The Deepwater Horizon was trying to tell us something was wrong in the Gulf of Mexico. And the levees are trying to tell us something is wrong in the Sacramento Delta—if they go, we’re all going to be drinking saltwater coffee.
—Professor Robert Bea,
University of California, Berkeley, 2010
In places that flood—Holland, central China, the states along the Mississippi River—man has developed various ingenious methods to control water. Dams and reservoirs and canals are built in part, or in some cases primarily, to capture excess runoff. But the most effective and common flood defense are levees, also called dikes: man-made barriers that stand between a watercourse and human development.
Levees come in all shapes, widths, heights, and angles of incline. Some are made of nothing more than sandbags, boards, and sheets of plastic and run just a few yards long. Others are more elaborate, such as the Sny, a reinforced wall of pilings and concrete that runs for fifty miles along the banks of the Mississippi. But most levees are berms made up of dirt, sand, or clay—and all that gets scooped up with that material—that are dredged and piled up along river edges (such as on the Mississippi) or the coastline (as in New Orleans), to control and restrain water. In some cases (as in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta of Northern California), levees are used to push water out of estuaries or wetlands to “reclaim” fertile land for farming or for new building lots. Levees are often partnered with a network of floodwalls, pumps and pipes, drains, gates, canals, and islands—complex systems of hydraulic control that require diligent maintenance to ensure their integrity.
Carefully engineered, solidly built levees have protected millions of people from floods and saved billions of dollars in potential damages. But levees are problematic. They tend to push water away from one area, which intensifies its impact on other, unprotected areas. They are often poorly built and are expensive and time-consuming to maintain. And they are only as strong as their weakest point.
Experts say—only half-jokingly—that there are only two kinds of levees: those that have failed, and those that will fail. They fail for many reasons: shifting rocks, falling trees, or burrowing muskrats; getting hit by a ship or the tremendous pressure exerted by floodwaters; or because of the weight of storm surges overtopping them, or burrowing through them, or tunneling under them—any one of which can lead to catastrophic flooding.
Levees exist in every state in the nation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is responsible for identifying flood hazards, estimates that levees protect 55 percent of the American population, or about 156 million people. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE, or the Corps), which is responsible for building and maintaining federal levees, has estimated that the United States has approximately one hundred thousand miles of levees. But more than 85 percent of US levees were privately built, ad hoc, by farmers, developers, or businesses. No one really knows how many of them exist, where they are located, who is responsible for their upkeep, and what their integrity might be.
Many US levees were built 100 to 150 years ago out of whatever material lay close at hand, such as sand and seashells dredged from the bottom of a canal, which are not structurally sound. During construction, other materials—such as rocks, tree roots, and human detritus (such as piles of garbage or old boxcars)—get swept up and entombed inside levees’ banks. These materials tend to shift and weaken the structure over time. Private levees are not inspected by the Corps and are often not well maintained, frequently leak, and are sometimes breached.
In a 2007 inventory of the levees that it oversees, the Corps found that 177 of them—about 9 percent of federally inspected levees—were “expected to fail”; 122 of the levees were at risk of “catastrophic failure.” California, with 37 at-risk levees, and Washington State, with 19, were the worst off. But the list included levees stretching from Washington, DC, to Hartford, Detroit, Omaha, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and Honolulu.
A weakened levee can suddenly give way with little or no warning. At four o’clock one morning in January 2008, the residents of Fernley, Nevada, a dusty town east of Reno, were awakened by the sound of a rushing torrent. Stumbling into the night with their flashlights, residents were shocked to discover that a thirty-foot section of levee along the Truckee Canal had ruptured. Within minutes, the breach had released enough water to swamp 450 homes, force 3,500 people to evacuate, and cause millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Some residents found their predicament difficult to comprehend. “We live in the desert, you don’t think of [a flood] happening here,” a Fernley resident said. But there it was: water several feet deep in their basements. The exact cause of the Fernley breach remains unknown. Burrowing gophers are a leading suspect, though poor maintenance likely played a role, too.
The flood in Fernley highlighted the vulnerability of the estimated hundred thousand miles of levees in America and underscored the much larger challenge of aging infrastructure nationwide—from collapsing tunnels to sagging bridges, broken highways, decrepit ports, outdated canals and locks, congested airports, and underfinanced rail systems.
In the 2009 edition of its biennial Report Card on American Infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the nation’s oldest engineering society, rated fifteen categories, from Aviation to Schools, with a grading system that ran from A, for “Exceptional,” to F, for “Failing.” Overall, ASCE gave the nation’s infrastructure a D, or “Poor,” grade. Waterworks earned some of the worst grades of all: the nation’s dams were given a D, while drinking water, wastewater treatment plants, inland waterways, and levees all received grades of D-minus. The nation’s flood defenses were singled out as a growing problem. Of the 85,000 dams reviewed by ASCE, over 4,000 of them were considered “deficient” in 2009, and of those, 1,819 were classified as “high hazard” cases.
Many levees are in poor shape, ASCE noted, and the cost of upgrading them could be “over $100 billion.” (That number could easily climb higher, once the Army Corps of Engineers has assessed levees across the country.) But as of 2009, Congress had committed only $1.13 billion to levee upkeep.
Business has also ignored levees. Developers, abetted by a vague Supreme Court ruling, have rushed to fill in wetlands and build on flood-plains. In the 2006 Rapanos case, which centered on a developer who had filled in a wetland in Michigan, the court’s ruling confused regulators about what legally constitutes a wetland and how to enforce the Clean Water Act. Wetlands absorb rainfall and waves and help to mitigate the impact of flooding. When they are filled in and built upon, history has shown, the displaced water will try to reassert itself. The result is flooding.
Flood protection clearly needs to made a national priority. But to fix America’s levees and reform its flood-control policies, the nation will first have to fix the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Corps got its start on June 16, 1775, when the fledgling Continental Congress organized an army that included a chief engineer, Colonel Richard Gridley, and two assistants. The three men built up a cadre of soldier-builders who fortified Boston with earthen redoubts around Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill, which helped to repel a British attack. As the Revolutionary War intensified, the engineers played crucial roles in building defenses and bridges during some of the most closely fought battles, including the pivotal Battle of Saratoga in 1777, and the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, the last major battle of the war.
In 1802, Congress officially designated the US Army Corps of Engineers, which was directed to build a new military academy at West Point, on the banks of the Hudson, a few miles upriver from New York City. The Corps literally laid the foundations for the Academy there, and for the next sixty-two years the West Point superintendent was always an engineering officer.
From the start, politicians demanded that the Corps contribute to both military projects and works “of a civil nature.” Although the Corps built roads, buildings, and parks, many of its projects have been focused on waterways. The Corps built lighthouses, jetties, harbors, navigational channels, bridges, and coastal fortifications—most notably the naval bases at Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Leading up to the War of 1812, the Corps fortified New York Harbor and constructed the eleven-pointed fort that now serves as the base of the Statue of Liberty, which helped to convince the British navy not to attack the city.
Congress expanded the Corps’s portfolio in 1826 with new legislation that authorized engineering officers to survey, clean up, and deepen rivers and to make improvements to American harbors. Corps engineers developed innovative methods to remove fallen trees and hazardous sandbars from the Ohio River; in the 1870s, the Corps commissioned the nation’s first hydraulic dredges and built a system of dams and locks on the Ohio. During the nineteenth century, the Corps undertook the first significant surveys of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Delta.
The Corps first addressed the risks of flooding in 1850, when a group of Southern congressmen lobbied for federal assistance to defend their states after severe flooding in 1849 and 1850 by the Mississippi River. Ever since then, the Corps has been bound in a love-hate relationship with the Big Muddy.
The Mississippi has the third-largest drainage basin in the world (after the Amazon and the Congo Rivers), which encompasses 1.245 million square miles. The basin draws water from an area stretching from Montana to New York, and funnels it down to a spout that empties into the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans.
In 1850, the Corps undertook a survey of the Mississippi Delta near New Orleans. Two engineers—Captain Andrew Humphreys and Second Lieutenant Henry Abbot—produced the “Report Upon the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River” (known as “the Humphreys-Abbot report”) in 1861, which, despite a few technical mistakes, was a crucial document in the development of river engineering as a discipline.
Humphreys and Abbot developed the theory that “levees only” could control flooding along the lower Mississippi. They believed that dams, reservoirs, and cutoff canals were no longer necessary. The levees-only policy profoundly influenced everything the Corps did on waterways across the country up through the Second World War.
In 1879, Congress established the Mississippi River Commission, a panel of experts who oversaw the construction of dozens of miles of levees along the river, the dredging of its shallows, and the building of “mattresses” made of woven willow branches, to prevent erosion of riverbanks and to improve navigation and flood control.
But flooding persisted. In 1882, one of the most devastating floods on record destroyed the delta region. Major flooding hit again in 1912 and 1913, when two terrifying floods overwhelmed levees and devastated the lower Mississippi Valley. In 1916, the region was swamped yet again. Still, the Corps and the Mississippi River Commission continued to rely on levees as their primary defense.
In the fall of 1926, heavy rains swept across the Midwest, and by the following spring a large region, stretching from Minnesota to Missouri, was soaked. In the spring, heavy snowmelt and persistent rains set the stage for the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, one of the worst disasters in American history. In late March, rivers across Kansas and Iowa swelled over their banks as tons of water rushed downstream. By mid-April, the flood crest had worked downstream to Mississippi and Arkansas, and the Big Muddy rose to unprecedented heights. The Mississippi spread a mile wide, a hundred feet deep, and flowed downstream at a fast nine miles per hour. On Good Friday, April 15, the Mississippi was flooded along most of its 2,320-mile course and in some places had spread eighty miles wide, according to a report by the Goddard Space Center. On April 22, levees near Greenville, Mississippi, broke; a tremendous gush of water flowed inland through the breach—at a rate twice the flow of Niagara Falls, by one estimate—and the city was sunk under ten feet of water.
Along the riverbank, levees broke in 145 places, flooding twenty-six thousand square miles in nine states—Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and Oklahoma—up to a depth of thirty feet in places. In portions of the lower Mississippi Basin, water remained above flood stage for two months. The Flood of 1927 destroyed cities, towns, and farms, killed 246 people, and led to the dislocation of nearly 700,000 more. Many of the refugees were African Americans, who were moved to 154 temporary camps and conscripted, sometimes at gunpoint, to shore up levees and excavate piles of silt deposited by the flood.
Until Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the nation’s worst natural disaster. One of its lessons was that levees alone are insufficient for flood control.
The 1928 Flood Control Act was drawn up in response to the disaster. The act led to what is now called the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, the nation’s first comprehensive flood-control and navigation provisions. The act also approved a controversial plan, designed by the Corps’s Major General Edgar Jadwin, to require that flooding rivers be equipped with outlets that spill floodwaters out of the main channel into floodplains. The 1928 act also contained a provision that immunizes the Corps from prosecution when its levees fail, a provision at the center of much Katrina-based litigation today.
In 1936, Congress passed an updated Flood Control Act, which for the first time declared that floods were a menace to the national welfare and that flood control was a federal responsibility. Since then, the Corps has built 375 reservoirs and hundred of miles of levees, floodwalls, and channel improvements. These significant engineering projects compose one of the largest single additions to the nation’s infrastructure, rivaled only by the federal highway system.
Today, the Corps is known as the nation’s handyman and performs all manner of governmental odd jobs—from hazardous-waste cleanup at former military sites, to warfare logistics, ice management, power generation, and building horseshoe-crab nests. It played key roles in the First and Second World Wars, in Korea and Vietnam. But in recent years the Corps has been “streamlined” by Congress and has slowly become a demoralized and balkanized agency that is mostly staffed by civilians.
In the aftermath of Katrina, the Corps was heavily criticized by civilian engineers for not knowing how many levees exist in the United States, where they are, and what their integrity might be. In 2006, the Corps began to compile the first national levee database. It took another two years for the agency to secure enough funding to include private, nonfederal levees. By 2009, the index contained just ninety-eight hundred miles of levees, or less than 10 percent of the estimated total. Tammy Conforti, manager of the Corps’s levee safety program, hoped to add another forty-two hundred miles to the inventory within a year or so, which would complete the fourteen thousand miles of levees over which the Corps has legal oversight. To assess the nation’s remaining, privately built levees—an estimated eighty-six thousand miles’ worth—the Corps will have to negotiate with state and local government offices to share data and inspect levees.
The rehabilitation of America’s levees has not begun and won’t until their cataloging is finished. That could take years. For now, the information used to predict how, when, where, and why the next levee breach might occur is mostly anecdotal. Some levee systems are breached again and again, though, regularly causing deaths, mass evacuations, and millions of dollars’ worth of destruction. To the experts, this pattern is infuriating and avoidable.
In the summer of 2008, the Mississippi flooded again.
A snowy winter and a wet spring led to high moisture levels in the Midwest, and on June 1 the first rains of early summer arrived. The Iowa, the Cedar, the Mississippi, and many smaller rivers began to rise. The rain kept falling, and the rivers began to overtop their banks. The swollen Mississippi swept away bridges, breached levees, submerged the sandbagged fortifications built around small towns by frantic citizens and the National Guard, and overwhelmed the locks and dams operated by the Corps of Engineers. Lakes designed to capture excess runoff overflowed. Up and up the waters rose, for two weeks, sinking large swaths of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri.
In Missouri, the owner of a house built on stilts high above the flood-plain told a group of engineers investigating what was let of the home, “My first house here was flooded out in 1956, so I built a second one. That was flooded out in 1993. This here is my third house. Now it’s flooded out, too. They keep tellin’ me it’s okay to build here, that the levees will protect me. But I think somebody’s been lyin’ to me.”
Like many people who built in the Mississippi’s floodplain, the man had been wiped out. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “This time I’ve got nothing left.”
The leader of the investigating engineers, a bald, rapier-thin seventy-four-year-old with a military bearing, a silver mustache, and piercing eyes, nodded. This was Dr. Robert Bea, a professor of engineering and codirector of the Center for Risk Mitigation at UC Berkeley. Bea calls himself a “forensic engineer,” and he is famous within engineering circles as a kind of master of disaster.
In 2003, he was a principal investigator of the Columbia space shuttle disaster for NASA, and in 2005 he led the National Science Foundation’s investigation of levee breaches in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. He has studied the causes of over six hundred engineering failures—from perforated submarine hulls to collapsed tunnels and upended oil rigs—and found that most of these accidents were caused by human error. In particular, he discovered, engineers failed to address so-called residual risk: those things people believe “will not” and “cannot” fail. Most engineers, he said, “only look at part of the risk and don’t take the whole picture into account. But this is not careful engineering, it’s ‘imagineering.’ “
After the Mississippi flood of 2008, Bea and eight graduate students, professors, and engineers had flown into the rising heat and dense humidity of St. Louis, then made their way through flood-wracked towns, washed-out roads, and ruined fields across the Midwest, like detectives scouring a crime scene. Just two weeks after the flood, they were looking for clues as to why the levees had breached, where, and when, to prevent such disasters from happening again.
A forensic engineer is very different from a design engineer, a building engineer, a maintenance engineer, or a decommissioning engineer; it is akin to being an investigative reporter. “You look at the dirt, the steel, the concrete, the water, to find out what happened,” Bea explained. “And, crucially, you talk to the people, to find out who did what, when, and where. I have done at least fifty of these investigations, and every one has been chillingly interesting.”
Bea used lidar (a laser-based measuring tool) to take careful measurements of breached levees and snapped photographs to document the different ways that the river bored over, under, or through flood defenses. “Water is a beast,” said Bea. “It scours and erodes and rips apart anything in front of it. It deepens channels faster than you can believe. It cannot be stopped. We humans need to understand that we will never ‘beat’ water, so we’d better learn to work with it.”
Which means building homes in sensible places, not in floodplains, and protecting ourselves with sensible flood defenses, not “piles of sand and shells, like the levees the Corps built here, and in New Orleans, and a lot of other places.”
When the man in the stilt house expressed his distrust and anger at the US Army Corps of Engineers, Bob Bea knew exactly how he felt. “It was déjà vu,” Bea said in a distinctive high, fluttery voice. “We’ve heard this tune before.”
As he toured the man’s flooded house, Bea couldn’t stop thinking about the Great Flood of 1993. In the aftermath of that deluge, a committee of well-regarded experts issued a 272-page report that described Midwestern flood defenses as “a loose aggregation of federal, local and individual levees and reservoirs”; it predicted that “many levees are poorly sited and will fail again in the future.” The report recommended that management of floodwaters along the Mississippi be made the sole responsibility of the Corps and that the agency make levee improvements a priority. The report was widely hailed, but once the politicians and TV cameras left, no meaningful change occurred. The flood of 2008 exposed the same institutional failings.
Now, Bea said, the Corps was trying to dodge its responsibility by tailoring and retailoring its message about levee failures in 2008. First, the Corps said, “No federal levees failed” in the flood. Then the message was adjusted to “Levee failures were due to overtopping,” which was another way of saying that the Corps had built the levees correctly, but the water had simply risen too high, and thus any failures were not the fault of the Corps.
Bea did not see it that way. He was angered by what he discerns as a long-standing pattern: the Corps builds poor levees, maintains them badly, and, when they fail in a flood, passes the blame or hides behind the 1928 law that protects it from prosecution should its levees be breached. Indeed, the Corps had quietly begun to decertify some of its levees, effectively abdicating responsibility when disaster strikes. “That is a no-sense loophole that should never have been written into law,” Bea fumed.
For Bob Bea, the fight with the Army Corps of Engineers could hardly be more personal. His father, “the Colonel,” joined the Corps during the Depression and considered it a steady, well-paid job that gave him a respected place in the world. Rigorously disciplined on the job, the Colonel could turn into a Great Santini–like despot at home, where he flew into rages and hectored his son to “conduct yourself like an officer!”
Bea became a Corps engineer himself in 1954, stationed in Jacksonville, Florida. His first job was to build levees on Lake Okeechobee and “drain every drop we could out of the ever-loving Everglades—which is how I first learned about levees, and their problems,” he said.
After a bitter falling-out with the Colonel in 1959, Bea quit the Corps and moved to New Orleans to work as an engineer for Royal Dutch Shell. He loved the Big Easy. He kept a boat to sail on the Gulf of Mexico and was in charge of designing and maintaining Shell’s giant offshore oil platforms. Part of his job was to assess how the rigs would fare in severe weather.
In 1965 Hurricane Betsy struck: Bea’s oil rigs survived 120 mph winds and tanker-size waves, but New Orleans’s rudimentary levees failed, and the nation suffered its first “billion-dollar hurricane.” When Lake Pontchartrain spilled into the city, Bea’s house flooded, and he and his family barely escaped onto the roof; they lost all of their belongings, including their wedding album. “We evacuated vertically,” he said, meaning that he moved his wife and children into his office at Shell, in a tall office building. For two months, the Bea family camped out around his desk and cooked meals on a hot plate. Fearing another flood, they relocated to Houston, Texas. “We decided we’d never go through that again,” he said.
Named head of Shell’s Offshore Technology Group, Bea modeled hurricanes, designed arctic pipelines, and built oil platforms off the Australian coast. He loved this work but chafed in the corporate environment. He quit Shell in 1976, helped found and sold two engineering consultancies, studied hydrology in Norway and Holland, and earned a master’s degree in Australia and an MBA at Harvard. In 1989 he applied to the PhD engineering program at UC Berkeley. He was turned down because he didn’t have the prerequisite courses, but the faculty were so impressed by his résumé that they offered him a job as a professor. Bea accepted on the spot.
The personal tragedy of Hurricane Betsy in 1965 was a formative experience for Bea, a touchstone that he frequently references. Betsy had prompted Congress to authorize the Corps to ring New Orleans with sixteen-foot-high levees—a project that was still under construction when Hurricane Katrina hit, in 2005. “In 1965, we said we’d never repeat the disaster of Hurricane Betsy. And yet forty years later, almost to the day, I go back to the site of my previous home in New Orleans—and what are the new owners doing? Dragging wet mattresses out the door to dry in the sun. What does that mean? That with all the struggle and money and resolution, we still failed to get the job done. The Corps is misleading people into false self-confidence about the level of protection they have from flooding.”
New Orleans has long been dominated by politicians and their cronies who allegedly control the city’s flood defenses and water systems through patronage. The designing and building of flood defenses was directed by local political considerations as much as by a desire for public safety. The Corps plays along, critics charge. “Corps officials, under pressure, repeatedly justify unworthy projects, which displace limited funds needed by more critical projects elsewhere,” the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) wrote in a 2007 report. In the five years before Katrina hit, for instance, Louisiana received far more federal funding—$1.9 billion—than any other state for water projects, according to the EDF. Yet only a small percentage of that money was spent on strengthening New Orleans’s levees.
“Good engineers are good worriers, just like good doctors are,” said Bea. “I worried a lot about New Orleans before Katrina hit. A Category Three storm was predicted, but people didn’t want to hear it. They care about where the fish are biting, or how the Saints are doing—‘Laissez les bons temps rouler!’ It’s endearing, I guess. But it can have tragic consequences.”
On September 27, 2005, four weeks after Hurricane Katrina submerged the Gulf coast, Bob Bea and his UC Berkeley colleague Dr. Raymond Seed arrived in New Orleans to lead the most prominent independent investigation of the disaster that killed over eighteen hundred people and swamped the Big Easy. The result was an encyclopedic report on what they deemed the “catastrophic” and “unnecessary” failure of the flood defenses that were supposed to protect lives and property.
By the time the hurricane crossed Plaquemines Parish, a peninsula that juts out into the Gulf below New Orleans, it had weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 3 storm, yet Katrina still managed to punch through nine “secure” levees and overtopped or undercut many others. Bea’s investigation revealed that the levee failures were caused by faulty design, shoddy workmanship, poor maintenance, and a culture of “hubris and arrogance” that prevented Corps engineers from listening to constructive criticism from outsiders. When the Corps protested that it had done all it could to protect New Orleans, Bea scoffed, “This was not a ‘natural’ disaster. It was a man-made disaster. And, sadly, much of the blame can be pointed at the Corps. I really hate to say that, but it’s the truth. If they can’t learn from experience, they are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.”
Bea and Seed’s report on Katrina became the focal point of a massive class-action lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers, which was filed in 2006: sixty-five thousand New Orleanians have charged that the Corps ignored its own flood-protection guidelines and left the city vulnerable to the ravages of the hurricane. (Another three hundred thousand plaintiffs have filed separate claims. Taken together, the litigation over Katrina represents the biggest legal action in the nation’s history.)
This suit involving Bea is the most significant challenge yet to the web of laws stemming from the 1928 Flood Control Act, which grants the Corps immunity from prosecution when its levees fail. As the case slowly crawled through the courts, Bea was frequently called upon as an expert witness. His overall goal, however, was to build effective flood control, and he continued to offer the Corps his expertise.
In December 2007, Bea flew into New Orleans for an unprecedented, off-the-record meeting with Corps leaders. The weather was sultry. The sun was a bright disk in the gray sky as it warmed the afternoon; in the evening, lightning flashed and thunderstorms drenched the streets. Bands tooted along alleyways, as the city prepared for Mardi Gras. Bea’s man on the ground, Jimmy Delery, a community activist, radio host, gardener, real estate entrepreneur, and gadfly, who had rescued people during Katrina, drove us through the city’s poor, mostly African American Lower Ninth Ward. More than two years after Katrina, the neighborhood remained a muddy shambles, as if it had been freshly destroyed. “This should not have happened,” Bea said, shaking his head. “We knew Katrina was coming. We did this to ourselves.”
I heard many conspiracy theories about what “really” happened during the storm. People said that the levees had “intentionally” been blown up—to save white neighborhoods, some said; or just the rich, said others; or friends of politicians, said yet others. In light of the government’s woeful response to the crisis, it is easy to understand such thinking. But as I toured the decrepit levees with Bea, a more likely scenario presented itself. It wasn’t that the Corps had intentionally blown up perfectly good levees out of racism or spite or greed; it was just as likely that they had built the minimum amount of flood protection required by law, did so in a hurry and without much of a budget, maintained the levees sporadically, and did not consider the consequences should a major storm hit. Which begs a pointed question: which is worse, intentional destruction or lethal apathy?
The next day, Bob Bea, three senior Corps officers, and local politicians tucked into Cajun food in the back room of a restaurant. It was their first face-to-face meeting, and the conversation seesawed between the jovial and the testy. Bea kept his comments focused on technical engineering issues, and the big, gruff USACE officers seemed genuinely interested in his critique. Some of the local pols debated about money for reconstruction, while others rocked back to eye their BlackBerrys or to whisper. The meeting was deemed a qualified success. “At least we’re talking,” one participant said. “You gotta start with that.”
A few weeks later, federal district judge Stanwood Duval upheld the Corps’s immunity from the New Orleans class-action suit—thanks to the 1928 Flood Control Act—while agreeing with Bea’s assessment in a tartly worded opinion: “Millions of dollars were squandered in building a levee system which was known to be inadequate by the Corps’ own calculations,” he wrote. In his lengthy opinion, the judge seemed to lay out a road map for appeal, which the plaintiffs vigorously pursued.
In a significant 2009 ruling, Judge Duval blamed the Corps for mismanagement of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (known as MRGO), a channel dredged by the Corps that flooded St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward, affecting at least one hundred thousand people. The ruling set the stage for judgments worth billions of dollars against the government for damages. “The Corps’ lassitude and failure to fulfill its duties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property … the wasting of millions of dollars in flood protection and billions of dollars in Congressional outlays,” Duval wrote.
The Corps had already spent $7.1 billion repairing New Orleans’s flood defenses and had requested twice that amount to defend the entire Gulf Coast against another Category 3 storm. Bea continued to worry. “If another Katrina were to hit today, the levees in New Orleans would fail just the same way,” he said. “It will. The question is not if, but when.”
According to Bob Bea, the levees in New Orleans are only the third-most vulnerable in the nation. The second-most vulnerable are in Texas City, Texas, near Galveston (which was flooded by the Hurricane of 1900, the deadliest disaster in US history). In Texas City, fifty thousand residents and $6 billion worth of property, including almost 5 percent of the nation’s oil-refining capacity, are surrounded by seventeen miles of levees. The consequences of a failure there are high. But of all the levees in America, the most vulnerable are in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta—the largest estuary on the West Coast, which lies just north of San Francisco and west of Sacramento, and is not far from Bea’s house near Berkeley.
The Delta’s waterways and peat bogs have been regulated by eleven hundred miles of levees, which pushed the waters back to reveal acres of rich, peaty soil that is some of the most productive farmland in the country. An intricate system of pipes, pumps, and aqueducts siphons freshwater from the Delta south to the Central Valley, the 4 million residents of the Bay Area, and the 21 million inhabitants of Southern California.
Today, many of these levees are old—some of them, built by Chinese laborers during the Gold Rush, are over 150 years old—and have grown fragile. “Between 1900 and 1950, we saw two hundred levee failures up there in the Delta,” said Bea. “Heck, they’re leaking right now.”
One day I drove along the brow of the Jones Tract, a curving levee that collapsed on a sunny day in 2004 for no apparent reason, causing a tremendous flood that resulted in $100 million worth of damage. The repaired levee I drove along was potholed and decrepit. On my left, the land had subsided at least thirty feet below the top of the levee; on my right, the water had risen almost parallel to the road. The water pressure against the earthen berm beneath me was nearly palpable.
If a large chunk of levee is breached in the Delta, it would set off a cascading effect: salt water would surge inland, destroying lives and property and tainting freshwater supplies for millions of people. Unless drastic measures are taken, Bea said, such a failure is “inevitable.”
To make his point, he enumerated the many similarities between the Delta and New Orleans. Each is along the outflow of big rivers—the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers in California, and the Mississippi and its tributaries in Louisiana. Both are set in wide, flat floodplains, on landscapes of soft earth made rich by the silt of regular flooding. Both are ringed by old, badly maintained, increasingly infirm levees run by the Corps. Both, he said, “are ticking bombs.”
Bea is not alone in this estimation. Federal flood experts have characterized Sacramento, which sits at the northeastern edge of the Delta, as the most flood-prone city in the nation. The levees there, which protect about 60 percent of California’s freshwater, are vulnerable to earthquakes or major storms. Seismologists have predicted a 1-in-3 chance of a “catastrophic” earthquake in the region in the next fifty years. Such a temblor could liquidate the earthen levees and transform the Delta to an inland sea. If a major Pacific hurricane caused waves to overtop and collapse the Delta levees, then California, the eighth-largest economy in the world, would suffer catastrophically, and so would the nation.
“In terms of total damage, deaths, and cost, a breach in the Delta would be far worse than what happened to New Orleans,” Bea said. “This is a national problem. We are due for a megaflood catastrophe.” Yet he might as well be shouting into the wind.
Just days after the April 22, 2010, sinking of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, Bea pulled together the Deepwater Horizon Study Group (DHSG), a group of sixty experts from the United States, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and Norway, to undertake an independent investigation of what mistakes had led to the explosion of BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, and to recommend steps to avoid repeating those errors.
Bea has investigated more than twenty offshore rig disasters—including the catastrophic blowout of Ixtoc I, a Pemex platform, in June 1979, which caused the biggest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico prior to the Deep-water Horizon. Most of these accidents were caused by human error—though Bea prefers the term human defect, meaning man’s “hubris, greed, and indolence.” In studying the causes of over six hundred engineering failures, he found that only 20 percent of such disasters are the result of intrinsic uncertainties, such as floods, tornadoes, and dust storms, while 80 percent are rooted in extrinsic uncertainties, or what Bea terms “the human factor.”
In the Deepwater Horizon case, Bea’s key finding was that the companies involved—BP, Transocean, and Halliburton—as well as the federal regulators supposedly overseeing the Deepwater Horizon, were “misled by their assumptions about the risks involved” in drilling miles deep, while cutting corners, on a tight deadline.
As a lead independent investigator of both the Hurricane Katrina and Deepwater Horizon disasters, Bea says the two tragedies have “chilling” similarities. “BP underestimated the whole risk to their platform and fell into the same damn trap that the Corps did in New Orleans,” he said. In both cases, a misunderstanding of the limits of technology combined with a cavalier attitude led to massive losses. “The result is the same: a trail of tears, floating bodies, expensive equipment destroyed. The big difference is that the Deepwater Horizon will impact the ecology of the Gulf for many years to come.”