“How quickly the sense of urgency flags,” says The New York Times. “Even as Hurricane Dean heads toward the Gulf Coast, New Orleans is frighteningly far from being prepared to withstand a storm with even a fraction of Katrina’s power.” Indeed, it will be another four years before the city is safe from “severe storms”, says the US Army Corps of Engineers. Even by then, it will only be able to withstand a one in 100 storm, never mind a one in 396, such as Katrina. “The entire flood system still provides much less protection than New Orleans needs, and the pre-Katrina patchwork of levees, floodwalls and gates that a Corps of Engineers investigation called ‘a system in name only’ is still just that,” says Chris Schwartz in The New York Times.
To the casual visitor to St. Charles Avenue and the French Quarter on the city’s higher ground, nothing would seem out of the ordinary, says Christopher Grimes in the FT. “But large swathes of New Orleans remain desolate. In some neighbourhoods… swinging hammers and buzzing saws provide evidence of the struggle to reclaim the city. But in the poorest quarters, I was greeted by an ominous silence.” The city is now home to 250,000 people, against 450,000 before the events of August 2005. But with the US Army Engineering Corp continuing to build into the wetlands that once acted as natural defences for the city, and building levees either too short or in the wrong places, even this reduced community is at threat.
Remember, the drowning of New Orleans wasn’t a natural disaster, says Michael Grunwald in Time. “It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics.” Coastal scientist and engineers who called attention to problems well before Katrina struck are warning that the Army Corps is repeating its mistakes. The US authorities would do well to listen. As Brent Budowsky puts it in The Huffington Post: “It is sickening, nauseating, disgusting and un-American that even now the levees in New Orleans are not ready. If and when a hurricane strikes and the people of New Orleans or other communities suffer preventable deaths, it would not be wrong to call this the moral equivalent of murder.”