Welcome to the third of three lunchtime plenary talks on the region, the city of New Orleans, the state, and the socio-political environmental setting. Before we begin, there is one quick reminder: the address for the aquarium on your ticket is incorrect. The aquarium is located at 1 Canal Place, which is at the very foot of the ferry landing, just a little bit further downstream. If you're using your GPS on your phone, it's just past the Hilton Hotel. Don't go the way your northern tendencies might tell you to go; go downstream. You can walk there in about 15 minutes, or you could take a taxi. There are no horse and buggies.
I'd like to introduce Shirley Laska, the founding director of the Center for Hazard Assessment and Response and Technology (CHART) at the University of New Orleans. She established this center many years ago, long before it was a widely accepted idea. Dr. Laska is a sociologist and a social scientist, and her work represents a significant leap into the study of hazard assessment and technology. Her foresight in forming CHART was truly prescient. She has also served as the Vice Chancellor of Research at the University of New Orleans. She is a mentor and a friend to all who strive to be better public servants through science.
Dr. Laska will be discussing her book about the catastrophe of Katrina. The book's jacket describes it as a "masterpiece of scholarship [that] breaks through a clutter of explanations of Hurricane Katrina." She and her colleagues grounded their analysis in sociological concepts to advance their argument about "humans biting nature."
I encourage you to give a warm welcome to Dr. Shirley Laska. There will be time for questions at the end of her talk, with four microphones set up for discussion.
Thank you very much for taking your lunch time to be here rather than finding yourself in a restaurant that would require a couple of hours of eating and drinking before you came back to your sessions. I started my college career as a student lab assistant in the herpetology collection at Harvard while I was a social science major at Boston University. I never realized the impact that would have on my future professional career, but it enabled me to start a collaborative relationship with the biophysical sciences that has been a wonderful experience for me. I wish there were many more social scientists who would be able to do or had thought about having this kind of collaboration, and likewise, many more of you who would be interested. I suspect some of you in the audience are just that because you were interested in a social science topic. My last teaching collaboration was with a coastal geologist, and our course was entitled "The Geology and Sociology of Coastal Louisiana." No other course gave us more pleasure and satisfaction with what we were able to impart to the students in that collaborative course. I encourage you all to think about those kinds of courses in your own universities.
I'm going to talk with you today about work that was done after Katrina. I call it "The Engineering of Katrina," but I would like to add the term "social engineering," and you will see what I mean when I get into the theme. My three co-authors are Bill Freudenberg, Bob Gramling, and Kai Erickson.
Bill Freudenberg was at UC Santa Barbara. Sadly, he died at too young of an age. Some of you may know his work as a strident advocate for the issues I am going to raise. His co-collaborator was Bob Gramling, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who is also "retired" but is just finishing up another book.
Kai Erickson is the well-known Kai Erickson from Yale who wrote a book called Everything in Its Path about the impact of mining in West Virginia decades ago. Anyone who has taken environmental social science will have read his book as one of the most important.
It was a joy to work with these friends with whom we'd been collaborating for a couple of decades.
One would start perhaps with a conversation and ask, "Is coastal Louisiana a risky place?" There is no doubt that we would say yes, but we would likely say so because of these dramatic, quick, disruptive events that harm us incredibly and then go away. You can see from the timeline how many of those storms we have had since 2005. They simply never seem to stop coming, and they also like to head for the Delta.
Our proposition in this book is that normal actions lead to disasters and catastrophes, not the quick event such as a storm. Contrary to the usual assumption that a disaster is caused by a sudden disruption, it is in fact our normal everyday actions that lead to them. If that proposition is correct, the conclusion we would come to is that it is what humans do to nature that leads to the disaster, rather than what nature does to us.
I'm going to look at two macro areas of use in this part of the country and use those as examples. The book's focus is on navigation, but I'm also going to talk to you about human habitation. I will discuss this topic utilizing some concepts:
First and most important is the concept of the growth machine.
I'm also going to talk about the concept of obsolescence on delivery.
Third, I will ask, where is the resistance to projects that produce these catastrophes? Where are the social scientists, the policymakers? Why aren't there more of us?
I'm going to end with a brief conversation about the California Delta and the tri-state area impacted by Sandy because, unfortunately, it's likely that the same things will happen there as happened here with regard to man's impact on nature. I will then ask what we should be doing to mitigate these challenges.
We have four prime uses here on the Delta:
Oil and gas production is one of our prime uses. If you've never seen this map before, it's a little bit breathtaking; those are all the rigs and pipelines. The green on the right is the oil spill from the BP Macondo.
We also have human habitation. It has been an amazing area to live in. As you know, we probably never should have been here; it was politics that put us here, but then the location became useful for other functions, and here we sit, stuck in the mud, sinking, losing our land, and still hanging on for dear life.
Thirdly, because of the ecosystem, we have amazing fisheries. Some of my long-term work has been in that area, first with shrimpers and now with the ecosystem harvesters in the Barataria Bay, which is going to be our primary area of restoration.
And fourthly, transportation/navigation. This one trumps the others, I would say, because of the new discoveries and the new technology to explore the Gulf, perhaps oil and gas is the preeminent one. Navigation has always trumped habitation, and therefore, that leads to policy decisions that have been quite unfortunate sometimes for habitation and the fisheries.
So we'll look at these two: navigation and human habitation.
In the social sciences, especially when you do qualitative research, your responsibility is to seek observations, whether in data you find in secondary sources or by participating. It is the "aha" that sometimes really gives you insight into what is going on. I'm going to start my talk with one "aha" moment and end with another. In my opinion, both of them give us a serious clue as to why we have had these catastrophes happen here.
In May 2005, a young coastal hydrologist named Ms. Ricci Hassan, who is currently working for the hydrology science and modeling program of the National Weather Service, was at Louisiana State University (LSU). The date, May 2005, is the important point of this story. He made a presentation on that day to all of the presidents of the coastal parishes (we call our counties "parishes" here, from our history of being connected to French culture). He presented data which he had seen from a hypothetical hurricane model called Hurricane Pam, which had been described in July 2004. What he had seen, and these are his slides, was the flow of the pattern of the surge into the area. Putting it into layperson's terms, he told the group that there was a funnel right there, very visible, that he likened to the Trojan horse, just waiting for the enemy to come out of it. You can see the ways in which the area would flood.
The "aha" of that meeting was that when he sat down, there was total silence. Not a single question was asked. The Army Corps of Engineers was also present. I thought, "Isn't this interesting? We have just been told the means by which we are going to have a catastrophe that might be beyond belief, and no one has a question." I hope at the end of my talk you will understand why there was silence.
Now that I've brought you to May 2005, I'm going to take you back and do a little bit of history of the canal. I won't do too much because I understand Rich Campanella did a wonderful job presenting that, as did the speakers on Tuesday. We are a city that has had a history of economic development focused on how transportation would bring goods in and out of the city. Before the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) was constructed (it was completed in 1968), we had four major canals that were constructed.
Bayou St. John became the Carondelet Canal and came right down into the French Quarter.
The New Basin Canal was built later on by Irish immigrants. This is where we piled all the millions of tons of debris from Katrina along this canal, which is now just a wide, open green area.
We also had the Lake Borgne Canal, which goes down here and out into Lake Borgne.
And then there is the Industrial Canal, or the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, whose purpose, as you will see, was principally for economic development.
This is the imagining of what this canal could produce economically for the city. There was a lot of push to have this canal created because all those different locales would be a berth for some kind of waterborne activity. You can see how excited the community was because they imagined that all those sites could be utilized. On this map, I want to point out the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which goes from Texas all the way across Louisiana, out into the open water across Mississippi and Alabama, and then through Florida to the East Coast. Barges transport materials on this waterway. So they knew they had the Intracoastal Waterway here when they were building the Industrial Canal, and it was completed in 1923.
Then we come to the topic of today's discussion, the MRGO. It was conceived and talked about as early as 1927. One of the most important quotes from that time is from 1943. It's very sociological and basically says, "We can't be subject to that gross river." It smelled, it was windy, it had insects, it had alligators. It had always been seen that way. This framing was a way to say, "We want something modern; we want it to be a straight shot to the Gulf, none of these problems." Thus begins the saga of the growth machine advocating for the creation of the MRGO.
I can't go into all the details, but here are the specifics: there was a lot of local support, which the Corps calls "regional economic development support." There was also national support for it. They argued that it was for national security because you wouldn't want the Industrial Canal lock to prevent military ships from going in and out of New Orleans. There was also a concern that Canada and the St. Lawrence Seaway would take transportation from the Midwest, so we wanted to retain that transportation in the U.S.
The other thing that happened was that the growth machine—the local economic advocates—found a way to manage the interest of the local community, the state community, and the federal government. Today, we would call this pork. They were also able to create a benefit-cost ratio for this project that was low because they failed to include the maintenance cost within it. One researcher said about the benefit-cost ratio as a way to argue for a project, "The project benefit-cost exercise is usually a drunkard's search for data to support a given course of action. The frequency of benefit-cost ratios over one [you have to achieve one for the government to fund these projects] would surprise no one. Data once pliable become hardened through handling, meaning that something you might speculate might be true eventually becomes the truth." So you go forward arguing the case for this.
The momentum built up, but it took a long time. The quote you saw was in the '40s, and it wasn't completed until 1968.
So then we ask, "Where was the opposition?" Where was the Ms. Ricci Hassan of that particular period? Yes, indeed, there was opposition:
Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries was extremely concerned.
The U.S. Department of the Interior was concerned.
The St. Bernard newspaper, in the county where the MRGO was constructed, was very fearful.
The Southern part of New Orleans was just starting to be a suburb, and people there were resistant and afraid.
Even the county council opposed it.
But it was to no avail because the momentum of the growth machine was so strong. In 1960, as the channel was being dug, look at the huge amount of marshland that had to be moved: 272 million cubic yards had to be dug up for this channel to be produced.
Here's the growth machine concept that I referred to. Its creator is a sociology professor who spent much of his time at UC Santa Barbara and was there when the Santa Barbara oil spill happened. He became very interested in the growth machine and its environmental impacts. Let me just reiterate what the explanation is: it's a process that is built and set in motion by persons who focus on profit and progress, but it is a process that has no internal brakes and no sensors to take note of the damage it may do as it churns along. Those are the key aspects of it. It's not that the process is bad because it focuses on profit and progress, but it doesn't have any sensors to ask what impact on the environment today, tomorrow, or a decade or two from now is what we're doing today going to have. So the goals aren't bad, and the public often supports it—you like economic development in your community—but the problem is the forceful way the goals are pursued ignores long-term consequences.
We're going to look just at the destructive process. We'll take the benefits first, and you'll see that there are very, very few. The draft of the canal was 36 feet for a period of time, which was an adequate draft for the ships that were being produced. But shortly after its completion, the size of the ships that were built worldwide were larger than that draft would accommodate. This is the problem with the growth machine: once you get an idea into a political process and it takes so long to accomplish, nobody on the way to accomplishing it says, "Now wait a minute, maybe what we want to have constructed is already obsolete before it will be done." That question was not asked; blinders were on. So the MRGO did not serve the economic purposes that they had anticipated because the technology was outdated before it was actually completed.
This table simply shows you how little it was used. If you take the first year, 1995, of all the tonnage that passed through the navigation system here, only 1.74% ever used the outlet. All the rest of it used the river. In 2004, a year before Katrina, it had gone down to 0.39%. Another way of understanding it is to look at this table where the draft of the ships from 29 feet and higher could not go through the Industrial Canal lock from the river; it had to use the MRGO. At 36 feet or greater, it could not. There were only a dozen ships that went up and back in the year 2004.
This is the kind of ship that could get through the Industrial Canal, but this company, which will become the final "aha" of my talk, is right in the Industrial Canal. It's the frozen chicken warehouse. This is the boat that was used after Katrina to be able to go in and drop off the chickens, or pick up the chickens. This company, after Katrina, wanted to go back to using the large ships that it had used previously. This kind of ship never could make it into the MRGO because its draft was too big.
Here are the final stats on this:
Only 13 ships needed to get to the Industrial Canal with a draft of 29 to 36 feet in 2004.
$19.1 million was spent to dredge that year.
With 12 round trips, you have a $1.5 million charge for each ship that used the MRGO that year.
After Katrina, the Corps decided that maybe there was a problem here we had to address, and they came to the conclusion that it was not cost-effective to continue dredging it. Also, they did an additional tally, and $580 million had been spent on the maintenance of it since 1958, a half a billion dollars. They came to the conclusion that perhaps we needed to stop this, and they had a plan to put a closure down on the MRGO to at least stop the salinity from coming in. The salinity is what really did the damage. Between 1956 and 1990, 68,000 acres of wetlands were lost in this study area. The way it is lost is that when the ships go through it, the wake causes the mud to fall away from the sides. It is also a straight shot to bring in salinity, which raises the salinity regime in the area and kills all the plants that require more fresh water.
On the top map, from 1953, this is what the area looked like; it was a healthy marsh. In fact, it wasn't just marsh; it was swamp with stands of cypress trees. After 1980, all of that was gone, and it was now open water. Swamps are important for storm surges because they slow the water, they break up the waves, and they block the wind. We all understand that there's a benefit of having swamps over open water for the movement of a surge. This is what it looks like today in that area. Closer to the city, there are not even the dead trees; we call these ghost forests. This is the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard. This is the triangle that they're now trying very hard to restore using the tertiary treated sewage from the sewage treatment plant that's here. This area is just open. When you drive on this highway, it's just all open water now.
This was the event that you heard about all around the world: the overtopping and then the breaking of the Industrial Canal flood wall into the Lower Ninth Ward. My colleagues and I were able to go in quite early through St. Bernard, and these are the photographs we took. It's just stunning. This is the barge up here. Five full blocks were completely wiped off the face of the Lower Ninth Ward and deposited into the rest of the neighborhood. This was the deposition; notice how high the water went for the appliances to be on the roof.
Now we have what I call a barrier across the MRGO funnel. It took three years to have this barrier built. If you've ever worked with the Corps, you know Corps work usually takes decades. It was the largest design-and-build contract they had ever given, and it was done in a flash. This is what Ms. Ricci Hassan said was going to happen. It's here. See, this is the barrier, and this is Ms. Ricci Hassan's funnel. It makes you pause and it also makes you think about the role of scientists, doesn't it? If someone had heard Ms. Ricci Hassan, who is from Bangladesh, he said in interviews that we conducted with him afterward, "I know what it means when people die in storm surges, and I didn't want it to happen to my new country and my new locale."
Here's the report. The de-authorization study was resisted; even the parish of St. Bernard didn't want the barrier to be put up in the lower part of the canal. Finally, after too many meetings in which people got up and reminded the parish president how many people had died, he finally changed his mind and agreed to the closure. This is the map that goes with the closure. The first closure was one down here, and this was a rock jetty that did stop the salinity from moving up because there was a salinity that killed all of this.
Now, the discussion goes on about the other kinds of things that are going to have to be done to mitigate the problems that the event caused. This one is the most controversial because the residents of the parish don't want to have a canal in their midst. They have been through way too much in terms of what happened when they let a canal happen. They are resisting, and the public is very much resisting. But even the other plans are fraught with problems because some of these they want to take soil out of Lake Borgne, use Lake Borgne as the spoil bank to add to these areas, and there is a concern that there might be some hydrologic issues if you create a deeper hole over which the water might flow. That's still being discussed.
The two lessons that we take from this example are that:
Technologically, we have reached the point where the dimensions of our projects can do enormous environmental damage. We finally have figured that out.
Because of the massive size of these economic development projects, even if we come to understand that it was a mistake, it may be impossible to undo.
Here's the statistic that is stunning: The MRGO will never be filled in. Ever. They got to put the barrier up, but you know what the barrier means? The barrier means that you have to continue to have controlled wetlands behind it. It's funny how we've been debating barriers, flood walls, and levees throughout our coast, and the environmentalists, myself included, are very sensitive to concerns about controlled wetlands behind barriers. It wasn't even a discussion when this came out. They just slapped that barrier on like that because they realized how seriously they had impacted the area. But the actual area that was excavated—all those tons and tons of cubic yards of soil—will never be filled in. It would take 15 to 44 years and $2.8 billion. It will never come to pass. So that hole, that wound in the ecosystem, will always be there.
Now this is my second "aha." Remember the frozen chicken warehouse? We went through three major planning processes after Katrina in order to get ourselves a plan that would enable the money to be released to us to repair ourselves. I'm not following what they are going through in the tri-state area in detail because after seven years, we're still completing our research and still writing and publishing the research that we've been doing. But we had a process where they had city-wide goals and then neighborhood priorities. Among the top three priorities for what money should be spent on to recover from Katrina was moving the frozen chicken warehouse out of the Industrial Canal. That's the power of a growth machine. It started in the '40s and still had the political clout to be worried about the frozen chicken plant.
Here's the data. If you go on the web, a colleague and I just shared this data in January. A Tulane professor went on it a couple of days ago to prepare for this talk, and it is no longer on the web. I have no idea why it has been pulled off, but no one can find it. Fortunately, my colleague at Tulane had taken a screenshot of it. This frozen chicken factory warehouse is right here, and this column says, "Must Do, Highest Priority." So there's that momentum that makes it so difficult to stop and ask the question: "Is this harming the environment? Will it harm the environment in the future? Is it worth it in terms of the harm versus the outcome?"
This is the iconic photograph that was taken by a friend of ours who is a photographer of the ghost forest with the city beyond it.
Now I'm going to turn to human habitation and spend my next 10 or 15 minutes telling you the same story but in a different way, with different examples. We're going to look at New Orleans East; we're going to look at the bowl, and then we're going to ask about the California Delta and the tri-state area. Taking the same map that you saw before, I'm simply putting a box around the area that I will be discussing. New Orleans East goes on Highway 90 to Mississippi. When I came to graduate school at Tulane many decades ago, that was the only road in. I came in, and I was a bit stunned by the heat and the mosquitoes and all the things that I was about to encounter for the rest of my life, but we came right in on this area. Those of you who are local or have studied it know that it's just as low, flat, and swampy as it can possibly be.
In 1961, the engineers opposed developing this area, just like they did with the MRGO. This is what the engineers said: "The area is a sink, the greater portion of which is some seven feet below mean lake level. The vast majority of the developer area of the track averages of elevation of 14.3 feet, but it's uninhabitable and has been so since the advent of the white man." This was from an engineering report, not from someone who had a negative outcome as their goal. With this kind of opposition, we had other quotes, like this one that I thought was particularly edgy and humorous: "Apply insanity, divide the raw cost by two, and it's still ridiculous."
So there was real opposition to developing this area. My colleague, Vern Baxter, has been looking into how it came to be that we developed this area and what was the growth machine's hubris that led to this.
Here is an aerial view of it, and you can see how much water is in this area and how low it is. I want you to note that this is the I-10 coming in; Highway 90 is down here. You notice these little exits? You can see from the sky that those were put in because of business dealings that were friends of Lady Bird Johnson when her husband was the president. There was an intent not only to develop this, which was bad enough, but they were also going to develop the even swampier part of the area.
Right now, we have 35,000 residential structures in this area—an area that the engineers in 1961 said not to develop. How did it come to be? The same growth machine dynamics happened as with the MRGO:
Too rapid a development process.
Reluctance by the government to provide the necessary drainage. They didn't want to spend the money; they didn't have the resources to do it, but the developers, the growth machine, were pushing.
Extreme subsidence. I've had friends who have houses out there, and in the course of their owning them, there's been five feet of loss of their front yard. That's just unthinkable. The houses were built as slab houses with inadequate fill.
This is what it looks like after Katrina. This is an area that became a predominantly African-American, and also predominantly upper-income African-American, community. So this was the American dream of our African-American population to own a suburban house, and their dream was lost with Katrina because the growth machine was successful in creating homes that would put them at risk.
Here's what the tools were: the wetlands were brought into commerce by a process of real estate speculation enhanced by federal programs that required speedy "flipping" of developable land. There was federal legislation passed that would give these developers tax credits if they bought the land, developed it, and flipped it really fast, and that's how they made their profit. It was done by some local developers, but principally by a New York corporate real estate magnate. As I said, Lady Bird Johnson's business partners were also part of it. It's interesting that the political forces were there to encourage it.
If you have a chance to go out to New Orleans East, it will not be a pleasant experience. It's very sad to see all these homes, with people trying to come back, trying to make their yards decent, and trying to put enough fill in. They just broke ground for a hospital—it's been seven and a half years, and there has been no hospital out there. The shopping center is gone; there are a couple of big boxes and one or two grocery stores. It was a thriving, suburban, middle-class African-American community before Katrina.
Let's finish up with the New Orleans story by looking at the "bowl," the middle part of the city. You can see how I've marked it and where the breaches were of the canals that come into it. Here's what it looked like historically. The original city was here, and all of this was uninhabited in 1849. Come the 1930s, somebody got the idea that it would be great to develop the bowl. How do you develop the bowl? You put an attractive, expensive strip of neighborhoods on the rim of the bowl. This is Lake Vista, which is the most expensive of the rim subdivisions, but there are five of them out at Lake Pontchartrain. You see how lovely it is—there are no roadways to go through, just bicycle and walking paths. It had all the amenities of the greenbelt concept.
Now, look at who was the growth machine in the bowl: the Levee Board. It provided grass cutting, lighting, and police before Katrina—every amenity you'd want for growth but not a lot of time spent on the levees. We also, since the turn of the 20th century, have developed one of the best pumping systems in the country. This is the wood pump, which is a very basic screw pump that is utilized in most of the pumping stations, and you see how many we have to keep all of this going. But this is the outcome; this is the impact on the ecosystem. All this land was mud-pumped in from the river, and here sits the bowl. The success of those pumps has caused this sinking of the land.
This is a new map that has been created by a group of architects and engineers. It's an enhanced vertical exaggeration of lidar data with the polders filled to sea level. In New Orleans, all this area is below sea level, except for the white areas, which are enhanced. This is our Lake Vista neighborhood right out here. This is how much success we've had in having those pumps drain the marsh and the peat, pulling it way down.
What areas flooded the worst? All of these areas: New Orleans East, St. Bernard, the bowl, and behind the French Quarter. This area did not flood because this levee did not break on this side, and this stayed dry, but there is always another storm.
Here's the group that's been doing something called "living with water." It's also called the "Dutch Dialogues." David Wagner, a very creative, very articulate architect, and his team are quite remarkable. If you Google the Dutch Dialogues, you will see a lot about their work. The theme of it is the drawdown of the pumps. This concept of "multiple lines of defense" was created by one of our directors of the Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, and it means that you have all these different things that will help us mitigate storm surges and flooding.
What Wagner has added to that is that you can also have these as well. You can have ponds and lakes, you can have swales and permeability, and of course, ultimately, evacuation routes. But he has focused on this: what can you do to this sinking, sagging peat to get it back up, to fill it, to "botox" it? Put something liquid in it so that it comes back up to where it should be.
Here's what he diagrams and proposes: you open the levees—the flood walls, excuse me—on these two primary canals. You let the water flow through Bayou St. John all the way up to here, and then you have all these swales and catchment ponds—anything you can do in an empty lot that will absorb the water from a heavy rainfall so that it will not need to go immediately into those pumps. Then you think about it in economic development terms, because these walkable, beautiful canals will then be places where people can construct their homes, have recreational areas, and have retail activities. He even sees that this water, when it fills this area, will backflow into these pipes and go back into the soil. So where these might be draining to a certain point, once the rainstorm has stopped, the water would flow back in the peat and bolster it again—the "botox" idea.
Here's the challenge that we have. I'm one who has been working on hurricane flooding and the fact that levees cause rather than prevent flooding for most of my life. I'm a Gilbert White student if you know who he is. But today, they are actually starting to break the curve of thinking about how we do something different than these growth machines have been doing historically. I see this as a growth machine because they're picking up momentum with the teams they bring with an international perspective, but hopefully it will be to do this instead of to harm the ecosystem more.
So we have this huge challenge: how to induce comprehensive technology impact assessment when economic development involves ecosystems. That's our challenge. Bill Freudenberg proposed long-term bonding of risky development. So that would have made the developer from New York City have to bond New Orleans East before he built it, and a long-term bond. Do you think he ever would have built it if he had been required to do that? Likely not, and he probably should not have. So it would have stopped him.
Another idea would be to do prepaid flood insurance by developers—the same thing as a bonding but it's flood insurance. Right now, there are areas of coastal Louisiana that I just read about yesterday where a house costs $25,000 per year for flood insurance. That house should never have been placed there, and that owner can in no way, shape, or form afford $25,000.
I would add this third point: I've been working with systems engineers under a proposal for mitigating the BP oil spill and have become a student of systems engineering. If we did a systems engineering approach to imagining the impacts that a development would have and brought into the conversation all of the stakeholders, we might have a slight chance to mitigate what is just an almost a plague, I guess I could call it, of these kinds of economic development projects.
My specialty in this domain is mitigation, which is doing things that reduce risk other than levees. Unfortunately, some of the methods that we've been thinking about harm the environment. For example, the National Flood Insurance Program harms the environment because it permits developers to develop areas that should not be developed because the homeowner will know that they can buy flood insurance to mitigate the risk that they're taking. But they don't know they are taking a risk. You see a brand new slab-on-grade subdivision go into an area next to one of our swamps down here, and you think, "Oh, how lovely. I just got this lovely waterway passing behind it." And then, all of a sudden, you get hit, and the actuarial rates of your flood insurance go up to $25,000.
I took this picture last Friday across the street from the University of New Orleans. This is a house that was raised by the funding that we got post-Katrina. What more do we need as a visual of how a federal program can be done incorrectly? It will probably stand there until somebody decides that they're going to have to tear the house down. A contractor got money to elevate this building. This building is now, in terms of elevation, up to code. It's above the base flood elevation of three feet. You can see the dormitories on the left-hand side of the picture; that's what students, staff, and faculty have to see every day as they leave the campus.
Somewhat near the university is this street, which is what we would like to see. This was a contagion of homeowners who started to elevate, and then they shared their contractors with the neighbors across the street, and now we have a safe street. But much of what's been done with federal money has not achieved the goals and has not been managed adequately. These two houses here are still slab-on-grade, and what I love about this picture is that they have for sale signs out in front of them. That's how it should be; those houses should not be in commerce, as they would say. But we're nowhere near having mitigation options that would be less harmful to the ecosystem while still providing human habitation in appropriate ways for our culture.
To finish up, let's talk about the California Delta. If you think that this is just a Louisiana way of doing things, then we bring this on ourselves. Well, those of you who know California are bringing it on yourselves with the California Delta. This was Bill Freudenberg's specialty. We were given a bus tour into this area, and we were taken to be shown the new levee that's being built. Instead of being built here to protect the existing houses, it's going to be built up here, and it's going to engulf this farmland. How long do you expect that farmland is going to be farmland? It's going to be developed because here are the ads.
We had a meeting with the Corps, and we said, "Sir, why are you putting it above the farmland and not just around the existing structures?" And the answer was, "We needed a benefit-cost ratio of one or greater." So if you think that quote at the beginning of my presentation was too sarcastic, you can see how we come to impact the ecosystem in ways that are dreadful.
Here's what their levees look like. You see this is inside the levee and this is outside the levee. That's the drop that has happened. So when this bursts, it's all going to come out here and do the same thing that has happened here in Louisiana.
Just a quick story: in this building is a new fire department, a firehouse. We were taken here to see it because all the important parts of this are on the second floor. The reason it exists is because the California Delta levees were de-authorized because they were not performing at the level that the Corps requires. So for this firehouse to stay in place, they had to build a new one, which was as it should be, with everything above the expected level of flooding if the levees broke. We were in there, and we were getting the tour and talking to the firefighters, and we were all excited. And then the fire captain says, "And just as soon as they authorize those levees, we're going to take everything from the second floor and put it back in the first." This was a bus of mitigation specialists. I can't tell you how forlorn we were. We just turned around and got back on the bus. There's nothing you can say to somebody at that point. We were stunned. He had no sense that he had a safe firehouse and when he did that, as soon as the levees broke, he would have an unsafe, flooded facility.
Let's turn to the tri-state area after Sandy. A friend of mine at Tulane University, Kevin Gotham, has a book that is in production called The Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans. It shows what happened after 9/11 in terms of the way that Manhattan was redeveloped. The term "growth machine" should be used just to show you how forcefully certain developers got their way in terms of what they wanted. For example, the World Trade Center didn't need to be rebuilt because there wasn't enough demand for that office space after it crashed, but the growth machine insisted that it be built. Because of that and because of what was developed in the Battery, the outcome of that effort will be linked to impacts on the ecosystem because the Battery, the World Trade Center, and all that area will have to be protected. There it is right there. The legacy of the 9/11 growth machine will be that there will be a need for protection that will be costly and can ultimately impact the ecosystem, just like the projects that we have had here in New Orleans.
I know that might give you indigestion; it's not the cheeriest of lunchtime talks, but we have to learn something from what we all have gone through here, and I hope that framing it this way and putting it together will give you some food for thought. I thank you for your attention and your patience with my presentation.
[Audience applause]
Speaker: Thank you for the excellent presentation. I'm over here.
Audience Member: Thank you very much for an excellent and thought-provoking presentation. What was running in my mind as you were going through your material was that what seems to underlie a lot of this is this ultimately is the desire that many in our culture have to get a college degree, buy a house, and live in a nice neighborhood. I don't know, it's sort of a cliché, but it seems like that's where all this desire to protect so that we can develop so that we can enhance commerce seems like that's where it all comes from, and that's pretty fundamental in our culture and very difficult to deal with. It's "normal."
Speaker: Right, it's the "normal" that I said initially, right? Normal.
Audience Member: So what do you think? I mean, how do we address that which is so fundamental and primal? I suspect that even those of us who are highly concerned and very sympathetic to your argument, where do we start?
Speaker: Well, there are subdivisions, and then there are subdivisions. There's also density and the reuse of urban areas that can be made more dense and attractive. It's called the "new urbanism" that to me provides many more amenities than the sprawl that you see where people have to commute for long distances. So we rethink what quality of life means in terms of human habitation.
We start with our children these days; they are getting more aware of environmental issues. You'll see them recycling; you'll see them telling their parents what to do with regard to green issues because they're learning them in schools. We could do the same thing with a lot of issues with regard to how settlements should be constructed and how they can be beneficial to human uses and still not harmful to the environment. But we haven't even started to approach that because the force of the American dream of the suburbs is so powerful. I could even say strongly to you that the suburb is going to be the death knell of our society because it requires us to continue doing fossil fuels because of the commute that takes in the cars that we have to use. So it's pretty serious, and it's just as you said, just "normal." That's what makes it so deadly.
Speaker: Well, thank you all very much for coming. I appreciate it.
[Audience applause]