Return to the Levee Failures

Who gets most of the blame for the death and destruction throughout New Orleans and the flooding that resulted during and after Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA takes a big hit, but where is the outrage against the Army Corps of Engineers, which not only was responsible for the design and construction of the failed levees, but has recently taken responsibility for the inadequate design and construction of those levees.

In other words, the Corps should be held accountable for the unprecedented flooding and carnage caused by the levee failures which were exascerbated by the construction of the MRGO - a project with dubious cost-benefits to the local community and nation at large despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars in construction costs.

Somehow, America has concluded that the scandal of Katrina was the government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage -- even though a useless Corps shipping canal intensified Katrina's surge, even though poorly designed Corps floodwalls collapsed just a few feet from an unnecessary $750 million Corps navigation project , even though the Corps had promoted development in dangerously low-lying New Orleans floodplains and had helped destroy the vast marshes that once provided the city's natural flood protection.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's failures didn't inundate a city, kill 1,000 residents and inflict $100 billion in damages. Yet FEMA is justifiably disgraced, while Congress keeps giving the Corps more money and more power. A new 185-point Senate report on what went wrong during Katrina waits until point No. 65 to mention the Corps "design and construction deficiencies" that left New Orleans underwater. Meanwhile, a new multibillion-dollar potpourri of Corps projects is nearing approval on Capitol Hill.

That's because the Corps is an addiction for members of Congress, who use its water projects to steer jobs and money to their constituents and contributors. President Bush has opposed dozens of the most egregious boondoggles, but Congress has kept funding them and the Corps has refused to renounce them -- while New Orleans has remained vulnerable.

Even Prather, the agency's public representative on the Hill, complained in that private e-mail that the Corps has sacrificed its credibility by defending its indefensible projects -- he called them "swine" -- just as the Catholic Church defended its wayward priests.

"We have no strategy for saving ourselves," he wrote. "Someone needs to be supervising the Corps."

And Congress is unwilling or unable to do so - because the Corps is an entity that doles out pork as good as any entity in the federal government.