Katrina. This is an admirable plan, but one with zero chance of implementation without an immediate and uncharacteristic show of political backbone. The more likely outcome is a replay of the recovery from the 1993 Midwestern flood. That disaster led to a short-term retreat from the Mississippi River floodplain, including $56.3 million in federal buyouts in Illinois and Missouri. More recently, however, St. Louis alone has seen $2.2 billion in new construction on land that was under water in 1993. The national investment in reducing future flood losses has been siphoned off in favor of local economic and political profits from exploiting the floodplain. The same scenario is now playing out in New Orleans, with city and state leaders jockeying to rebuild back to the toes of the same levees and floodwalls that failed last year. Another common thread between 1993 and 2005 is that both disasters resulted from big storms but were caused by overreliance on levees. Hurricane Katrina was not New Orleans' "perfect storm." At landfall Katrina was just a Category 3 storm, striking the Mississippi coast and leaving New Orleans in the less damaging northwest quadrant. For Biloxi and Gulfport, Katrina was a hurricane disaster of the first order, but New Orleans awoke on Aug. 30 with damage largely limited to toppled trees and damaged roofs. For New Orleans, Katrina was a levee disaster: the result of a flood-protection system built too low and protecting low-lying areas considered uninhabitable through most of the city's history.