From disaster to disgrace

As we wonder why relief was so long in coming after Katrina, we should consider what other disasters the nation is not prepared for.

A Times Editorial
Published September 7, 2005

Most people are familiar with the fable of the little Dutch boy who, shivering through the night, kept his finger in the dike to prevent a small leak from becoming a disastrous torrent. The story is fiction but the premise is true, as the world has now seen to its shock, horror and rage.

Not only was there no finger in the dike this time, but the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for protecting New Orleans from its foreseeable (and often predicted) destruction, did not even have sensors in place to sound an alarm when water from Lake Pontchartrain overflowed a levee and began to erode it. The excuse, no doubt, will be that had they known, what could they have done?

The greater shame, though, belongs to the politicians - President Bush, the Congress and others - who for years sloughed off explicit warnings that New Orleans and its levees were sinking faster than expected, that the system was designed only for a Category 3 hurricane and was still incomplete even for that, and a flood precisely like Katrina's could occur. But as recently as this spring, the New Orleans district sustained a $71.2-million cut. At the same time, Congress happily conjured up a pork barrel bill that contemplates, among other things, the justification for an unnecessary and unwise $50-billion interstate highway through the North Carolina and Georgia mountains. The same president who signed that bill rationalized last week that nobody foresaw the New Orleans levees giving way. Only someone who prefers to dwell in ignorance could have said that.

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