Words Whispered in Water. Sandy Rosenthal
to the bus stop. I read and read and read all day. Promptly at 3:45 p.m., I picked up Stanford at the bus stop.
When we got home, he said, “Well, Mom, I’m going to go outside and try running.”
I smiled and said, “Okay!” I stayed inside, so he wouldn’t see my look of disappointment. I did not expect anything to be any different.
A moment later, Stanford burst back into the house, shouting, “Mom! I can run! And it doesn’t hurt!”
I leaped up, and together, we ran out into the bright sunshine. And Stanford ran! And then he laughed! And then ran some more! And laughed some more! And then Stanford, who at that time was a shy fifteen-year-old, ran up to me and hugged me!
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Later that afternoon, after sharing the amazing good news with every family member I could reach with our still-intermittent phone service, I bought some stationery and a small box of chocolates. I suggested that Stanford write a note to Mr. Bouillon, and then I would deliver both. When Stanford brought the note to me, I asked him if I could read it. He nodded. Here’s what it said:
Dear Mr. Bouillon,
I did exactly what you told me to do. I wore my inserts to school, and then when I got home I tried running. I could run, and it didn’t hurt! I have been dreaming about this day.
Thank you very much,
Stanford
If you talk to any survivor of the 2005 flood, most will share a tale of a silver lining, a way in which the survivor’s life was improved in some way. For me and my husband, our lives were made better because the 2005 flood put us on a straight-and-narrow path to Mr. Bouillon’s doorstep. Our son was no longer in constant pain, and the world of sports would soon open back up for him.
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The Millers also needed medical care. Their daughter Beth continued to worry and urged both of them—especially Harvey—to see a trauma counselor.
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Away in Washington, DC, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), an elite engineering trade group, was working out an arrangement with the Army Corps. Larry Roth, the ASCE’s executive deputy director, was doing most of the deal-making. The agreed-upon arrangement was that the ASCE staff would handpick a group of experts to perform an external peer review for an Army Corps-sponsored levee investigation, which was yet to be announced.85 This arrangement would guarantee the trade group a “place at the table” and a two million dollar fee from the Army Corps.86 Worded differently, the Army Corps was making its self-investigation appear to be “independent” yet all the while had chosen its peer-review team and was paying them, too. Both were a conflict of interest. And no one knew anything about it yet.
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On the other side of Washington, DC, firefighters from New Orleans testified about what they saw on August 29, 2005. Captain Joe Fincher and rookie Gabe King had witnessed floodwaters flowing through the breach of the 17th Street Canal.87 They had firsthand knowledge and Captain Fincher had videotape.88 As soon as the winds died down enough, they had swum out to find a boat to commandeer. Captain Fincher had hot-wired it, and they made life-saving trips into the neighborhood near the breach. The rescues continued for four days, from sunup until dark. Their testimony was riveting, but they were ordered to be quiet until the Army Corps’ investigation was completed.89
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In New Orleans, after being rebuffed multiple times, the Berkeley team—led by Drs. Seed, Rogers, and Bea—was finally allowed into the field. But there was a caveat: they had to be escorted by a team from the Army Corps led by Dr. Mlakar. According to Dr. Seed, Mlakar’s role seemed to be to “keep the Army Corps personnel from speaking too openly with the rest of us and thus potentially spilling any beans.”90
Almost three hundred miles of levees had to be examined. The urgency on the part of the Berkeley team was intense because data continued to disappear daily. In response, the now-formed ASCE team announced that they would cooperate with the Berkeley team to prevent redundant work and maximize efficiency. This move made sense since most of the experts had known each other for years.
The Berkeley team cochairs and the ASCE team members prepared a semi-formal outbriefing for the Army Corps press conference, which was scheduled at the 17th Street Canal. A problem arose, however, because it seems that, because of a deal between the ASCE and the Army Corps, the field teams were not permitted to discuss with the media what they had learned. They could only discuss what they had “measured.” Since the Berkeley team had already agreed to work with the ASCE team, they were muzzled as well.
As expressed by Dr. Seed in his forty-two-page ethics complaint filed in 2007, “It was ethically and professionally offensive to the two assembled teams of experienced experts to be told that they were to simply wave, say that they had measured things, and that they had learned nothing. And at a time when a distraught population and the government (both local and federal) were in desperate need of some small sense that engineers were performing a straightforward, honest investigation and were making some progress.”91
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Six weeks after the 2005 flood (October 11), the City of New Orleans was officially dewatered.92
Seven weeks after the 2005 flood, despite multiple investigating teams, the surface had yet to be scratched on the who, what, where, and why of the levee-breach event. If one were to count the breaches on a graphic map created by the Army Corps, they would find a total of fifty-two breaches in the region.93 It was impossible at this point for any human being or group of human beings to draw conclusions on what happened in so complex a scenario. Communication lines were still down, and breaches needed to be plugged.
Yet, just seven weeks after the levees broke, the Business Council of New Orleans had decided where the fault lay. On the day the floodwalls broke, this small group had no phone number, no staff, no meeting minutes, no list of expenses, and no membership list. But, with the city barely dewatered, they had already decided that blame belonged to the Orleans Levee Board—people whose chief responsibility regarding floodwalls and levees was maintaining them after the Army Corps built them. By October 20, while some souls were yet to be discovered in their attics, this group had already submitted a bill to the Louisiana legislature. It was sponsored by State Senator Walter Boasso in St. Bernard Parish and it would change the way members of the Orleans Levee Board were selected.94
Up until 2005, all Levee Board members were selected by the governor. Boasso’s bill would take control of who selected the Orleans Levee Board members out of the governor’s hands and give it to a small group of people with life terms, a so-called “blue-ribbon committee” that would select its own people.
Seven weeks is far too soon for anyone to wrap their heads around what had happened, let alone figure out a way to fix the problem. For example, the investigation of the I-35 bridge collapse over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis took eighteen months in a situation where the bridge was completely closed down. The Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident took more than four months to complete in the face of intense national pressure.
But here, just seven weeks after fifty-two levee breaches flooded forty-eight square miles of a metropolis, a bill was crafted and ready to go without one single completed levee investigation. It would appear that plans to change the way the Orleans Levee Board was selected were discussed long before the 2005 flood. As noted by Naomi Klein in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, changes to policy are often pushed through while citizens are in shock from disasters, upheavals, or invasion.95
The business community was loud in its condemnation of the Orleans Levee Board but named no names. The many dozens of men and women who had served for decades on the board had no faces. Looking at the list of eighty-four men and women who had served on the Orleans Levee Board since 1925, one would see all kinds of upstanding people: city mayors, city councilpersons, and philanthropists. One Levee Board member who served from 1997 to 2001 was a Catholic nun: Sister Kathleen