In response to Mark’s post yesterday about the centrality of levee failure to the fate of New Orleans, we get Dilan Esper, a frequent and well rated contributor to the TPM Café conversation, calling Mark’s insistence that it was a man-made catastrophe a piece of “unmitigated crap.” Dilan has proven over time to be both reasonable and well-informed, and yet still holds this position. This is a microcosm of the paralysis that has kept the faucet that dispenses the money for the city’s recovery firmly in the off position. See, at last count, the number of houses in New Orleans that have been rebuilt with the aid of federal funds is…zero. Happy anniversary!

Let’s take this line by line as an exercise.

Mark Moseley wrote:

"That's why this blog is named 'After the Levees', not 'After the Storm'. The catastrophe in New Orleans was man-made"

To which Dilan responded:

I am starting to hear these sorts of talking points with more and more frequency, and it's getting distressing. 99 percent of the time, it's conservatives who believe their own BS, but on this one, liberals seem to be getting into the myth-making game.

I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. This message we’ve been trying so hard to get out there is now perceived as a “talking point”? I didn’t think it was being talked about nearly enough to achieve “myth” status. Good news! I am now inspired to redouble my efforts to get this talking point out there.

Yes, I know, the levees were poorly designed and did fail. But the catastrophe in New Orleans had a lot of causes, and the bad levees were only one.

Well, they were in fact the proximate cause. The stress the storm surge put on them was well below their design tolerances. And yet they failed and flooded most of the city. Let’s say my house is on a hill susceptible to erosion and you're hired to build me a retaining wall to solidify the area. Then one day it rains and that retaining wall falls apart and the ground collapses under my house. You could point to the soil quality and rainfall and numerous other causes, but those would look like lame excuses, like a pathetic attempt to avoid taking responsibility for your own work. And it would look that way because it would be that way. That’s what America is doing to New Orleans.

That city is in a dangerous place. The entire Gulf Coast is susceptible to major hurricanes. New Orleans has gotten whacked before; so has Galveston, so has Pensacola.

You mean every city on the East Coast as well, don’t you? As well as the entire West Coast for earthquakes? The world is a dangerous place. New Orleans, if the wetlands were not being destroyed, is not even a coastal city, and is thus in less “hurricane danger” than much of the coast.

New Orleans is also sitting right next to a river that is threatening to change course and drain through the Atchafalaya swamp instead. New Orleans also contains lots of neighborhoods that are well below the level of the river and thus susceptible to flooding with or without a levee break.

You’re discussing probabilities when we’re talking about facts. Regardless of what bad things could happen to New Orleans in the future, those things did not happen in 2005. What happened was a “catastrophic failure” by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, followed by a tragically inept response by the FEMA wing of the Department of Homer Simpson.

It has taken tremendous feats of engineering to even make New Orleans relatively safe to live in, and if it ever faces a direct hit from a stronger storm than Katrina (a distinct possibility, thanks to all the CO2 we put in the atmosphere), all bets are off, no matter how high the levees are.

This sounds wonderfully apocalyptic, but the last bit is not true. The feats of engineering have indeed been tremendous, and they were implemented because New Orleans has always been a tremendously profitable city, and it has paid back the investment a hundred fold. And the various plans that have been proposed for the last thirty years by Louisiana geologists and other experts would, had they been implemented, make New Orleans a very low risk city indeed. And they can still be done using only our fair share of the oil revenues.

There seems to be a great desire of many people to live in denial about these facts.

I’m not sure which facts are being denied here. Of course if a cat5 storm hits any city, it’s going to look like Mississippi does now. Now that’s hurricane/surge damage. Of course, if Louisiana recovers its wetlands, New Orleans couldn't be it be a cat5 because it would be too far from the coast.

Note that this does not deny the truthfulness of some of the left-narratives. It is quite true that racial prejudice has tainted the rebuilding process. It is quite true that the levees weren't as strong as they should have been. And it is, of course, tragically true that the current presidential administration is playing all sorts of politics with disaster aid and rebuilding programs. Nonetheless, denying the role that Mother Nature played in Katrina is, for lack of a better word, unmitigated crap. The fact is, that is a very dangerous place to put a city.

That is not a fact at all. And there is no “putting” the city there, that is where the city needed to be for the USA to become an economic power. And that is where it has now stood for hundreds of years. It's been made more dangerous because the land has vanished around it, but that was done by us and can be reversed by us.

And the fact that there is one there that has been somewhat depopulated raises very difficult questions, questions that, frankly, I am not sure that our political process is capable of answering. It is so easy to fit the issues into our preexisting political narratives, either here on the left about poor people and blacks getting the shaft, or on the right about corrupt urban governments and the purported inability of persons of color to run cities.

Actually, you’ve left out the narrative that I’m most committed to opposing. It’s the individualist consumer narrative. It’s acting as though what’s going on in Louisiana has nothing to do with you. So America’s failures led to the destruction of a city and the death of over 1500 of it’s inhabitants, while America’s response led to unspeakable further suffering. Yet you talk about the inhabitants of the city (your fellow citizens) as though they are pieces on a game board to whom you owe nothing, as though you are not part of the country that failed them. Hundreds of thousands of people are currently living and suffering and grieving in the New Orleans area, and their compatriots casually discuss whether we should just kill the whole thing. I wish your point of view was unique, Dilan, so I could write you off as a bad person. But you’re point of view is too typical for that, so it must be some sort of thoroughgoing cultural failing. It is this that I’m trying so desperately to understand.

But at least we can start by admitting that the initial cause of the disaster is Mother Nature. The levees are a mitigation scheme. They were inadequate. But that makes them one cause, not the only cause.

Yes, and if we let the Hoover Dam collapse, the initial cause will be nature. And if we make no effort to control our rivers, the massive flooding will be caused initially by nature. And when the scrapping of something like Project Impact leads to many more deaths in the next earthquake, nature will be the initial cause of that as well. But the proximate cause would in each case the engineering and planning failures that were under human control and enabled the destruction.

Cities are not natural objects to begin with; they are “mitigation schemes” from stem to stern. New Orleans is not particularly special in this respect. The consequences of failure in New Orleans are, as we have seen, particularly dire. But it is not harder to succeed in New Orleans, nor is it more expensive than many other public projects that have been undertaken.

The people of New Orleans are not OK. Half the city is medicated, the children panic if they hear the words "evacuation" or "hurricane", and many are going bankrupt because neither the insurance nor the federal money has come through yet. Don't let anyone tell you different.

And if you are an American reading this, you are a part of it. It's your country that let New Orleans down, and your country that has the obligation to help lift it back up. Don't let anyone tell you different.