Gustav's Lessons for New Orleans

Let's start with the good news: Hurricane Gustav was a much ballyhooed bust. It arrived in Louisiana as a relatively mild Category 2 storm, not the Category 4 nightmare forecasters had feared, and it missed New Orleans. The fatal failures of Hurricane Katrina were not repeated: levees and flood walls didn't collapse, pumps didn't break down, and most residents fled the coast before Gustav's landfall. There was much better preparation and cooperation, much less finger-pointing and obfuscating. And for all the TV footage of downed power lines and uprooted trees and windblown reporters, there were just a few reported deaths, and probably just a few billion dollars in damages.

But this is no time to declare victory. The evacuation of 2 million residents was less a triumph of coordination than a reaction to disaster; nothing says "Get out of Dodge" like the fresh memory of a city under water. It's even more jarring to watch Army Corps of Engineers officials hailing their hurricane defenses just three years after their tragic errors and warped priorities drowned New Orleans. The sad truth is that the Big Easy--while slightly less vulnerable than it was before Katrina--is still extremely vulnerable. And eventually the region will face the Big One, a storm far larger than Gustav or Katrina. "We got lucky this time," says law professor Mark Davis, director of Tulane's Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy. "I like being lucky. But at some point we have to get smart."

The brunt of the storm passed directly over the coast's best-preserved barrier island, Grand Isle, which sapped its power; Gustav also seems to have passed over another speed bump in the form of a rare swath of healthy marshes. "It's really incredible; a slight variation of the track either way could have meant six more feet of storm surge," says Louisiana State University coastal scientist Robert Twilley, who studied Gustav's track. "I hope nobody gets a false sense of security." The barrier islands that once protected New Orleans have eroded, and most of the city's nearby marshes are gone. Every hour, Louisiana loses more than a football field's worth of the wetlands that once provided natural hurricane protection. The lesson of Gustav, in other words, is that the lessons of Katrina still apply. "Coastal restoration is one of those things politicians say, like 'I owe it all to my lovely wife,'" says Tulane law professor Oliver Houck, who has been warning about land losses for decades. "Meanwhile, we keep building up the coast, no matter how many times we get hit in the chin. At some point the American public is going to stop paying for chin surgery."

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