Reforming the Corp of Engineers

The US Army Corps of Engineers was established in 1779 when nature was seen as the enemy, and--despite the percolation of new ideas through the rest of our society--it has stayed the course in its war against nature ever since. "This nation has a large and powerful adversary," the Corps explained in one of its early promotional films. "We are fighting Mother Nature. . . . It's a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory." As with all wars on nature, this one has gone badly from the start.

More recently—in 1999—the Corps hatched an official prayer in which it thanks the "engineer of all eternity" for "holding the plumb line of the cosmos" and beseeches him to assist it in "making rough places smooth, crooked ways straight and . . . our calculations accurate." But aquatic life evolved in "rough" and "crooked" places--i.e., rivers--and when you convert them to straight gutters you wipe out fish and the ecosystems in which they function. Indeed, no federal, state or private entity has destroyed more fish habitat than the Corps. With bulldozers, dredges, draglines and more than 500 major dams it has degraded or destroyed 30,000 miles of river. It has hacked 11,000 miles of navigation channels through some of the nation's most valuable wetlands, and with 8,500 miles of levees and floodwalls it has cut off rivers from their floodplains and fish from their spawning and nursery habitat. When conservationists first asked the Corps to install fish ladders on its newly completed Bonneville Dam, lowermost impediment to salmon and steelhead migration on the Columbia River, its official response was: "We will not play nursemaid to the fish." That's one pledge it has kept.

What the Corps prays for and what it really wants are two very different things. At every opportunity it brazenly fudges its benefit-cost calculations, going so far as to enter conversion of flood-absorbing marsh to developable real estate in the benefit column. Upon review of its $286 million proposal to deepen the Delaware River's main channel, the Government Accountability Office found that the Corps' benefit-cost analysis "contained or was based on miscalculations, invalid assumptions, and outdated information" and that "the benefits for which there is credible support would be about $13.3 million a year, as compared to the $40.1 million a year claimed [by] the Corps."

In their review of the Corps' Upper Mississippi River Navigation Expansion--a monumental boondoggle that would devastate fish and wildlife by messing up flows and floodplain habitat--both the Army Inspector General and the National Academy of Sciences found that senior Corps officials had manipulated the economic model to justify the project. When Donald Sweeney, the Corps' own Ph.D. economist, demonstrated that his agency's plan to double the length of seven 600-foot locks on the Upper Mississippi would cost $1 billion but produce only $750 million in benefits he was, according to his sworn affidavit, ordered to "ignore" and "alter" data and "arbitrarily reduce" expenses in order "to produce a seemingly favorable benefit-to-cost ratio for immediately extending the length of existing locks" and "to find a way to justify large-scale measures in the near term for the [study], or the Mississippi Valley District office would find an economist who would, and I would be out of my job as technical manager." Sweeney refused and, one week later, was dismissed as leader of the economic study team. When the new team leader, economist Richard Manguno, also found that the lock expansion was not economically justified, he too was ordered to fudge his figures, according to his sworn testimony. Eventually, however, he complied. Such is the Corps' commitment to keeping its "calculations accurate."

Most Corps projects are aimed at controlling floods, but the only flood control that ever worked is wetlands; and the Corps destroys them. Since World War II it has spent $100 billion attempting to stop US rivers from doing their thing, yet during the same period average annual flood damage has steadily climbed to nearly $8 billion. "We harnessed it, straightened it, regulated it, shackled it," bragged the Corps after it fitted the Mississippi with a corset of levees longer, higher and thicker than the Great Wall of China. Then in 1993, as it does every few decades, the river flexed into its floodplain, blowing out the levees, topping the dams, destroying $15 billion worth of property, and displacing 74,000 people. It was an act of engineers, but America called it "an act of God."

America called the destruction of New Orleans "an act of God," too. But it should have blamed the Corps and Congress (which funds and authorizes its wasteful, destructive and counterproductive projects). For the five millennia before the Army engineers "improved" the Mississippi, as they like to say, the river had built its own flood control--a rich mosaic of forests, ponds, swamps, sloughs, and five million acres of flood-absorbing, fish-and-wildlife-rich delta marsh. But with its levee system the Corps has converted the river into a sluiceway that shunts marsh-building sediments into the Gulf and over the lip of the continental shelf. Corps projects (along with oil-and-gas access canals) have destroyed 1,900 square miles of delta marsh, thereby bringing the sea 30 miles closer to New Orleans.

Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Corps brass and President Bush expressed astonishment that the levees had failed. But everyone who had been paying attention, including a few rank-and-file Army engineers, had been predicting that failure for years. In 1999 about 50 conservation leaders--later to gel into the "Corps Reform Network"--met in Louisiana to strategize about how best to encourage the Corps to protect instead of destroy natural resources. Their first action was to go to the district engineer and implore him to close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (aka "Mr. Go"), a dangerous and essentially useless 76-mile navigation channel connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of New Orleans' Inner Harbor Navigation Canal in eastern New Orleans.

To create Mr. Go the Corps slashed through natural levees and wetlands to a depth of 36 feet and a surface width of 650 feet. But the soft marsh soils kept sloughing off the banks. Today, in its 42nd year, Mr. Go is nearly a half-mile wide, and the Corps spends $22 million a year dredging out the dirt. This equates to $35,000 in maintenance fees for each vessel that passes through (on average only one per day). Basically, warned the conservationists, Mr. Go was good for nothing save delivering storm surges to New Orleans. The district engineer blew them off. Six years later Hurricane Katrina pushed the Gulf up Mr. Go, over the levees and into New Orleans.

The LSU Hurricane Center's deputy director, Ivor van Heerden, got blown off too when he warned the Corps of the danger in which it had placed New Orleans. "What bothers me the most is all the people who've died unnecessarily," he told NBC's Lisa Myers. "Those Corps of Engineers people giggled in the back of the room when we tried to present information." And the New Orleans Times-Picayune did not exaggerate when it blamed the Corps for "the deaths of more than 1,000 residents."

After I had inspected the damage to Louisiana habitat (both human and nonhuman) and interviewed some of the victims and the conservationists who had forecast their fate, it was time to, well, go fishing. The coastal marshes south of Houma seemed endless and timeless, and save for the smashed and overturned boats there was no sign that anything was wrong. Shorebirds and roseate spoonbills worked the mudflats, sheepsheads swirled, dolphins herded panicked mullet, and flights of waterfowl hung over the horizons like black crepe. What guide Dan Ayo and I focused most on, however, were the "crawlers," as he and his fellow Cajuns call the redfish that sashay through the shallows with their bodies half out of water. In the deeper sections I had to drop the copper-foil fly within six inches of a redfish's snout, but crawlers are hunting crabs and will chase down a fly from six feet. When the tide got higher and the redfish vanished, Ayo put me on suitcase-size black drum that churned across the flats like draft horses, towing most of my backing.