Racism in the delta, California's that is?

Among the charges laid against those charged with building levees to protect New Orleans from the disaster of such as Hurricane Katrina is that racism entered into less attention being given than necessary. I addressed these charges in two prior posts at Democracy-Project.com, today and last Friday. Check the links in those posts. Here’s some other useful links for the more real problems: Duane Freese at TechCentral Station, Lori Widmar in 2001 at Risk & Insurance, and the initial planning that the federal Department of Homeland Security had initiated for New Orleans.

Will Dunham reports at Reuters on the 99.5% probability the Army Corps of Engineers depended upon. According to Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: “It’s a combination of doing the engineering, looking at the likelihood of a given storm event, looking at the amount of effort that will be needed to protect the city in an ironclad way, and then making a decision which is based on engineering judgment and the economics of whether it’s worth the cost to the benefit and then striking the right level of protection.” As Strock says: “We figured we had a 200- or 300- year level of protection. That means that an event that we were protecting from might be exceeded every 200 or 300 years. So we had an assurance that 99.5 percent, this would be OK. We, unfortunately, have had that 0.5 percent activity here.”

One can argue that the many, many billions of dollars may have been worthwhile, in retrospect at least, but politicians of all stripes obviously thought there were other priorities of higher probability of need from education and healthcare to defense and security, not to mention home district pork.

The Sacramento Bee, newspaper of California’s capital, has two further enlightening columns today. The Sacramento Bee editorial repeats portions of an editorial from August 1999 about planned upgrades to Folsom Dam to protect California’s delta, and comments on the lack of follow-through and more than quadrupling of projected cost.

Jeffrey Mount, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and a member of the State Reclamation Board, writes in his guest column several good points:
1. “Levees, the principal line of defense in both New Orleans and the Central Valley, were overtopped and breached due to a high flood stage.”
2. “We have knowingly developed flood-prone landscapes….creating spiraling land values and population growth within deep floodplains with ever-escalating demands for more protection.”
3. “We are, and continue to be, victims of self-inflicted engineering hubris….escalated demands for more levees, more pumps and more dams.”
4. “New Orleans and the Central Valley – Sacramento in particular – are wedded to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as our principal partner in flood management….multiple projects that failed to live up to expectations, with significant cost overruns and time delays, and some important surprise findings about overall vulnerability.”
5. “New Orleans and the Central Valley have systematically removed their natural shock absorbers. For New Orleans, the levees have cut off sediment and water that sustained the marshes that historically surrounded the city….We have accomplished the same effect by severing the connection between river channels and their floodplains.”
Mount calls for more planning in California, to head off a catastrophe like New Orleans’. Whether that will happen, or be worthwhile, or followed through upon, remains to be seen.

What can be seen, clearly, particularly clearly if not through race-colored prisms, is that the natural and man-made precursors and causes to flooding have little at all to do with race, unless California’s Central Valley has suddenly become 2/3rds Black instead of filling with White retirees and a long commute from more affordable homes for other Whites (and other ethnic groupings) to coastal jobs.