Katrina Proved Experts' Early Warnings Right

Sept. 7, 2005 — -- No one knows better than Shea Penland how it feels to be vindicated by a horrible, unthinkable, disaster.

For years, Penland had warned that a powerful hurricane could wipe out New Orleans, but while some listened, few chose to act.

Today, he's a refugee from his own nightmare. His century-old home in New Orleans' fashionable Garden District is empty. Penland had stayed through the hurricane's horrific winds and torrential rain, but when his emergency generator finally ran out of fuel he boarded up his house, and with his golden retriever at his side, headed for higher ground.

"We've got a terrible problem," he told me five years ago when we talked about the future of the lower Mississippi Delta. Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, had devoted much of his life to the study of coastal Louisiana, and he sensed that the end would come sooner, rather than later, to a city he had grown to love.

While not exactly a prophet of doom, Penland spoke bluntly in the winter of 2000 about the fate he foresaw for New Orleans. Ancient levees that protected the city from the Mississippi and nearby Lake Pontchartrain were inadequate and in desperate need of upgrading. The barrier islands that protected the coastline from storm surges were eroding away at an alarming rate, and little was being done to restore them. The land on which New Orleans and many other communities sat was slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.

And his was not the only voice. Chip Groat, then director of the U.S. Geological Survey, warned in early 2000 that "New Orleans will likely be on the verge of extinction by this time next century."

He was wrong, we now know. It came a lot sooner.

A few people listened. In an impassioned plea for more federal funds to upgrade levees and flood control equipment, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., told the Senate late last year of a New Orleans emergency worker who had collected several thousand body bags, just in case the levees failed.