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Learning from Katrina: Storm Surge Protection Is Paramount

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On August 29, 2005, the levees that were supposed to protect New Orleans failed catastrophically. The United States Army Corps of Engineers simply did not do the job it was tasked to do. As such, it was found liable for the flooding in court.

“It is the court’s opinion that the negligence of the Corps, in this instance by failing to maintain the MRGO properly, was not policy, but insouciance, myopia and short-sightedness,” U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. wrote in his lengthy ruling, referring to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal.
“For over 40 years, the Corps was aware that the Reach II levee protecting Chalmette and the Lower Ninth Ward was going to be compromised by the continued deterioration of the MRGO … The Corps had an opportunity to take a myriad of actions to alleviate this deterioration or rehabilitate this deterioration and failed to do so. Clearly, the expression ‘talk is cheap’ applies here.”

“It is the court’s opinion that the negligence of the Corps, in this instance by failing to maintain the MRGO properly, was not policy, but insouciance, myopia and short-sightedness,” U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. wrote in his lengthy ruling, referring to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal.

“For over 40 years, the Corps was aware that the Reach II levee protecting Chalmette and the Lower Ninth Ward was going to be compromised by the continued deterioration of the MRGO … The Corps had an opportunity to take a myriad of actions to alleviate this deterioration or rehabilitate this deterioration and failed to do so. Clearly, the expression ‘talk is cheap’ applies here.”

Clearly, the man-made protection was not up to par. The storm surge that rushed inland was too great for it to restrain.

As many have noted in the past five years, however, there were other safeguards that historically protected New Orleans: coastal wetlands and barrier islands. But for decades, as National Geographic notes, these were allowed to erode away to the point that they could offer little resistance to the rising tides that ultimately breached the levees.

When Hurricane Katrina smacked the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the protection from powerful storm surges provided by coastal wetlands and barrier islands had gradually been whittled away. Since the 1930s, Louisiana had lost 1.2 million acres of coastal wetlands. More than two dozen dams and thousands of miles of levees on the Mississippi River had trapped sediment that otherwise would have replenished them. At the same time, wetlands were drained and filled to enable oil and commercial development in the Gulf region. Even as the Army Corps of Engineers failed to adequately maintain levees to keep the floodwaters at bay, this loss of natural protection worsened the catastrophe.

Of course, this is not an issue unique to New Orleans.

Across the globe, protective wetlands are disappearing. At the same time, coastal populations are expanding. The combination is deadly and means that wind storms and flooding that would have been less catastrophic to society just a few decades ago are now inherently capable of creating more damage more easily to more people. The NatGeo piece uses the current, historic flooding in Pakistan and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as examples of major disasters that could have been less disastrous if the natural protective barriers had not been allowed to degrade so dramatically.

With some investment, however, scientists believe that such ecosystems can be restored and again provide protective benefits.

Just as we buy home insurance and life insurance to protect ourselves and our families from catastrophic losses, so society now needs to “buy” disaster insurance to reduce the damage caused by floods and other weather-related events. By strategically investing in the protection and restoration of ecological infrastructure, we can begin to re-gain the benefits of nature’s services.

Some nascent efforts in this direction have at least been floated. Within a month of the Asian tsunami, officials in Indonesia–where more than 126,000 of the tsunami deaths had occurred and where some 1.6 million acres of coastal mangroves had been lost in the preceding few decades–announced a large-scale effort to restore the nation’s mangrove defenses. In the aftermath of Katrina, U.S. scientists have been studying the idea of diverting Mississippi River water back toward Louisiana’s disappearing coastal swamps, to supply the nutrients and sediments needed to rebuild them.

Overall, however, the story is one of inertia, neglect and missed opportunity. After the Great Midwest Flood of 1993, U.S. researchers estimated that restoration of 13 million acres of wetlands in the upper portion of the Mississippi-Missouri watershed, at a cost of $2-3 billion, would have absorbed enough floodwater to have substantially reduced the $16 billion in flood damages from that event. But instead of calling floodplains and wetlands back into active duty, officials in the region permitted even more floodplain development. Nicholas Pinter of Southern Illinois University estimates that 28,000 new homes and 6,630 acres of commercial and industrial development have since sprung up on land that was under water in 1993.

I interviewed former FEMA head James Lee Witt in 2008 (following the Sichuan earthquake in China and Cyclone Nargis that hit Burma soon after), and he was a proponent using natural barriers as well. Here he highlights one of the initiatives he enacted along the riverbanks of the Red River after devastating flooding there in 1997 caused some $3.5 billion in damages.

We utilized the mitigation and buy-out relocation programs [after the flood]. Mayor Pat Owens in Grand Forks [North Dakota] and Mayor Lynn Stauss in East Grand Forks [Minnesota] took all that space and turned it into green, open-space parks. And the Army Corps of Engineers did a fantastic job on the levee work there. You should see that town now. It is a model of prevention.

Mayor Strauss in East Grand Forks took the area we bought out-which still had all the infrastructure, streets and huge trees right along the river-and turned that into an motor home park where people can camp in the summer. It turned into an absolutely beautiful city.

The lesson in all this is that prevention, both natural and man-made, must be prioritized by city planners. If there is a threat of flooding, particularly if the natural barriers that have historically protected the city are disappearing, the municipality must find a way to refortify its shorelines and riverbanks.

Unfortunately, those who propose anything with the words “restore” and “ecosystem” in the same sentence are often quickly dismissed as tree-huggers who are overly concerned with protecting wildlife. With city and state budgets stretched thin, that is not something many citizens can get behind. But it is not about saving the whales — it is about saving people.

And, ultimately, from a protection standpoint, man-made barriers can be just as good in many locations. In New Orleans, for example, they are nearing the completion of a new protection system.

Nearly five years after Katrina and the devastating failures of the levee system, New Orleans is well on its way to getting the protection system Congress ordered: a ring of 350 miles of linked levees, flood walls, gates and pumps that surrounds the city and should defend it against the kind of flooding that in any given year has a 1 percent chance of occurring.

The scale of the nearly $15 billion project, which is not due to be completed until the beginning of next year’s hurricane season, brings to mind an earlier age when the nation built huge works like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Hoover Dam and the Interstate highway system.

The city’s reinforced defenses are already stronger than they were before Katrina. But even after 2011, experts argue, they will still provide less protection than New Orleans needs to avoid serious flooding in massive storms.

This new system is not a Dutch-level engineering marvel that will hold back virtually anything short of Armageddon. You would think that the the death of so many New Orleans residents would have spurred the same “never again” mentality that the Dutch took after they lost 2,000 of their citizens to a flood in 1953 — not the creation of a 100-year protective system (meaning that those who construct it essentially expect it will likely fail within a century when an unusually strong, but not unthinkably strong, storm strikes).

But it is certainly a vast improvement over what existed in 2005.

Now, if we can just get other areas to see the importance of holding back floodwaters before they devastate the community, we will really be making some progress.

Learning from Katrina

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As we look back upon the fifth anniversary of worst hurricane in U.S. history, two windstorms churn through the Atlantic. The first, Danielle, fortunately veered away from the coastline, its destructive power withering by the hour. The second, Earl, on the other hand, is strengthening, with sustained winds already reaching 135 mph and a trajectory that has the whole Eastern Seaboard on watch.

Katrina taught us many things about disaster preparedness and response. It gave us vivid, appalling visions of a new worst-case scenario. Even more powerfully, Spike Lee put together two gripping documentaries that unveil the true, long-term magnitude of the tragedy, the second of which, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise, recently premiered on HBO and is a much-watch look into just how much the city has suffered — without crumbling — since the floodwaters receded.

At Risk Management magazine, ever since the storm, we have tried to tell some of the city’s other stories. I wrote an article about the New Orleans Museum of Art’s harrowing days after the storm and the commando art restoration team that saved collections throughout the city. Another story detailed how a casino risk manager in the midst of a major merger had to deal with $1 billion in lost property after his company’s riverboat was thrown 2,000 feet by storm surge. And we tried to find some semblance of a silver lining by offering these lessons that all of us can learn from a disaster of this magnitude.

Unfortunately, it seems as though few lessons have actually been learned. Oh, they have been discussed ad nauseum and the outrage expressed has generally been genuine. But actual behavior has largely remained unchanged. Still, most people admit that they are unprepared for disasters.

Hopefully, most companies and organizations are more confident. But many are not — or at least have no cause to be. Along these lines, we plan to spend the rest of this week (and much of September, which is National Preparedness Month) remembering what happened on August 29, 2005, and emphasizing the importance of disaster preparedness and response.

I encourage you to click some of the links above and check back soon for more.

The Risk Management Angle on Time’s “10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years”

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Each year, Time magazine does a story on “10 ideas that are changing the world.” This year, the editors have made it a more forward-thinking feature, labeling it “10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years.” And as is the case with most everything these days, I managed to see several risk management-related angles in some of the trends they expect to shape the coming decade.

Here is a run-down with some thoughts.

time 10 ideas for the next 10 years

Time’s Idea: Remapping the World
“Good borders make good neighbors. Bad ones make wars”

This idea basically says that physically redrawing some national borders — or at least minimizing their importance over logistical factors like multi-national infrastructure — will cause less international and intra-national conflict. Obviously, the risk management benefits here would come from less political risk across the globe.

If Sudan could be divided, the civil wars there may become less intractable and economic opportunities may open up to multinationals — which could help both companies otherwise too concerned about conflict to set up shop in-country and the people living there who desire jobs and better access to goods. A world full of “good neighbors” also clearly benefits any utilities or other companies trying to lay down the transnational pipelines or internet cables that will be increasingly necessary in our increasingly globalized future.

Particularly in the Middle East.

Time’s Idea: Bandwidth Is the New Black Gold
“And it’s a scarce resource”

An under-reported risk, the dependence on bandwidth for real-time information exchange is increasingly vital to all companies and organizations. Whenever this is interrupted, so is business. Today, aside from major disaster situations, this interruption is mostly an inconvenience. But in the future, as more and more of this bandwidth is taken up by video and other resource-intensive applications, there may be real problems.

In time, the mere slowdowns we see today may be eclipsed by full-scale information traffic jams. But beyond that, the deeper problems will be with high prices and possible profiteering. As demand for bandwidth goes up, suppliers will logically be able to charge more, as happens in energy markets.

Can we rely on private industry — the cable and telephone companies — to build its way out of these problems? In a word, maybe.

It will be difficult to manage this risk individually, but organizations need to be thinking about these “information jams” in years to come. Tim Wu of the New American Foundation explains it further in this video.

Time’s Idea: In Defense of Failure
“Making mistakes is a great American freedom”

This idea centers on the idea that the great innovation that marked the United States’ ascendence to the front of the global economy in the 20th century was greatly aided by the fact that its citizens were not afraid to fail. They took big chances knowing that even if they failed, they would have a chance “to try, try again” without being entirely wiped out.

The article worries that this courageousness is waning, mainly due to macroeconomic realities, and that “rather than launch a quixotic war on failure” as the author argues has been done against complex financial instruments on Wall Street, “we should be using what we’ve learned to build a system that fails better.”

This, of course, is the new tenant of risk management: We should never try to avoid all risks — we just need to make sure we are taking calculated risks with contingencies built in for failure.

Time’s Idea: TV Will Save the World
“In a lot of places, it’s the next best thing”

Globally, the biggest impediment to better disaster preparedness and building codes is poverty. Places like Haiti and rural China just don’t have the resources to mandate and enforce developed world standards for things like foundations and reinforced concrete.

Somewhere lower on the list of challenges — but no less worth striving to overcome — is the educational gap. More so than in the developing world, the United States and Europe have learned from their past disasters. A lot of this has come from in-depth, post-mortm investigations of disasters. And a lot of the demand for such investigations has always come from the proliferation of TV news and the fact that citizens are generally outraged that such calamities could happen. People want to know why people were allowed to die or houses were permitted to burn, and the impetus behind that outrage often comes from seeing the tragic images in moving picture form on TV.

Too much TV has been associated with violence, obesity and social isolation. But TV is having a positive impact on the lives of billions worldwide, and as the spread of mobile TV, video cameras and YouTube democratize both access and content, it will become an even greater force

Sure, a lot of TV is more candy than vegetables (think Jersey Shore, SportsCenter or American Idol), but if you are still among those who erroneously think that television will rot your brain, you obviously haven’t seen The Wire. Or Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, which premiered on HBO.

In related news, The Wire creator David Simon’s upcoming HBO show Treme will focus on the music scene in post-Katrina New Orleans. Expect something amazing that will speak on what was the worst “natural” disaster to hit this country.

And, yes, this was mostly just an excuse to make you watch the new trailer for Treme embedded below. (via Video Gum) (UPDATE: That trailer is no longer available … replacement video below. Don’t worry, it’s just as good. Probably even better.)

You can also view the other six “ideas for the next 10 years” over at Time.com. Let us know of any other major risk management-related concepts that stand out to you.