U.S. floods: Nature or failing infrastructure?

Executive Director, Levees.org

The flooding in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, over 700 feet above sea level, has been accurately compared to the flooding in New Orleans when levees breached during Hurricane Katrina.

Also mirroring New Orleans is a Wisconsin town 1,100 feet above sea level, which flooded when an embankment of Lake Delton breached and emptied the lake into the nearby Wisconsin River. Add this to the January midnight levee breach in Fernley, Nev., a whopping 4,200 feet above sea level, that flooded 800 homes, and a scenario is emerging that suggests levee failure and flooding is not a distinctly New Orleans problem.

The group Levees.Org, which was founded after levee breaches during Hurricane Katrina, has campaigned to educate the nation that what happened in New Orleans is a case of federally directed civil engineering failures, not a simple case of a natural disaster. Levees.Org contends that the flooding within the city during the August 2005 storm could have been avoided had levees been at the right height and had they been built to withstand a few hours of water overtopping them.

Responsibility for the design and construction of levees in New Orleans – like most levees in America – belongs to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Levees.Org believes that what happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere, but this problem is not being addressed. There are more people in the state of California in danger of catastrophic levee failure than in the states of Texas, Louisiana and Florida combined. This is not just a New Orleans issue.

The group supports the 8/29 Investigation – Senate Bill 2826 filed by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) – because the organization responsible for the levees, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, sponsored the official investigation as to why the levees failed. That is a conflict of interest.

Editor’s Note: Levees.Org was founded in November of 2005 by Rosenthal, 51, and her son Stanford, now 17, while living in Lafayette after evacuating from New Orleans after Katrina. They returned to the city and grew the organization to over 20,000 members. The non-partisan grassroots group’s mission is to educate others that metro New Orleans was destroyed not by a natural disaster, but by what it calls “the worst engineering failure in the world since Chernobyl.”