Читать книгу Words Whispered in Water - Sandy Rosenthal - Страница 11
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On the morning of Friday, October 28, I awoke feeling better than I had in eight weeks. I was going to spend the morning and early afternoon doing something I loved: playing tennis. The familiarity of a tennis court was highly welcome in this new world, post the 2005 flood. All tennis courts are basically the same; in fact, they are all built facing the same direction relative to the sun, a perfect touchstone to normalcy.
This was alumni weekend at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. One of the planned activities for the alumni was a mixed-doubles tennis tournament. A few days earlier, the planners realized that they were short one female player. One of the planners knew me and remembered that I was always on the prowl, looking for a tennis match to play. She invited me, and I promptly accepted.
The day was glorious with temperatures in the sixties. After the initial introductions, the conversation gradually shifted to my being an evacuee, and I launched into my researched but short script on why New Orleans flooded. The levee failures were due to poor design and construction by the Army Corps. I closed by saying that, had the levees been properly built, there would have been little more than some lost shingles and soggy carpets.
What happened next changed my life more than the 2005 flood alone could have.
My male tennis partner, along with the male tennis player on the opposite team, became instantly angry. They told me that there was nothing wrong with the levees and that the hurricane was a huge storm. They went on to say that New Orleans was a “city below sea level,” and we should not expect any special help.
At first, I said nothing because I was shocked. I had grown accustomed to being treated as a bit of a nuisance in Lafayette due to the sheer number of evacuees who had temporarily relocated there. Traffic was snarled at all hours of the day, grocery stores routinely ran out of food, gas station lines were long, and so on. Until that moment, I had felt tolerated, but I had never felt unwelcome. And I certainly had never been told that I, and evacuees like me, deserved our misfortune. Shaking with anger, I walked to my tennis bag and pulled out my car keys. I walked back to the two men who had moments before berated me and my fellow New Orleanians.
I held up my car keys and said, “I am a victim. If you don’t apologize right now, I will leave.”
Had I left—as I was obviously prepared to do—I would have caused a serious disruption to the tournament.
“I’m sorry!” my partner said quickly, but the deed was done. My eyes were now wide open to the misinformation, and therefore the impossibly large amount of resentment toward survivors of the 2005 flood. These two people, both alumni of this institute of higher learning, lived just hours away from New Orleans. If they had their facts so wrong, imagine how confused people must be if they lived in New England or Chicago or California? I suspected that these two people were not alone in their opinions. Thinking back to the way the folks in Lafayette appeared to tolerate us, I could now see that there might be a similar feeling lurking just beneath the surface.
My tennis partner had apologized, which required me to stay and play the tournament. To my partner’s credit, he was on much better behavior after that. But all day long, my mind spun with the revelation that 80 percent of New Orleans residents lost everything—or almost everything—and they were being blamed for it. They were also considered stupid for living there and undeserving of help. Something had to be done!
***
The next morning (Saturday, October 29), I cleared my head by leading an invigorating group-exercise class at City Club. Even then, physical exercise always had a glorious ability to turn big problems into smaller ones. Problems didn’t disappear completely, but they always seemed smaller after exercise.
After the class, I drove home in the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic in the overcrowded city and found Steve soaking up to his chin in the bathtub after a grueling tennis match. I told him I wanted to join others in an effort to show the nation that New Orleans residents had been unjustly thrown under the bus. I couldn’t bear to sit idle, knowing that, behind all the talk of wind and water, the Army Corps was hiding. I believed that there had to be other people who had already drawn the same conclusion. How could I possibly be alone? I started making phone calls and sending emails.
After looking for three solid days, I came up empty handed. There was no one doing the work that I was burning to do: to right the misinformation and to bust the myths.
“Well, then, I will just have to lead the effort myself!” I said aloud in the empty kitchen. “All I need is a spokesperson.”
I thought perhaps I could find a famous celebrity who was born in New Orleans and would be interested in helping me. I attempted to reach Ellen DeGeneres, who was born in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie and found out how difficult it can be to get in touch with a celebrity, especially a television star.
I began to understand that, if I wanted to lead an organization devoted to bringing the vetted facts to every household in America, I could not wait to find a celebrity spokesperson.
Stanford and I discussed this that night over a supper of stewed hen, rice, and gravy. I explained to Stanford that there was no time to find a spokesperson.
“I will just have to be the spokesperson myself until I get a celebrity,” I told him.
We talked about how we would create an organization to explain the real reason that New Orleans flooded so badly. We needed a name, a mission, and goals. Stanford said that, if I would work on that portion of the project, then he would design and create a website. We decided that we should use the word “levee” since that was primarily where the confusion about the flooding lay.
While I scraped the dishes and loaded the dishwasher, Stanford did an online search for any URLs that contained the word “levee.” A true testament that levee breaches were unheard of before August 29, 2005, is the fact that so many URLs containing the word “levee” were not yet taken! Levees and levee breaches were not yet part of commonly used language. On that cold, clear, starry night in early November 2005, we could have almost any URL we wanted.
We kept things simple. We chose “Levees.org” for our URL. The name of the organization would be the same as the website—something that turned out to be effective in an increasingly digital world.
***
The Berkeley team had a budget of less than $250,000.105 In contrast, the IPET (Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force) budget was in excess of twenty-five million dollars.106 But since funding for both was federally sourced, the Army Corps had earlier agreed to cross-share field data and lab results. So Dr. Seed formally reached out to Dr. Mlakar, the designated point of contact, to request the cross-sharing in order to fill in gaps. Initially, Dr. Mlakar said that the data would be quickly forthcoming. Then, he said that it would take a bit longer. Ultimately, Mlakar told Dr. Seed, in no uncertain terms, that he and his team “were never going to see those data.”107 Gradually, the Berkeley team realized that the IPET, which had been described by General Strock as a wide range of experts with two different sets of fact-checking, peer-review groups,108 was in fact the Army Corps investigating itself with the help of preselected consultants.
By November 3, the Berkeley team and the members of the ASCE team had completed their initial report. Though the two teams had earlier agreed to combine their efforts, it was written mostly by the Berkeley team. The team presented their testimony to a highly engaged Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs hearing titled, “Why Did the Levees Fail?”109
This particular hearing was convened in response to Michael Grunwald’s Washington Post article, which heavily criticized the Army Corps. Dr. van Heerden was also an expert witness, and he provided testimony that was similar to the Berkeley team. Both focused on the 17th Street Canal; it was not overtopped but rather that the canal’s steel-sheet pilings in the floodwalls had failed—a potential design flaw. Furthermore, the canal’s floodwalls had breached between four and five feet below design specification. Described in layman’s terms, the floodwall failed when water pressure was about half what they were designed to hold.
At this final statement, Dr. Mlakar blanched and urged caution in jumping to conclusions. (Mlakar had told CNN that the canal wall had failed due to the “awesome force of the storm” and that water had risen to the top of the floodwall and coursed down the other side like a powerful waterfall.110) Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) shrewdly recognized that the Army Corps spokesperson was being slow about providing anything useful.111 Senator George Voinovich (R-OH) was present for this hearing, and he would become a key figure in testimony five weeks later about the same drainage canal wall.
***
At this same time, some participants at the original “secret meeting” in Dallas were busy filing a bill with the Louisiana legislature. The bill, ostensibly crafted by State Senator Boasso, was first introduced in a package of bills on October 20 and focused on the Orleans Levee Board. On November 11, when Boasso’s Senate Bill 95 was formally introduced in the legislature—and when I was able to read it—I was, as usual, perplexed.112 It conflicted with information that I had found in the September GAO report; that the Army Corps was tasked with designing and building levee protection and the local Orleans Levee District was responsible for maintenance of completed structures and for operation (e.g. closing gates when hurricanes approached).113 It seemed to me that, if the levees broke, one should look to the architect and to the contractor, which, in this case, was the Army Corps. To me, blaming the local levee officials was like blaming the janitor if a building fell to the ground. Furthermore, I had seen no stories documenting that the Orleans Levee District personnel had performed their levee maintenance improperly.
At this exact time, Jim Letten, US Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, told a reporter with the Associated Press that he would pursue tips that he had received about corruption relating to building and maintaining the levees.114 The reporter added, “Local agencies handle most of the building and maintenance of levees.”115 This statement was wrong. The local agencies controlled none of the building.
This news article was circulated coast to coast and nurtured what the American people already believed. Fingers continued to point toward local officials and away from the federal government—away from the Army Corps. The same Associated Press article closed by pointing out that State Attorney General Charles Foti and Orleans Parish District Attorney (DA) Eddie Jordan were also conducting similar investigations of their own.
When the media reports that federal, state, and local DAs are announcing an investigation, that is what is remembered. But, as famously stated by reporter Megan Carter (played by Sally Field in the 1981 classic Absence of Malice), the government does not tell the media that an investigation has been discontinued.
Sure enough, the investigations by Letten, Foti, and Jordan were eventually closed with no indictments and no press. But the damage inflicted—at a time when the story was under intense public scrutiny—was incalculable.
***
It was now mid-November, and Louisiana politicians were getting an earful from Boasso. He pinned blame for the flooding squarely on the Orleans Levee Board while failing to provide documentation or proof of why.116 In the words of a popular political science professor at LSU in Shreveport, “Boasso gave an emotional speech, addressing several senators by name, by recounting personal anecdotes about the flooding in St. Bernard Parish, argued how consolidation of levee boards could be the only solution to improving flood protection.”117 Boasso wanted to get rid of the Orleans Levee Board by consolidating it with others (the Jefferson and Lake Borgne districts).
