A FEW THINGS to get straight about Hurricane Katrina:
God wasn’t angry at New Orleans. (Who do you think makes breasts?) Nor, my atheist friends, did Mother Nature turn capriciously against the place, socking it with a storm the likes of which we’ll never see again. And, with apologies to Kanye, even if George W. Bush fucking loved black people, what happened to the town in August 2005 would have been just as awful.
In his painstakingly researched documentary The Big Uneasy—surprisingly accessible given the dizzying array of charts, maps, and jargon used to make its case—satirist and Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer punctures the myth that Katrina’s ravaging of a vibrant city was an unforeseeable, unpreventable natural calamity. Taking aim at decades of incompetence by the US Army Corps of Engineers—if not outright malfeasance—Shearer enlists a cast of scientists and journalists to explain how shoddy levees, bad science, government-sponsored coastal erosion, and the averted eyes of politicians all conspired to do what nature never could’ve done on its own.
Even more alarming, the whole thing could happen again—in New Orleans or any other city where shaky walls allegedly are keeping water at bay. The Army Corps of Engineers has refused to reckon its role in the disaster or change its ways.
Meanwhile, reports and findings that question the myth are stepped on, and whistleblowers and dissenting scientists—like the ones who appear in The Big Uneasy—are either pilloried or punished.
One warning: Shearer occasionally drifts into the maudlin. In an attempt to also tell the mostly untold story of New Orleans’ rebirth, he cuts to a panel of boosterish, vaguely sentimental intellectuals he’s convened to emptily discuss the city’s progress. The Big Uneasy is a long documentary—98 minutes—and with all that talk about water, you might want to seize this chance to take a mid-screening piss.
Thirty-two days after the BP oil spill, President Obama signed an executive order for a bipartisan national commission to investigate the disaster to make certain it never happens again. There was a similar immediate commission for the Challenger explosion and the Twin Tower collapses.
But after five and a half years, there is still no comparable investigation, ordered by Congress or the White House, of the levee protection failures that drowned metro New Orleans and killed over 1,500 people.
Fifty-five percent of the American population lives in counties protected by levees. Clearly, there should be a truly independent analysis of the flood protection failures – and the decision making involved – that led to the devastation in metro New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005.
+ Sandy : With world climate already demonstrably more erratic than at any period in living memory , and undeniably due to continue accelerating to even greater extremes of wind and rain , good levee technology is more vital than ever ( The Netherlands is well on the way with a 200-year plan . ) . Every moment dithering is a similar disaster in the making . Even a tea-partyer might see the logic of this .
Citizen Dan, yes, I went to Holland in May 2009 with a Congressional Delegation and heard first hand about their 200 year plan. They are absolutely planning for sea level rise, and if the rise isn’t as serious as feared, they are building with contingent plans as back ups.