Katrina Victims: Justice is Coming

It’s been over two years since my film crew and I began to chronicle the events leading up to that debacle, culminating in our documentary “America Betrayed.”

In addition to poorly designed and poorly built levees, this mega-disaster was caused by the construction of a 76-mile long channel (billed as a shipping channel short-cut to the Gulf of Mexico, but rarely used) which funneled storm waters directly into New Orleans from the Gulf. New Orleans was quite simply a sitting duck. It was never a question of if the city could be drowned, but rather when.  

To add insult to literal injury, this very navigational channel—called the MR-GO—was the impetus for major soil erosion, channel widening, levee lowering, and destroying the very wetlands that act as a natural buffer against hurricanes. Outcries from the citizenry reflected this doomsday scenario for 50 years. Many of these folks—interviewed in “America Betrayed”—had  gone to extreme lengths to call attention to this impending tragedy... one female activist even going so far as to blockade the outlet against giant erosion-causing tankers, with her own small boat... putting her life in peril. But who was listening? Certainly not the very governmental agency charged with the responsibility for protecting the city... the Army Corps.

It’s been an agonizing four years since Katrina for so many of the flood victims who’ve waited endlessly for any form of recompense. While lawsuit after levee lawsuit has been begrudgingly dismissed by a judge upholding a 1928 flood control act immunizing the government from liability for flood control projects, hundreds of thousands of lives have been in limbo.

But on April 20, 2009, a groundbreaking civil suit began in federal court, charging governmental neglect by building that poorly designed and horrifically maintained navigational channel, which exacerbated the effects of the hurricane, and ultimately factored in to the inundation of much of New Orleans and all of St. Bernard Parish. Note: we’re talking about a navigational canal here... not a flood protection system. And therein may lie the one hope of holding the government responsible for their former and ongoing travesties.

But where has the Army Corps been since the disaster of 2005?

Over the six months I spent shooting “America Betrayed,” no less than 20 requests were made to talk to some of the colonels and branch managers in the Army Corps of Engineers. ...not just about what went wrong initially, but why there were so many failures to correct their errors post-Katrina. All of our requests were either ignored or denied. No explanation for the leaking of newly reinforced floodwalls, no explanation for acquiring faulty pumps (from a holding company formerly owned by Jeb Bush... at that time, the President’s brother.)

The Corps officials clearly have removed themselves from the line of fire, with the exception of some tightly orchestrated press conferences which we filmed. Under careful scrutiny, amidst rapid-fire questions from reporters, the Corps is often caught up in its own double-speak (as evidenced in the film). When former Colonel Jeffrey Bedey states unequivocally that all the new pumps have been tested, but then is asked by a reporter about testing at a specific location, his answer is “well, that’s a good question... the answer is no.”

If what we have here is a failure to communicate, it’s no accident. There is an insidious nature to all of this. Even in the aftermath of the devastating floods, the independently appointed team charged with investigating the levee failures were stonewalled, bamboozled, and ultimately denied access to the very site, which was critical to their investigation. There is an revealing interview in “America Betrayed”  with Dr. Raymond Seed of Berkeley, discussing the cover-up on the part of the Corps, months after critical walls had collapsed.

But make no mistake... this is a governmental group concerned with its own image. In the wake of constant criticism post-Katrina, the agency has retained a public relations firm—to the tune of $1 million a year at taxpayer expense—to bolster its tarnished public persona. And, to make matters worse, they’ve even logged onto a website, nola.com, where many readers go to obtain pertinent and timely information about the rebuilding of the city’s levee system. They have surreptitiously written letters in defense of the Corps, purporting, of course to be “ordinary” citizens. A subsequent investigation into the  e-mails revealed that they were coming from a server based at the Corps’ headquarters.

To what ends will this group go to maintain its stranglehold on the revolving door of money and influence which abounds within its hierarchy? It would seem the limits are boundless. For as long as Congress funds massive infrastructure projects to the tune of billions of dollars, with no independent oversight as to how the projects are being built, funded or maintained, we are all spitting in the wind... and the horrific consequences, as evidenced by Katrina flooding, are there for the world to see.

Where should Congress begin?

If the solidly entrenched Army Corps is to stay in place as the governmental body responsible for building the massive water-related network in this country, then the powers that be need to take a long hard look at which contractors continue to do substandard work, examine a bidding process which encourages fraud, waste and collusion between contractors and the Corps, and demand accountability when complaints are lodged by expert independent engineers about the viability of the work being done.

As Judge Stanwood Duval examines reams of documents relative to the MR-GO case, and considers them all before his much anticipated ruling in a few months, one can only hope that justice will prevail. For, if we continue to allow this rogue agency to persist in its “business as usual” mentality, with impunity, the long term prognosis will assuredly be cataclysmic for other American cities.