Levees Not War

Run, don’t walk, to your newsstand now to buy the Aug. 13 issue of Time, featuring a 14-page special report, “Why New Orleans Still Isn’t Safe.” With a stark image of a drainage canal floodwall, the cover teases: “Two years after Katrina, this floodwall is all that stands between New Orleans and the next hurricane. It’s pathetic. How a perfect storm of big-money politics, shoddy engineering and environmental ignorance is setting up the city for another catastrophe.”

The “main course” of the special report is Michael Grunwald’s “The Threatening Storm.” Right off the bat in the lead paragraph Grunwald says the drowning of New Orleans “wasn’t a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics.” (Investigative environmental reporter Grunwald’s powerful article “Rotten to the Corps” appeared in Grist in 2006 and is linked on our “Environment” page at “Read All About It.”)

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. . . no place in America is safe. Hurricane tidal surges of 10 feet or more could swamp Houston, Charleston, Long Island . . . A tornado in Brooklyn (really), earthquakes not limited to California, an interstate bridge collapsing at rush hour into the Mississippi in Minneapolis (it didn’t take an earthquake) . . . Where will the federal government be when you’re down and out? Northeastern energy grid blackouts, hijacked planes . . . These are matters of survival that concern us all equally, regardless of residence or party affiliation. Without care and maintenance, things fall apart. Without funding, without investment, things fall apart. And the longer our so-called leaders shy away from climate change, the higher the temperature, and so with the sea level.

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