Nonprofit Leadership Podcast · Dr. Rob Harter

The Story Behind the Real Cause of Hurricane Katrina’s Devastating Impact

·39 min·2 clips

"If the Army Corps is going after me, a nobody, just a citizen of this city, I must be on to something."

1. Rob Harder's Nonprofit Leadership Podcast examines the levee failures behind Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans, which killed almost 1,400 people and caused around $125 billion in damage. 2. Guest Sandy Rosenthal, a New Orleans resident and founder of Levees.org, describes herself as a non-engineer who is profoundly deaf and wrote the 2020 book "Words Whispered in Water." 3. Her central claim is that the storm passed east of the city as a Category 2 and the flooding came from brand-new federal levees that failed at half their design pressure. 4. Evacuated with her family for three weeks, she followed news obsessively and, four weeks after the flood, obtained a Washington, D.C. report showing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers designs and builds flood protection while locals only maintain it. 5. Engineers stayed quiet because the Corps would oversee rebuilding all 350 miles of levees, and she says those who spoke out risked being banned from work or fired. 6. About 18 months after the disaster, she used IP addresses to trace online attacks on her and her family to Army Corps computers in 2007 and gave WWL TV an exclusive after two years of media silence. 7. CBS national took notice about three years after the storm when Levees.org publicized a roughly $5 million public relations contract, backed by screen grabs after the PR firm removed the material from its website. 8. In March 2015, the authors of an early study that blamed local officials retracted it in the journal Water Policy, and after a New York Times story the BBC, the Guardian and the Daily Mail stopped blaming the storm. 9. A Freedom of Information Act request showed almost two-thirds of the U.S. population lives in levee-protected counties, which let Levees.org open chapters in other states and now push for required engineering-failure coursework at 200 schools. 10. Nonprofit leaders and advocates interested in grassroots campaigning against institutional resistance will find this useful.

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