Katrina Casablanca in California

I’m shocked, just shocked, that there’s politics in politics!

Today’s editorial in the Washington Examiner, “Big Government Failure is Katrina’s Lesson,” points out the obvious:

Katrina was essentially a man-made disaster thanks to big, bureaucratic, distant, wasteful and ponderously slow government.

California, today, offers the lesson again, adding in, as in New Orleans, corrupt and incompetent politicians’ influence on bad planning. Remember this when California’s burgeoning Central Valley is the next Katrina man-made, politically-blessed disaster.

That’s how government usually is. Competing interests, including the venal, are usually blended into compromises that may promise to get by for now but often lead to future shortcomings. That isn’t to say that better can’t be done. It is to say that more public involvement in getting it more correct up front is needed, which requires more transparency by and into government, or in standing against wrongheaded bills to begin with before they lead to more predictable disasters.

During Katrina, several of my posts discussed a parallel disaster to Katrina coming in California’s Central Valley, from collapsing old levees. For example, here, I quoted from Jeffrey Mount, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and a member of the State Reclamation Board, and commented about the economic relocation and population pressures in the Central Valley to rampantly develop. Development and housing is needed, but must not be irresponsibly behind weak levees.:

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.

The state Senate’s leader of Sacramento’s heavily liberal Democrat legislature unceremoniously dumped a collection of bills to put teeth and responsibility into levee protection and responsible development nearby. A $500,000 donation to his political action fund was promptly received from the state’s Builders Association, to promote public financing of levee repairs and a myriad of other state infrastructure. Builders, in effect, want state taxpayers to subsidize developments in flood plains. This blatant and grossly irresponsible “coincidence” has led much negative comment, the Tri-Valley Herald reporting “Perata reconsiders bills amid bad press.”

The Sacramento Bee’s editorial today is scathing and unsparing of blame, “Flood tide of inaction.”

The political intrigue is about as thick as bayou muck.

About eight bills are in play, including ones to improve flood mapping, make flood risks a part of a city's general plan and finance upgrades for Delta levees. These are all fine measures, but they don't deal with the reality that cities and counties are building new homes in basins that lack adequate levee protection, with no plan for improvements.

Assembly Bill 1899, by Lois Wolk of Davis, would attack this syndrome by requiring local governments to demonstrate safety before putting more families in floodplains. For a while it appeared Perata and other key senators supported it. Then Perata mysteriously shelved Wolk's bill and others, claiming he didn't want the governor to "cherry-pick" and veto certain bills. Then we found out that the California Building Industry Association -- the major opponent to Wolk's bill -- had provided Perata's bond campaign committee with a $500,000 donation.

Stung by the bad publicity, Perata held a meeting with lawmakers Monday night. The meeting was a farce. Wolk didn't get a chance to present possible amendments to her bill. Instead, Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden, dominated the session, claiming her bill would hurt his Stockton district.

Machado is often a sage voice on water and corrections policy, but he has acted like a petulant child in dealing with recent flood bills. He voted for AB 1899 in committee, but then kept coming up with more and more objections. If Machado has a better approach for ensuring that development doesn't outpace levee upgrades, we would like to hear it. He had months to articulate it, but didn't. His lack of action speaks volumes….

Schwarzenegger helped create this mess by failing to engage early and come up with alternative flood proposals. Perata may end up repeating this mistake, which does not bode well for the $4 billion flood control bond the two politicians have placed on the November ballot.

Will voters agree to put $4 billion of their money into a bond championed by two leaders who have failed so miserably on flood legislation? Possibly not. That means that 2006 could a lost cause for levees, one year after Katrina.

UPDATE: Several readers wrote that some of the critical levees weren’t topped but collapsed from inadequate engineering and construction. Correct. The quoted comments are from a year ago, regarding topping, before facts emerged. Today’s Investor’s Business Daily points out more facts that emerged, despite inadequate media engineering and construction of the “news.”

Instead, the sea surged, the levees broke and a big part of the city was washed away. The inadequate levees had been in place for decades — a failure, to be sure, but one that spanned many years and multiple presidents, mayors, governors and FEMA leaders.
In short, this was an avoidable tragedy. We should learn from it and fix problems. That might not be easy, though, since many in the media treat Katrina not as a chance to improve a vital part of our homeland security, but as another chance to score debating points against the Bush-led GOP in midterm elections.