United States Army Corps of Engineers

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers occupies a consequential place in the book’s history of flood risk around New Orleans: the 1927 Mississippi River floods helped establish its federal responsibility for the lower river’s flood-control system, and its later work included projects affecting the city itself. That institutional history frames the account of Memorial Medical Center, where the danger posed by flooding to critical electrical equipment had been identified before Hurricane Katrina but remained unresolved. The Corps did not design or control Memorial’s hospital systems; its significance lies in the broader landscape of flood protection, known risks, and choices about which vulnerabilities would be addressed.

From the 1927 Floods to Federal Responsibility

Two weeks after a Good Friday storm, water swelling down the upper Mississippi reached Louisiana. On state orders, workers dynamited a levee below New Orleans to reduce pressure on the levees protecting the city. The decision sacrificed St. Bernard Parish and Plaquemines Parish to protect New Orleans, at the urging of the city’s business elite. Promised restitution did not follow, and the resulting grievance endured into the next century. The blasting was a state-directed action, not an operation attributed to the Corps; its importance is that it exposed the human and political consequences of choosing where floodwater would go.

The Mississippi floods of 1927 prompted the Flood Control Act of 1928, described in the book as one of the most expensive peacetime legislative initiatives of its era. The act tasked the Corps with improving the lower Mississippi’s levee and flood-control systems, placed responsibility for the river fully with the federal government, and granted the Corps immunity from liability for damage that might result from its work. Federal authority and protection from liability thus emerged together from the effort to manage a river whose flood-control decisions could impose costs on communities as well as protect them.

New Orleans and the Limits of Drainage

Decades later, the Corps became more involved in flood-protection projects for New Orleans, including drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain. Meanwhile, city drainage capacity grew substantially: fourteen custom-built pumps were installed, and by the end of the twentieth century the system could move more than 45,000 cubic feet of water per second, nearly four times its earlier capacity. Those improvements did not eliminate localized exposure. The area around Baptist Hospital in the Freret neighborhood continued to experience some of the city’s worst flooding, and the city never fully solved the problem.

That history shaped everyday expectations at Memorial. In the early twenty-first century, staff knew that even a moderate storm could flood nearby streets enough to force employees to leave their cars on the raised ground between lanes. Maintenance workers sometimes used waders and a battered metal fishing boat, stored in the parking-garage basement, to bring colleagues to work. Yet supplies, food, equipment, records, and linens were still kept in the basement. Repeated experience with water had fostered practical coping habits, but it had also made flooding seem less like an exceptional threat. The contrast is central: extensive drainage infrastructure could coexist with persistent local exposure and vulnerable hospital operations.

A Known Risk at Memorial

After Tropical Storm Allison flooded Houston’s Texas Medical Center in 2001 and caused hospitals there to lose power, New Orleans health director Kevin Stephens asked local hospitals whether they could withstand fifteen feet of water, what it would cost to elevate their generators, and whether federal funding might help. A letter went to Memorial’s emergency committee head, Susan Mulderick. Hospitals responded without enthusiasm: the improvements could cost millions, and the initiative went nowhere. Before Katrina, emergency officials were therefore aware that nearly all New Orleans hospitals had generators, electrical switches, or both at ground level.

Memorial’s plant operations director, Eric Yancovich, examined the hospital’s exposure after Hurricane Ivan narrowly missed the city in 2004. At a meeting with the Corps, he studied hurricane storm-surge models known as SLOSH. The models indicated that a Category Four or Five storm could send twelve to fifteen feet of water around Memorial, which stood three feet below sea level. Yancovich then sketched the elevations of hospital entrances and outdoor equipment against Magnolia Street. His calculations showed that less than four feet of street flooding could carry water over the loading dock and into the hospital. Although the backup generators themselves were on the second floor, parts of the emergency power distribution system lay below ground or only inches to a few feet above it.

Yancovich’s written warning was specific: relatively little water could disable most of the medical center. He predicted that power in the main hospital would fail and that patients would need to move to the newer Clara Wing, where he believed the electrical circuitry was better protected. His department made some changes, including installing floodgates and raising the vent for underground diesel tanks, but he also recommended elevating ground-level and basement transfer switches and the pumps supplying medical air and vacuum suction. Those pumps mattered to patients with respiratory problems. A partial bid for electrical work exceeded a quarter of a million dollars; Yancovich recorded that he did not expect approval because of the lack of capital and kept the proposal on file for future consideration.

Katrina and Institutional Accountability

As Katrina approached, the Corps’ storm-surge models were no longer an abstract planning exercise. A National Guardsman told Yancovich that the levees had been breached and warned of fifteen feet of water. Yancovich recognized that Memorial’s emergency power system had the very kind of weakness officials had discussed before the storm: critical components, not only the generators themselves, were exposed to flooding. He and Mulderick understood that evacuation was necessary, and Memorial’s chief executive, René Goux, told his superiors at Tenet that it appeared likely.

The hospital’s generators nevertheless ran for two days, despite being designed for shorter periods of emergency use. When one engine stopped and part of the hospital went dark, maintenance staff worked by flashlight, added water to its radiator, and restarted it. This was a failure-prone chain of dependence: generators could provide power only while their engines and the connected distribution system remained functional. The Corps’ role in regional flood protection should not be confused with responsibility for those hospital components. Rather, the episode shows how known external flood risk met separate, documented weaknesses in a facility’s emergency systems.

In the months after Katrina, reports and investigations assigned responsibility across government agencies, private organizations, and individual institutions. The book places the region’s flood-control system—managed by the Corps after its increasing federalization following the 1927 floods—among the serious, predictable failures left insufficiently addressed. It also describes other causes of deaths and suffering, including delayed evacuation, inadequate transport, poor communications, and hospitals and nursing homes lacking backup power and water robust enough for a prolonged emergency. The Corps’s historical significance is therefore not a claim that it alone caused the disaster. It is part of a longer account of federal flood-control authority, decisions made in the face of recognized risks, and the consequences when protection remains incomplete.