How Did This Happen?

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Once the city was there, nestled into what was essentially a lake bed, no one expected New Orleans to move someplace safe. But there were other options. Governments could have built stronger, higher levees and shored up the disintegrating coastline. As it was, the levees, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, were designed to handle storms as strong as Category 3, even though experts warned that worse storms were inevitable. "The Corps has been pushing for years for Category 5 protection," says retired Lieut. General Robert Flowers, past head of the Corps. "Decisions have been made to accept more risk."

Doing more would have been expensive--in the billions, most likely. But certainly less costly than the Katrina recovery will turn out to be. Preventive work, however, would have had to start in the 1990s. That's how long the improvements would have taken. In 1996, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project to upgrade levees and drainage and pumping stations along the Mississippi River. But Congress and successive Administrations were never willing to fund the project fully. Under George W. Bush, the shortfall was acute: from 2001 to 2005, the Corps asked for almost $496 million, according to figures supplied by the office of Louisiana's Democratic Senator, Mary Landrieu. The Administration cut the requests back to $166.5 million. Congress eventually approved $249.5 million, but that was still half of what the Corps wanted. The Corps' other major effort to shore up New Orleans, the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project, was also underfunded: as of this spring, seven of its contracts were delayed because of lack of money, according to a May 23 Corps report.

Yet would it have mattered if the Corps had got all the money it asked for? Lieut. General Carl Strock, commander of the Corps, insists it would not have. The system might have been able to drain the floodwaters more quickly, but the big breach occurred in a levee that had recently been strengthened. "We were just caught by a storm of an intensity that exceeded the design of the project we have in place," Strock says. In other words, the levees worked just fine; it was the storm that screwed things up by being so powerful.

Even if we accept that logic, it's not yet clear whether Strock is right. Since the storm center passed to the east of New Orleans, congressional investigators are not convinced that the part of Katrina that swept through the city was in fact a design-trumping Category 4. It's possible that the levees just did not work the way they were supposed to. It's not even certain that the water overtopped the levees, as the Corps claims. Congressional investigators, experts and even some Corps officers tell TIME that the failure might have been caused by leaks in the barriers. "The storm surge was only about 10 to 12 feet, according to our modeling, so overtopping was not the culprit," says Leatherman. If the levees failed because they overflowed, that means the storm was just too fierce. If there were leaks, however, that might mean the levees had been poorly constructed or maintained.