There Will Be Flood
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A while back, I went down to southern lousianner just a few minutes drive from the gulf coast to meet up with a guy named, when do curl hoddy alex?

Y okay, where? Where's home again?

Send new mexico.

yeah. Ah.

so what wetter down here.

he is that opposite. Okay, our land over. He was brought here about water.

That's how where IT is. Windows, in his mid seventies, got a shock of White hair and twinkly Green eyes. He was born and raised here in cain country, work up in a french speaking household of shrimp Fishermen and oil rig workers and hearing talk. It's clear how proud is to be from this place.

You know, the midwest is the nation's bread basket. South luzon is a seafood PLA.

arguably more delicious .

than a bread basket. You don't hear people traveling to a milani for the, for the tremendous view. Sorry.

my rocky. But delicious as IT is when they are explains, this part of the country is also in the middle of this kind of slow moving existence entity crisis of biblical proportions, because of where he sits on the edge of the ocean, when the night are standing on the spine of a massive grasses ridge line, a kind of fortress while dividing the land from the water. On one side we can see little houses in neat roads. There are gunb o restaurants and checks by the side of the road, selling fresh rim.

You looked at a life, and you see a regular town streets, you know, pretty typical trees, but you think that the right, the landscape, is mostly water.

On the other side, open water stretches to the horizon. It's speckled with little thoughts of land and marsh, a few far off oil tanks, when to tells me it's a watery no mans land in a war between the open ocean and the people who live on luiz an as southern coast because this part of the country, he says, was formed over the course of thousands of years by section Carried here on the mississippi river.

But men made engineering over the last century has changed the river so much that sediment isn't building up anymore. And southern museum a is actually sinking back into the gulf. And Wendy says that is putting the people who live here closer and closer to the front lines of hurricanes.

The big pictures that the land is thinking and open water from the gulf keeps increasing. So there's less to slow down in your wave out.

Now the reason I came to visit window is because he spent almost his entire professional life over forty years working with the federal government to build the thing we are standing on, to build a system of levies. A last line of defense against those hurricane force waves were standing on a kind of like, grassi know here.

That's what I is, is just like a ridge, but it's an artifical ranga was made by man. A typical .

levy is a very intentionally constructed pile of dirt covered in grass or gravel that holds the water out when those levy, as it's come to be known in these parts, is basically a giant ring, forty eight miles long, protecting this community of over ten thousand people. Now, alley can seem like a deceptively simple piece of technology, but when that explains that, building and maintaining them in the right way is essential. For decades, wendel headed up a local government agency he worked hand in hand with the federal government in order to build this levy to very specific standards, because if waves spill over to the top, they can erode the levy from behind. If wild hogs root around them, they can create places for the waters to break through.

I mean, every day the year, I think about what could cause a problem for this lovely everything from a having orman dealers tic holes in IT to people riding too many horses or having cows on IT h anything that takes away the resilience that they live IT. We got to stop.

The resilience of the levy is really at the heart of this story. After hurricane Katrina hit lousianner nearly two decades ago, IT caused a massive rethinking of how these levy systems should be built. And in the wake of that window, decided to take a gamble, a gamble that put him at odds with his partners in the federal government. He decided that the best thing he could do to protect his community was to go rogue.

The way I looked at IT is that, man, i'm not GTA sit on my hands with money in the bank. We don't want money in the bank. We want money on the bank. Okay, because you flag from a hurricane, your cities is destroy IT.

Well, i'm welcome to plan the money. I like xy work with goi.

and I marry child a couple decks ago. When do curl found himself at a in the road? On one path, he could stay within the framework the federal government had laid out to build these hurricane defenses, and on the other, he could create his own path, building his levies as high as possible, as fast as possible, in a race against larger and larger storms. And he knew his decision could mean life or death for over ten thousand people.

Today on the show, what the story of windows levy can teach us about, how the federal government calculates and manages the risk of natural disasters, and how those calculations can look a lot different to the people staring straight into the eye of the storm.

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When do kol was fresh out of college back in the late seventies when he first started thinking about what kinds of fortifications they might take to protect south lefuel perish the place .

he calls home growing up in viana, the specter of hurricanes, hungover everything over the last century and a half, whole towns here have been designated and ultimately abandoned. After flooding from hurricane windows, own great grandparents had to resettle. After a hurricane in eighteen ninety three flooded their town and killed half the population.

So when he heard about a job leading the south leftie levy district, if I look a way to serve the place that he left, the levy district was this local office, with a Mandate to help the federal government, built hurray e protection around the community.

When I took job as a look, this is life in that for people. I had to tell myself from the beginning, people can die. You want to make sure you do the best job possible.

And one of the first things when they ve learned about the job was that had entailed a close partnership with the part of the federal government that builds these levy systems, the army core of engineers.

The army core is part of the U. S. military. And IT oversees this very specific system, partnering with local communities in order to build the country's defenses against hurricanes. There are hundreds of people like wendel all around the country working to build not only levies, but also flood walls and pump stations, all sorts of infrastructure meant to mitigate natural disasters.

To hear the story of how this branch of the military got put in charge of the nation's flood protection, we caught up heat Jones. He's the emergency manager for the course new orleans district. And apparently something of the star was then .

heat can hear me now.

Okay.

it's great that .

are too detail.

Hz says the army core engineers was founded to help build forts during the revolutionary war.

Their logo was actually a little castle.

yes. And because for a long time the core trained the majority of the country's engineers by the late eighteen hundreds, they were tasked with helping to clear and tame the mississippi river.

Their job was to help bring all the products of america's burgeoning bread basket down to the port of new lands and out to the rest of the world. And by the late one, nine hundred and twenty years, the core was also drafted into building systems to fight floods.

The one thousand nine hundred and twenty and seven flood was the big driver for the flight protection on a mission ppi river.

The great mississippi flood killed hundreds of people and caused an estimated billion dollars in damage. Nearly a third of the entire federal budget at the time, IT became clear that some sort of national system is needed to try to prevent these disasters. So congress put the army core in charge of preventing floods along the mississippi.

That project, through a series of diversions and levies, set us up in in a flood control business and have been building those projects ever since then.

By the mid thousand and sixty, a series of devastating hurricanes pushed congress to expand the army course Mandate to include hurray e flood protection. And that is how we got the system that window was walking into when he first took the job.

And here is how the system is set up. If a local community like south of fush finds itself facing repeated flooding, they can lobby congress to have the core come in and solve IT, and then the core has to decide, what does that make economic sense to protect this community? Harsh, but building flat infrastructure can get really expensive. And communities around the country are competing for these resources.

So they've come up with this system that basically set out to answer this one fundamental question, will IT cost the federal government more to try to prevent flooding in the specific area? Or will IT cost more to try to deal with the damages after the fact?

Because when a major disaster strikes, some huge portion of the costs will fall to the federal government. That could be in the form of temporary housing or food for people who've been displaced, or money to repair. Basic infrastructure like the power of grid or drinking water supply or IT could come in the form of federal flight insurance, which often pays out over a billion dollars in claims a year.

So what the army has to figure out first is how much the damages in this particular area would be if they were hit by a major storm.

They do this, he'd explained, by conducting a sort of economic senses, they'll take a place like windows, community and south fish and telling up the number of structures first, all the homes.

but it's not just houses that are flooding. I mean, if there are a oil refineries in the area of their seafood production happening or agriculture, you know, like in case of self flush, is a lot of sugar cane fields out there.

The court then compares the estimated cost of repairing damages to houses and businesses against the cost of a sleep of potential engineering solutions.

If it's a rural area with low population density, they might adjust, elevating individual buildings.

We say, hey, that houses not safe up to this level and we will go raise IT on pilots essentially. So you're .

basically putting the houses on stilts.

yes. But if the value of homes and businesses is high enough, they may propose building something bigger, like a series of levies.

And at the end of all of this, if the army court determines that the costs of one of those solutions would generate a positive return on investment, meaning if the cost of prevention would be less than the cost of repairs and response, they will often propose that solution to congress.

And that is exactly what happened to windows community in south of fush. Back in the in one thousand and sixties, the army core determined that IT would be worth the estimated initial five point five million dollars in federal investment to build a system of levees around this part of south asiana.

Congress approved the plan. They appropriated the funds by them. In seventies, ground was broken on the levees. And in one thousand hundred and eighty, window curl accepted the job as general manager of the levy district, where he immediately threw himself into learning as much as he could.

If if you read the then through the chinese general, what to me? Everything about everything, football, okay. And so you learn about the enemies. So I wonder everything about her inst, and everything about lobbies and everything about the engineering that goes to IT.

Now, when those job, as the head of the levy district, was to partner with the army core to build this massive erring of levees around his community, he had to raise funds every year to keep construction going. Because the way the system was designed, local organizations like his were responsible for paying around thirty percent of the cost of any army core project in order for the feds to pick up the rest.

So when do lobby the state legislature for funds to convince big lang owners who donate their land? And occasionally he had to appropriate private property in the name of the public. Good people were not always happy. He was sued by angry landon wners and companies.

Yeah, been here. I've been threatened in a couple of times and that are too bad. But one time I knew this, I was totally stable and threat that concern a little .

bit but window power through this incremental, bureaucratic and occasionally threatened process. And by the early two thousands, nearly three decades after breaking ground, thanks to window in the army core, there was now a dirt forges around his community, reaching as high as dirty .

beat a man. A few years later, a storm hit the gulf coast that changed the way almost everybody had been thinking about the levy system. We are talking, of course, about hurricane Katrina.

New orleans is called the big bowl. When Katrina breached the levees that held the water back, the ball was swamped. The scene is nothing short of apocalyptic. c. Eighty percent of new orleans, including much of downtown, is underwater ers now lowering huge sandbags .

to start repair ring. One of the levy breaks that caused all.

I mean, I love yours. I remember driving into the city at night with no lights, did not have any lights, and then just drive on, I mean, no people, uh, before people could start coming back. IT tears IT you all.

The failure of the new orlandi levy system took the country by surprise, and the army core took a lot of the blame for having allowed IT to happen.

In the aftermath, the army court decided to do a major rehang of all their levy construction requirements, focused on beef ing up their structural integrity.

And so the court just wanted to make sure everything was the but the letter that the cities and do IT our standards or nothing at all, because that had happened.

So Katrina, about kind of levy failures that happened during Katrina.

change the way the core of us worked.

The court changed their specifications for healthy k. The levis had to be windows, says they started requiring heavy and more expensive place that often had to be transported from further away.

And for local levy districts like windows, those changes meant that building new editions to their levies will cost way more money.

Dirt is still cheap, but when you move twenty and thirty miles against very .

expensive hurricane katina pushed vendors priorities in a different direction. Places in mississippi had seen storm search as high as twenty eight feet, way higher than any point in his levy system. So while the army core was focused on structural integrity, windows main concern was with elevation. He became sort of obsessed, even developed a personal model.

Elevation is a salvation to innovation.

Elevation is the salvation to innovation. In other words, wendel filton almost religious conviction that he needed to build as high as he could as quickly as possible. Because every year they weren't adding height to the levy. They were taking on more and more risk.

And here, window faced a choice. He knew that he could continue his partnership with the army court. The court did want their levies built higher as part of their design rahall.

But when will also knew all of the red heep that wouldn't tell he'd have to ask for a study, wait at least three years? And even if congress approved the funding, given the course new standards, IT might just be too expensive when .

I get to spend armour in the bank and fix one problem and spend so much money, we can do our other problems. You know, it's just calculated with the whole time .

for window going through the army core might ultimately lead to a studio levy, but IT would be slow and costly. And he knew every year that he wasn't adding height to the levy, was leaving his community vulnerable. IT can mean the difference between surviving the next major storm or not.

So window cooked up a second option, a way to start adding elevation faster and cheaper. South of fush levy district could build the levees, hire themselves using the old standards. They could build their own elevation for their own salvation and avoid the army course red tape in high costs.

Window brought the idea before his colleagues at the levy district, they agreed.

But window faced a big obstacle right out of the starting game. Without the army course backing, he would no longer have access to those sweet, sweet federal. So he needed to figure a way to fund all that new construction. And the strategy that he came up with was kind of controversial. He wanted to convince the citizens of south latish to pass a new one percent sales tax in a place, he says, where people do not generally like a new taxes.

So when you went on the offensive, cording, the local press giving talks at libraries in town halls and making T, V ads impLoring the citizens of south of food to help him protect them, they were facing a potentially big local flooding event. Here, though he says the tone of the ads was anything but sensational, IT was more P, B, S.

documentary than need you help to pass this ick tax for today and for a chance of a great .

future for for the levy tax. Because I have to see any amount of flood water in my home.

No way. No shiny buttons or a big sales pitch.

No fireworks.

none at all. Because that was out about getting attention is about just getting the facts across. Please go to the poles and support you have a district. We definitely controlling our own destiny with this tax. Yes, yes, for your protection.

And when I finally came to the day of the vote, when dos no nonsense approach appeared to have done its job, when the tally came in, the new tax I passed by eighty two percent. And with that new funding, plus some money from the state window, had enough financial fuel to begin elevating the levy.

Now, window says he and his colleagues did reach out to the court to try to get permits for their new levy plan. He knew that there could be big consequences if the court didn't approve the project as part of the federal government. They just had much more legal and financial firepower.

They are part of the army.

That's i'm seeing a big gun in us. okay? I'm not a fool. I mean, look like IT. I may act like IT not but after a .

couple of years without approval from the core, when he says he told his engineers to ask for IT one more time .

if they don't give IT start building and IT, we'll see if they stop us. They stop us if they don't get more protection.

when do did not get approval. And in the late two thousands, he, his team started building their levies higher. Anyway, the army court was not exactly happy with this. They wanted to make sure this piece of federal infrastructure was working as IT should the integrity of the whole system depends on IT. They worried that windows obsession with elevation might make his levis vulnerable to toppling over. They told them that if he kept building higher without permission from the core, they would have to remove his levy system from a program that covers the cost of repairs if they're damaged by hurricanes. At one point, they sent a season desist letter.

Despite this pressure from the federal government window kept building, he knew he could mean his levy district would have to pay millions of dollars if the levees were significantly damaged, but went, have had that different calculation. He saw his job as doing everything he could to prevent his community from getting washed away. So he says they could worry about repair costs later.

And then fema, the federal emergency management agency, announced they would be desertifying the south of fusion levy district. That meant that flood insurance premiums ms. Throughout the community could rise.

So in addition to the taxes that the citizens of south of fish were paying to build and maintain the levy, some were taking on even more of the costs. Because of windows decision to go rope. Some people were angry. One person even put up a billboard by the side of a busy road, thanked window for, quote, screwing the levy. And the people .

still window kept building like he was in a race against time.

IT is a risk because every season I got a new hurray e season coming and nobody knows was behind a curtain, you know, is a tiger or lam? You know, you Better act like its a tiger, okay? You have to act like its a tiger by .

the end of twenty twenty, when do in his colleagues had managed to build their levies as higher eighteen feet? In some places, though, there were still this central question hanging over the whole project. Would IT actually hold up under hurricane force pressure? Would elevation really prove to be the salvation to innovation? Or would deviating from the army course regulations turn out to be a disastrous .

gamble after the break? The tiger of a storm that went d'd have been worrying about finally pounces. And we learn whether when those wager paid off S.

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remember when you first caught wind of this storm? That seems like IT might be a big problem up .

in the same days, Katrina's nine, the August k sixteen .

years after hurricane Katrina, in two thousand and twenty one, the storm that window, Carol had been worrying about the reason he and his team had been scrambling to build his levy higher and higher, started gathering strength off the coast .

of lousianner. Tonight, hurray e idea slamming into lousianner as a powerful cat for storm, sending fierce winds up to one hundred fifty miles per hour. And surgeon waters, hr ican. I is still miles away, but this much water this early is not a good sign for the city. As the storm picked up steam and started heading for the coast, wandle did what he often does in the hours before a hurricane, making preparations and checking the TV, hoping to hear the storm wasn't headed to the future parish.

I do this channel changing, waiting to somebody to see some good you working on, please. Somebody see something, you know, that is not going to come here, you know. But my, I got close. That thing just headed. I mean, right for the parish line, IT couldn't tell what was going to happen .

as idea made landfall window and several of his coworkers at the levy district decided to wait out the worst of the storm at the local hospital on the third floor. They actually brought rescue boats along with them in case they needed to make their escape by water.

Winter says they spend hours hunker down, listening to the wind ripping across the hospital roof and wondering whether his levy would be a match for the rising waters.

I mean, you get so this or that, because when the storms heading, it's so dark, you don't knew if it's day, night and almost complete track of day, night, complete track of IT and looking into the darkness, and little tiny pieces of leaves are hitting on the glass, getting ripped. I'll tell the guy that they look, no matter what happens, if we can see, grasp on the ground to more, which means flow waters didn't come in. It's a good, nothing else matters .

at some point that night, window says the winds died down enough for him and his team to get out onto the roads and inspect the levies on the pumps. Tions and the first signs were promising, but IT wasn't until the next day that he was able to actually see Green grass on the ground to see that his levies had managed to keep the flood waters out when .

things come down. I mean, that really hit me that, wow, I mean, you couldn't ask for us to have been more successful. We couldn't have been more lucky. We and handled a worst storm in this. This was pretty much close to the worst that this system can take.

The storm surge had reason, several feet above where wandle's original levy had stood. In some places, the wave seemed to have reached within just a foot of spilling over the mounds, even after new height of eighteen feet. If window hadn't rushed their construction the way he had, he says, it's likely the whole community would have sustained major flooding.

And I guarantee you, if we have listen to the core and then everything that they wanted us to do, i'll love you, would have been four, five feet lower than IT was hurricane ida. And we would lost people's lives.

Window says the magnitude of all this didn't really hit him until a couple weeks after the storm. By that point, people who evacuated had returned and had started picking up the pieces and assessing the damage from all the wind and rain. And as he drove into his neighborhood, he noticed a dozen and resolve. People standing .

around talking, see the crowd. And I just try by then take anything about IT, but they flag me down. I said, whether thank you IT all worked in.

And what they do clapped. They gave you pause. How did to feel to hear .

that unexpected?

He was unexpected, he says. Rendel still gets choked up thinking about this moment, even a few years later.

when you build the project, this be, there are so many people that are involved in in getting the start. So in the club, for me.

it's favorite bond. When you ask folks like heath Jones at the army core of engineers about the story of windows, levy clearly can't exactly sanction what he did.

How do you think about that, that kind of trade off that he made by going rogue in this way?

You know, you can ask me that question, right? Um i'm not sure what the exact motivation for window to do to things but I got imagine funding was of the bigger driving factor why he did the things he did yeah because our standards are not cheap and so with limited resources window head at his disposal, I think he went did what he thought was right.

And in turn we had to do what the law requires us to do and where I could be on to hold for a system that would modify that was not done to our standards. At the end of day, we just got our member. You know, there's hundreds of thousands of people that live behind these risk production systems that we build.

The army course risk analysis, heat says, just has to keep this much bigger picture in mind. There are hundreds of landers working in their system, and the best way to fulfill their Mandate of protecting lives and property is to make sure they had here to the best of their ability to the designs the core engineers have determined to be the safest, at least likely to fail.

he says. That doesn't mean that windows levy didn't do its job. Unlike several neighbor communities, the structures with in winter levy were mostly spared from major flooding during hurricane do, and no lives were lost, which is not a bad outcome. And he says there's a good chance this levy will get back into the army core system.

We would absolutely welcome self of who strive district back into the program if they do the work that was originally wired to get those parameters and make sure that they are up .

to our standards. okay. So windows levy has not been permanently x communicated from the army core engineers system absolutely as a little not when .

those levy districts and the army core may have been at odds about how exactly to build the levy higher. But they're still fighting a common enemy and no one from either side has lost side of that.

As for when do karol himself, he is retired now. Though he still visits the levy from time to time, he still processes the need to build higher, still, believes that elevation is the salvation to innovation, but he is clearly that everything he and the army core have done is fundamentally a temporary fix to a problem that only seems likely to get worse as southern lusia a continues sinking back into the gulf and is bigger, more powerful storms come. Sure.

not stopping everything. It's minimizing the supply and the loss of probe minimizing. You don't control god.

God, you know, our life is at ninety feet or whatever he is. God wants to throw twenty three feet at us. He does IT okay. You don't control that all you can choose like you, you afford to build. And how well can you build IT and do the best you can with that what .

the resources you have?

Yeah that's really that the whole game.

This episode was produced by ama pieces and edited by Justine IT was factor by sera what as an engineer by gilly moon, alex gold, mark is our executive producer.

special things to Ricky boy, yet josh haw and Rachel road and a huge shot out to journalist kt, fourteen, who wrote an excEllent piece about window, Carol and the guardian, where we first learned about this story. I'm likely hord.

what's gossip and I marry child. This isn't P. R. Thanks for listening.

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