'Path of Destruction' details how politics trumped science, safety

 No comments  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

BY CAROLYN JOHNSEN / For the Lincoln Journal Star

 (“Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms” by  John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, Little, Brown and Company, 384 pages, $25.99). The 2006 hurricane season left the U.S. Gulf Coast unscathed, although many had feared a repeat of the destructive 2005 season.

Instead, one-year commemorations of Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed one of the world’s great cities, dominated the news at the end of 2006.

 With tens of thousands of New Orleans residents displaced, and the city still struggling to survive, Americans won’t soon forget the catastrophe. It revealed profound failures at every level of government.

[+]Enlarge

In “Path of Destruction,” Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid offer a thoughtful and comprehensive story of the Katrina disaster.

The two reporters are part of the team at the New Orleans Times-Picayune whose coverage of Katrina won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for public service and breaking-news reporting.

 But unlike reporters for big national media outlets, who jetted or drove to the city only after disaster struck, Schleifstein and McQuaid had covered the threat for years.

 Their prize-winning 2002 series, “Washing Away,” predicted what would happen if a big hurricane hit New Orleans: The lack of a solid emergency evacuation plan would put thousands of residents at risk. The levees would break. It was only a matter of time, and the city could be destroyed. In fact, Schleifstein lost his home to Katrina’s floods.

To “Path of Destruction,” the authors bring their considerable knowledge of the history, science, politics and culture of the Mississippi Delta. McQuaid and Schleifstein identify the politicians, engineers and business people whose decades of inept management of the delta’s hydrology preceded the bungled emergency efforts that characterized the Katrina disaster and led directly to the suffering of thousands.

In muscular, compelling prose, the authors provide fascinating details of how politics and patronage affected decisions that should have been based only on science and safety. The levees, for example, were “an enormous, shared illusion of safety, signed off on by the highest authorities.” For decades, government officials at the federal, state and local levels had dithered over the best way to protect the city and control costs at the same time: “The flow of water was only one variable. The flow of money was another.”

“Path of Destruction” is a page-turner, deftly recreating the suspense felt by meteorologists, who watched Katrina develop in the Atlantic, and describing the terror of victims, who climbed to rooftops or crowded into the Superdome to escape the flood. The heroism and the tragedy are told in human terms: A child slips from her grandfather’s grasp in the flood, nursing home residents drown in their rooms, and a newspaper photographer faces the moral dilemma of doing his job or saving a family in peril.

McQuaid and Schleifstein are unafraid to use terms like “stupidity” and “chaos” in describing the official response to Katrina and in chronicling the string of engineering mistakes that left the city vulnerable. In particular, the authors show how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ attempts to re-engineer the delta’s complex mix of river, wetlands and bayous actually made New Orleans more vulnerable to big storms.

The authors also explore the evidence that has led world climate experts to conclude that more such catastrophes may be on the way. Although the intensity and number of hurricanes are increasing, scientists and these reporters are cautious about blaming the trend on global warming. But one fact is not disputed: The warming climate is raising ocean levels, imperiling coastal cities around the world and making them more vulnerable to storms like Katrina.

The authors conclude:“If another storm hit, washed away for good, this one-grand city of spice and jazz and good times and hard work would vanish beneath the sea, the first but possibly not the last American Atlantis. And those who will look back on it, and on other cities that meet a similar fate, will scratch their heads and wonder why we let it happen.”

“Path of Destruction” is one of several recent, noteworthy publications reporting on the science and consequences of climate change. Others include “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” by the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Weather Makers” by Tim Flannery, and the damning new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which can be found at http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu.

Carolyn Johnsen teaches science writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications.