"When the Levees Broke"

Before coming to New Orleans in January, 2006, to gut houses with a group from Rockfish Presbyterian Church in Nellysford, we had seen the TV images and had read a couple of books on the damage that hurricane Katrina inflicted on the city and neighboring parishes. We were, however, totally unprepared for the extent of the damage that the levee failures had caused. It must be seen to be believed. Even a year and a half after the storm and a lot of rebuilding, the city is still suffering.

Since the 1920s, Congress has charged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with the responsibility of protecting the American people from devastating floods, and to do this the Corps has built levees–thousands of miles of levees–wherever rivers or lakes might threaten lives and property. The Corp has built levees from Hartford, Connecticut to Sacramento, California and on all the major rivers in between.

By its own admission, in a 6,000 page investigative report issued in June, 2006, the Corps admitted that the levees it had built to protect the city of New Orleans had been poorly designed and inadequately constructed. It is certainly understandable, then, why folks in the city blame the Corps for the levee failure that resulted in 80 percent of the city being flooded. It was clearly a man-made disaster.