I received an email this morning from my Senator, Barbara Boxer, titled “Dont (sic) Waive Environmental Regulations:”

… The Department of Justice is looking for a way to blame environmentalists for the failure of the levee structures. In an internal e-mail, the U.S. Department of Justice asked various U.S. attorneys’ offices to report on any cases they had defended “on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.”

If the President is sincere when he says he accepts responsibility for the abysmal federal response to Hurricane Katrina, he should instruct his Justice Department to stop trying to smear environmentalists by blaming them for the government’s failure to shore up the levee system in Louisiana.

… There are vital lessons that we must learn in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. However, those lessons should not include blaming environmentalists for the levee failures.

This is typical Boxer inanity. President Bush’s may have taken responsibility for the federal response to the disaster, but despite Boxer’s oddly constructed sentence, I don’t believe he extended that to accept blame for root causes of the flooding dating to the 1960’s.

More importantly, what about Boxer’s get-out-of-jail-free card for environmentalists?

Let’s say the Corps of Engineers had a funded plan to protect the levees — which were not designed to protect the city from a Category 5 hurricane — with additional barriers that would reduce the storm surge battering the levees. If environmental groups had a role in derailing that plan, wouldn’t you want to know? Wouldn’t you want to reassess that decsion to reduce the city’s protection in the light of what we know now, so that better decisions could be made in the future?

Not in Barbara Boxer’s world. There, President Bush’s acceptance of responsibility for the federal response somehow translates to umbrella responsibility for all aspects of Katrina, past, present, and future. All other issues are to be ignored.

But in this world, the Corps of Engineers really did have plans to improve protection from storm surges off Lake Pontchartrain, and they really were called off at least in part due to environmentalist’s objections. The LAT recounted some of the history last week:

A House panel today will examine whether New Orleans defenses against Hurricane Katrina were compromised by the suit, which resulted in an injunction in 1977. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dropped the project by 1986 in favor of raising levees in the city.

… Congress in the mid-1960s approved a massive hurricane barrier to protect New Orleans from storm surges that could inundate the city from the Gulf of Mexico. The system included a lengthy levee along the city’s eastern flank and giant floodgates that could shut off Lake Pontchartrain if a hurricane was approaching.

What happened to that plan? The September-October issue of Riverside, from the Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District, says:

… One of four alternatives to be investigated will include blocking tidal surges at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Pass. The concept was part of the original Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project.

In 1977, plans for hurricane protection structures at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Pass were sunk when environmental groups sued the district. They believed that the environmental impact statement did not adequately address several potential problems, including impacts on Lake Pontchartrain’s ecosystem and damage to wetlands.

Ultimately, an agreement between the parties resulted in a consent decree to forego the structures at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Pass. Instead, a “high-level plan” resulted, amounting to construction of a levee system around St. Bernard, Orleans, East Jefferson and St. Charles parishes.

A Corps of Engineer official considered the storm surge off Lake Pontchartrain a very serious threat; he said that the levees should survive a Category 3 storm, but their inability to protect the city from a Category 5 hurricane could cost 100,000 lives and $100b.
Other sources confirm the fate of the project. In a New Orleans Times-Picayune article from November 2003,

… Ivor van Heerden, director of the LSU Center for the Study of the Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, discussed his initial findings Friday at a special meeting of the monthly New Orleans Mayor’s Environmental Breakfast at the district headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers.

In addition to listing the frightening consequences of a hit on New Orleans, van Heerden also offered support for a couple of disregarded engineering projects that could protect the city from catastrophe.

… Both proposals, van Heerden said, would dramatically increase protection from hurricane storm surge for the New Orleans area.

… Both proposals have been considered in some form and dismissed in the past. … A form of the lake barrier, including gates at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur passes, was successfully challenged in court in the 1970s, when it was recommended as part of the area’s hurricane protection system.

There seems to be no argument that environmental lawsuits were a factor in the reduction in scope of the project. We’re not arguing that they were the sole cause. According to the LAT, it suffered from cost overruns and delays, so it might have imploded on its own. And the Corps of Engineers did compromise, and must live with that.

But what if the suits were the primary cause of the weakening of the Corps’ plan? Shouldn’t that be identified as a fork in the road that led to disaster? Shouldn’t we reassess on what grounds such suits can be filed? Is it possible that when balancing the risk of a disaster with the costs to mitigate that risk — including environmental costs — in this case the process was faulty?
Barbara Boxer does not want to know.

Without bothering to ponder the facts, she jumps straight to the conclusion that Katrina’s lessons “should not include blaming environmentalists for the levee failures.”

It’s a perfect Boxer moment: all the classic elements of Boxer PR — willful ignorance, interest group pandering, and blaming the administration — are now mixed with a dangerous new refusal to learn from history. And that can have real costs in this, the real world.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2005 at 1:59 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Barbara Boxer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.