This article is adapted from a column published by the nonprofit online news service The Lens, and used with permission.
August brings poignance to the politics of floodwater management in low-lying cities along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the anniversary of Katrina, the 2005 hurricane that triggered the second-most catastrophic engineering failure in human history. (The collapse of the New Orleans levee system is exceeded only by the Chernobyl reactor meltdown of 1986 in the annals of man-made fiascos.)
