Did Our Government Drown New Orleans?

If I can intellectualize for a minute, one of the reasons disasters are so intriguing to me as an urban planner is because they expose the vulnerabilities in our social systems and structures.  The two major disasters I've responded to - Katrina and 9/11 - both question how we design, build and live in cities - on what kind of land we build, where we put the housing versus office space, who has the best access to jobs, roads, quality housing, waterways, shops, etc.  Development often either feels totally abstract or extremely local; New Orleanians' lawsuit opening this week against the federal government for the construction of the MR GO Canal counters both that abstraction and that scale. 

If it wasn't clear already, we really need to rethink how we develop cities.

The lawsuit was filed by six residents of New Orleans against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and alleges that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR GO), a 76 mile navigation channel next to the city, "was flawed in its design, construction and operation, and that those flaws intensified the flood damage to the eastern parts of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish."  Though the federal government is protected against lawsuits over failed flood control projects, MR GO was not designed as such and therefore does not offer the feds immunity, though significant hurdles remain for the plaintiffs to prove negligence on the part of the government.

The case opened today and is unprecedented; the Judge called it "'the first real trial' about Hurricane Katrina, the levees and the role of the federal government."  What's fascinating about this trial is its scope and the plaintiffs' desire to have the government accept responsibility for the destructive flooding of the city.  Many of the current and potential future plaintiffs are financially as well as physically wiped out from the flooding that resulted from the levee breaks; their houses are gone and the have neither the savings nor insurance proceeds to rebuild.  One colleague of mine years ago described Katrina as one of the biggest wealth transfers in history; the hurricane's collective physical and socio-economic destruction followed by buying up of former homes and property by private developers is really staggering.

And here we are.  In court in 2009 over a federal development project completed in 1968 and likely planned for a decade or two prior to that.  Imagine if we could all crowd into the courtroom over Urban Renewal, slum clearance, highway construction, and wholesale public housing demolition (oh, right).  We may question why NOLA exists at all (yet are we asking the same about Hilton Head?), but in reality much of the city is on relatively high ground.  It's these massive development projects with hints of social engineering (send the white folks that way!  no the poor people go over there! give them rich ones their water views already!  Businesses need this overpass, don't you know??) that are such a disaster for communities everywhere.

This post has been a bit of a ramble, but I'm fired up by this case, even though I suspect the government will prevail in the end.  As it is, MR GO is being closed down, IIUC.  Apparently it only took the destruction of an American City to get us to think twice about its efficacy.  Too bad we can't say the same for Ground Zero.

(Photo of houses that floated off their foundations due to levee breaching, taken by Cowbell Solo in the Lower Ninth Ward, fall 2006)