Friday’s Wall Street Journal has a “nice” look at how the bureaucracy
that is the Louisiana Levee Board system might have played a role in the
Great Flood of New Orleans:
Investigations into the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina have focused on three main breaches of the city’s levees — and
whether those defenses were poorly designed or built by an underfunded U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers.But there is growing evidence the New Orleans flood-control system sprang
leaks in countless other locations around the city. Even if no levees had
collapsed, parts of New Orleans still would have flooded, engineering
reports indicate.Engineers and others now say substantial blame for some of those failures
lies with the ineffectual patchwork of agencies overseeing the system. A big
part of the problem is a colorful relic of 19th-century Louisiana: the local
“levee districts” that own and maintain most of the levees and floodwalls.
Held up as an essential defense against floods, they also became vehicles
for government contracts and political patronage, critics say.
The article goes on to discuss other bits of fun, e.g. how the New Orleans
board allegedly spent most of its time on non-levee projects (the lakeside
airport, a pier for a casino floating on the lake, etc.), as well as
touching upon the issue of subsidence causing the levees to not be as high
as engineers thought.
Gotta love the way Louisiana politics work.
Also gotta love how there seems to be an awful lot of finger-pointing, but
not that much visible effort on preventing a repeat of the Flood for the
2006 hurricane season.