Two Reporters Predicted How New Orleans Would Flood Years Before Katrina

Three years before Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid, reporters covering Louisiana, wrote a series about how the city's flood defenses might fail.

They described a city protected by levees, the earthen walls and concrete barriers built to hold back water, that might not hold. When the storm came in 2005, their warning looked prescient.

This account comes from Bill Gurley, an investor speaking about catastrophic failure. Katrina killed 1,800 people, displaced 400,000, and caused $125 billion in damage, even though it struck as only a Category 3 hurricane.

In his account, the Army Corps of Engineers, which had built the levees, wanted people to believe water had gone over the top in a natural disaster, an act of God. What happened instead was that water washed beneath the walls until the foundations gave way, a preventable collapse.

News coverage helped challenge that explanation. Schleifstein and McQuaid had written about how this could happen, and after Katrina they would win two Pulitzer Prizes for their work.

They were not alone in concluding that the flooding was man made. The House opened an inquiry, and so did the Senate. The National Science Foundation sponsored its own investigation, led by two University of California professors. Louisiana officials brought in a separate group from Louisiana State University. The groups sometimes competed and sometimes shared notes, but they all agreed the flooding stemmed from human mistakes.

He describes the Corps as naturally inclined to act as a blocker of such inquiries. As an example, he says the Corps asked the American Society of Civil Engineers to join its internal review, paid the society $1 million, and over time the outside engineers were absorbed into the Corps position.

Raymond Seed, a University of California professor, documented his concerns in a 42 page report to the engineering society listing the ways its review had been constrained. The document is still on the internet.

The investigations produced 90 recommendations. The fixes were built as part of the storm damage system, with seawalls costing about $15 billion, and he says those walls have held for 20 years.