With Hurricane Harvey still ravaging Texas, a piece in Politico looks at the continuing problem plaguing America - a failure to take proactive actions to avert damage from hurricanes and rising sea levels. Among the obstacles? Republicans - with a few exceptions - who refuse to admit the reality of climate change and sea level rise; a fossilized Army Corps of Engineers; a pork barrel approach to funding appropriations; and a focus on disaster response rather than averting disasters. Here in Hampton Roads, Virginia, cities like Norfolk are trying to forge onward alone (Miami-Dade County in Florida is doing likewise as is New York City after Hurricane Sandy) and has even hired Dutch consultants to devise ways to deal with sea level rise and the flooding goes with it. Virginia Republicans meanwhile will not use the term sea level rise and instead refer to repetitive flooding, ignore the cause of the flooding. As the piece notes, there are some bright spots, but overall little has been learned since Hurricane Katrina a dozen years ago. Here are highlights:
Washington’s systems for protecting communities against weather disasters haven’t gotten better since that 2005 disaster, and in many ways may be worse. The State of Louisiana wasn't supposed to shoulder the Caminada Headland project itself: Rebuilding the island was originally the job of the Army Corps of Engineers, the 215-year-old entity charged with building and maintaining our country’s ports, harbors, locks, dams, levees and ecosystem restoration projects. Today, the agency is the single most important agency in coastal America's battle against rising seas, at the center of every major water-resources project in the country, either as builder or permitter. But the state of Louisiana, exasperated by federal delays and increasingly worried that the next big storm could just wipe out the port, eventually fronted the money and pumped the sand on its own. Today, despite years and millions of federal dollars poured into studying the Caminada Headland project and neighboring islands slated for restoration, the Corps has yet to push a dime toward construction.
Graves compares his experience with the Corps to that of a “battered ex-spouse”: “I feel like I’ve been lied to, cheated, kicked in the teeth over and over and over again.”
The sclerotic Army Corps of Engineers is the most visible and frustrating symptom of what many officials have come to see as the country’s backwards approach to disaster policy. From the way Congress appropriates money to the specific rebuilding efforts that federal agencies encourage, national policies almost uniformly look backwards, to the last storm, rather than ahead to the next. And the scale of the potential damage has caused agencies to become more risk-averse in ways that can obstruct, rather than help, local communities’ attempts to protect themselves. The Army Corps, for example, requires Louisiana to rebuild a full suite of five islands before it can reclaim any of the money it spent on the one headland—and is currently insisting it will take another half-decade simply to review an innovative wetlands restoration project the state has been working on for more than a decade and views as the linchpin of its coastal efforts. Meanwhile, new design standards inspired by Katrina have made levee projects wildly unaffordable.
As the effects of climate change play out, the risks posed by storms like Katrina and Harvey only stand to get worse. A not-yet-final draft of National Climate Assessment, produced by scientists across 13 federal agencies, predicts that global sea levels will likely rise between half a foot and 1.2 feet by 2050, and between one and four feet by the end of the century. In areas like the Northeast and the Gulf of Mexico, relative sea-level rise will happen much faster, researchers say. Coastal Louisiana is currently losing a football field’s worth of wetlands every 90 minutes, making it a harbinger for the crises that coastal communities around the country are expected to face.
Preparing for the looming disasters will require nimbleness, innovation, a willingness to take calculated risks and, as Louisiana has learned, respect for natural processes—all qualities that have been bred out of the Army Corps, and don’t get much consideration in federal policy. The agency molded itself around the earmark system, catering to the pet projects of individual lawmakers and then drawing them out as long as possible to keep the money flowing. Congress, too, learned to treat the Corps as a pork barrel: though Washington officially did away with earmarks a decade ago, lawmakers remain focused first and foremost on their local projects, pushing legislative language that serves their narrow ends without an eye to the mountain of red tape they are adding to the system as a whole.
And although preventing damage is widely considered to be cheaper than mopping up after the fact, congressional accounting creates incentives to spend money exactly the opposite way: Disaster relief bills are generally considered emergency spending, and thus not counted towards the federal deficit, while proactive investment in planning and protection must be funded through the normal budget cycle, which makes it look like cuttable federal spending at budget time.
Hurricane Katrina provided the real wakeup call, though: Residents saw firsthand that without the wetlands to help absorb their power, winds and waves pounded their communities with ferocious strength. In the wake of the storm, the Louisiana legislature passed major reforms aimed at professionalizing the state’s levee boards and coastal protection efforts. It embraced the concept of “multiple lines of defense”—a modern understanding of interlocking coastal systems, in which barrier islands and marshes play a role along with manmade structures like levees and pumping stations to shield communities from storms.
Today, Louisiana’s approach is seen as a model for states facing looming coastal crises, and its experts regularly host visitors from around the world seeking to learn from its resiliency efforts. Indeed, Louisiana is fostering this reputation, with a $60 million new “water campus” under construction in Baton Rouge, its flagship research center, the Water Institute of the Gulf, to be housed in a sleek, glass-encased building that straddles the levee and floats out over the main channel of the Mississippi River. But all this hard-won expertise has come with a side effect: A growing realization that the federal government—whose funding and know-how have been key to all projects of this scale—was far more of an obstacle than an ally. And the biggest frustration was with the Army Corps.
Hurricane Katrina showed that severe storms could be far harsher than previously thought, so the Corps adopted new mandates for federal levees to be built significantly bigger and stronger—a change that made sense in theory but instantly multiplied the price tag on projects to the point they became effectively impossible. One project, a massive levee system designed to protect highly vulnerable bayou communities and a major oil and gas hub in Terrebonne Parish, was approved by Congress at $887 million in 2007, just weeks before the new standards came out. When the post-Katrina standards were applied to it, the price tag suddenly multiplied nearly twelvefold, to $10.3 billion. . . . . they had virtually no shot of ever seeing it built.
[T]here’s a much bigger problem that the country is facing. And in this sense, the Corps—strangled in red tape as it may be—is no more than a tool of a larger system. Across government, virtually the entire philosophy of disaster relief is to react after disaster strikes rather than help communities and residents to prepare in advance. This leaves Congress funding billions in disaster aid when an investment of millions ahead of time could have warded off the worst. And the problem is only likely to grow as a warmer climate brings more frequent and severe hurricanes, floods and droughts.
The rare Republican who acknowledges the scientific consensus around climate change, Graves does not shrink from the future projections. He knows them first-hand—and sees them as a tool for solidly conservative fiscal planning rather than fanning environmentalist fears. “Statistically, we can prove that we have increased vulnerability. We’re spending more on coastal storms, and some of these areas are being inundated with increased frequency,” he says. “So, call it what you want, there’s an adaptation issue here that needs to be addressed—and it’s more fiscally conservative to step in and be proactive on some of these investments than it is to continue to rebuild after they’ve flooded and continue to be reactive.”
Hurricane Harvey is certain to teach this lesson again, in some form. With the storm expected to wreak billions of dollars in damage, there will likely be another of round of disaster aid, perhaps some more legislation directing the Corps to investigate the problem. But until the system fundamentally changes, it will simply be a waiting game, until the next, even stronger storm hits.
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