Words Whispered in Water. Sandy Rosenthal
On November 4, the Army Corps issued a press release, announcing that the chief of engineers, Lieutenant General Carl Strock, had commissioned an Interagency Performance Evaluation Taskforce (IPET) to study the performance of the hurricane protection system in New Orleans and the surrounding areas.102
The White House did nothing while the Army Corps—the organization responsible for the flood protection’s performance—convened and led an investigation of its own work. Inexplicably, neither Louisiana’s governor Kathleen Blanco nor the Louisiana congressional delegation protested such a clear conflict of interest.
All was quiet even while Steve Ellis (Taxpayers for Common Sense) and Scott Faber (Environmental Defense) howled in protest. They wanted “to see some sort of independent federally authorized commission look into the levee breaches, in addition to the [Army] Corps.”103 And, with 500,000 families displaced from their support base (family, neighborhood, and place of worship), citizens could not collectively recognize the travesty or do anything to stop it.104 They were literally consumed with worrying over life’s most basic things.
Chapter
On the morning of Friday, October 28, I awoke feeling better than I had in eight weeks. I was going to spend the morning and early afternoon doing something I loved: playing tennis. The familiarity of a tennis court was highly welcome in this new world, post the 2005 flood. All tennis courts are basically the same; in fact, they are all built facing the same direction relative to the sun, a perfect touchstone to normalcy.
This was alumni weekend at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. One of the planned activities for the alumni was a mixed-doubles tennis tournament. A few days earlier, the planners realized that they were short one female player. One of the planners knew me and remembered that I was always on the prowl, looking for a tennis match to play. She invited me, and I promptly accepted.
The day was glorious with temperatures in the sixties. After the initial introductions, the conversation gradually shifted to my being an evacuee, and I launched into my researched but short script on why New Orleans flooded. The levee failures were due to poor design and construction by the Army Corps. I closed by saying that, had the levees been properly built, there would have been little more than some lost shingles and soggy carpets.
What happened next changed my life more than the 2005 flood alone could have.
My male tennis partner, along with the male tennis player on the opposite team, became instantly angry. They told me that there was nothing wrong with the levees and that the hurricane was a huge storm. They went on to say that New Orleans was a “city below sea level,” and we should not expect any special help.
At first, I said nothing because I was shocked. I had grown accustomed to being treated as a bit of a nuisance in Lafayette due to the sheer number of evacuees who had temporarily relocated there. Traffic was snarled at all hours of the day, grocery stores routinely ran out of food, gas station lines were long, and so on. Until that moment, I had felt tolerated, but I had never felt unwelcome. And I certainly had never been told that I, and evacuees like me, deserved our misfortune. Shaking with anger, I walked to my tennis bag and pulled out my car keys. I walked back to the two men who had moments before berated me and my fellow New Orleanians.
I held up my car keys and said, “I am a victim. If you don’t apologize right now, I will leave.”
Had I left—as I was obviously prepared to do—I would have caused a serious disruption to the tournament.
“I’m sorry!” my partner said quickly, but the deed was done. My eyes were now wide open to the misinformation, and therefore the impossibly large amount of resentment toward survivors of the 2005 flood. These two people, both alumni of this institute of higher learning, lived just hours away from New Orleans. If they had their facts so wrong, imagine how confused people must be if they lived in New England or Chicago or California? I suspected that these two people were not alone in their opinions. Thinking back to the way the folks in Lafayette appeared to tolerate us, I could now see that there might be a similar feeling lurking just beneath the surface.
My tennis partner had apologized, which required me to stay and play the tournament. To my partner’s credit, he was on much better behavior after that. But all day long, my mind spun with the revelation that 80 percent of New Orleans residents lost everything—or almost everything—and they were being blamed for it. They were also considered stupid for living there and undeserving of help. Something had to be done!
***
The next morning (Saturday, October 29), I cleared my head by leading an invigorating group-exercise class at City Club. Even then, physical exercise always had a glorious ability to turn big problems into smaller ones. Problems didn’t disappear completely, but they always seemed smaller after exercise.
After the class, I drove home in the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic in the overcrowded city and found Steve soaking up to his chin in the bathtub after a grueling tennis match. I told him I wanted to join others in an effort to show the nation that New Orleans residents had been unjustly thrown under the bus. I couldn’t bear to sit idle, knowing that, behind all the talk of wind and water, the Army Corps was hiding. I believed that there had to be other people who had already drawn the same conclusion. How could I possibly be alone? I started making phone calls and sending emails.
After looking for three solid days, I came up empty handed. There was no one doing the work that I was burning to do: to right the misinformation and to bust the myths.
“Well, then, I will just have to lead the effort myself!” I said aloud in the empty kitchen. “All I need is a spokesperson.”
I thought perhaps I could find a famous celebrity who was born in New Orleans and would be interested in helping me. I attempted to reach Ellen DeGeneres, who was born in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie and found out how difficult it can be to get in touch with a celebrity, especially a television star.
I began to understand that, if I wanted to lead an organization devoted to bringing the vetted facts to every household in America, I could not wait to find a celebrity spokesperson.
Stanford and I discussed this that night over a supper of stewed hen, rice, and gravy. I explained to Stanford that there was no time to find a spokesperson.
“I will just have to be the spokesperson myself until I get a celebrity,” I told him.
We talked about how we would create an organization to explain the real reason that New Orleans flooded so badly. We needed a name, a mission, and goals. Stanford said that, if I would work on that portion of the project, then he would design and create a website. We decided that we should use the word “levee” since that was primarily where the confusion about the flooding lay.
While I scraped the dishes and loaded the dishwasher, Stanford did an online search for any URLs that contained the word “levee.” A true testament that levee breaches were unheard of before August 29, 2005, is the fact that so many URLs containing the word “levee” were not yet taken! Levees and levee breaches were not yet part of commonly used language. On that cold, clear, starry night in early November 2005, we could have almost any URL we wanted.
We kept things simple. We chose “Levees.org” for our URL. The name of the organization would be the same as the website—something that turned out to be effective in an increasingly digital world.
***
The Berkeley team had a budget of less than $250,000.105 In contrast, the IPET (Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force) budget was in excess of twenty-five million dollars.106 But since funding for both was federally sourced, the Army Corps had earlier agreed to cross-share field data and lab results. So Dr. Seed formally reached out to Dr. Mlakar, the designated