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Friday, September 09, 2005

"Overtop" and "breach" mean two very different things

Rather repeating well-documented deficiencies in the staffing and management of FEMA in the years leading up to Katrina, I thought I would try to find confirmation that anyone was on record anticipating a breach in the levee keeping Lake Pontchartrain out of New Orleans. I have not been able to find any pre-Katrina prediction that a levee breach could occur even in a direct hit on New Orleans by a Category 5 hurricane.

What show up instead are many instances of Michael-Moore-style reasoning. Typically, someone will quote President Bush's comment to Diane Sawyer that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" and then proceed to cite something saying that a storm surge could "overtop" the levees and flood New Orleans. One source quotes the Bush comment and then reproduces the October 2004 "National Geographic" article about New Orleans. Nowhere does the article suggest a severe storm could breach a levee.

I also found this tidbit about Sen. Mary Landrieu (whose name I cannot hear without thinking of a certain "Star Trek" episode):
"She also faulted Bush for failing to recognize the severity of the situation when the levees broke, noting that public service announcements featuring the Mr. Bill clay animation character have been warning about such a scenario for two years.

"'We know the president said 'I don't think anyone anticipated the break of the levee.' Everybody anticipated the break of the levee, Mr. President,' she said. 'How can it be that Mr. Bill was better informed than Mr. Bush?'"
Guess what you find if you go to the trouble of viewing the "Mr. Bill" spot in question? It says nothing about a levee breach. Rather, the narrator says "That's right, Mr. Bill. And since New Orleans is below sea level, if a hurricane hit us directly, it could push the water over the levees and fill it to the top." In case that clip didn't work for you, here's a Quicktime version into which an amateur Michael Moore has repeatedly edited the inapposite segment from Bush's Diane Sawyer interview.

Pretty much no one makes the point that "overtopping" and "breaching" a levee are two totally different things. When your levee is overtopped, you get water coming into the city for a few hours and then you can pump it back out. When your levee is breached, water drains into your city for the better part of a week and you can't pump it out until you fix the breach. The consequences of a breach are an order of magnitude worse than those of an overtopping.

As far as I can tell, the levee breach is the "faulty O-ring" of the Katrina disaster, except that you don't need a Nobel Prize in physics to see the vulnerability of the levee system. It's amazing that no one anticipated a levee could fail, or made that possibility a worst-case scenario in the disaster planning, but that does seem to be the case (as reported in the New York Times last week). But just as remarkable to me is the unexamined rhetoric that has become the conventional wisdom. The standard for our national dialogues is so low right now, but I still think that if you make an argument and cite evidence for it--a magazine article, a "Mr. Bill" spot or whatever--the thing that you cite should actually support your argument. Call me old fashioned.


posted at 11:53 AM

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