Heath Jones
Appearances
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There Will Be Flood
Hurricane Katrina pushed Wendell's priorities in a different direction. Places in Mississippi had seen storm surges as high as 28 feet, way higher than any point in his levee system. So while the Army Corps was focused on structural integrity, Wendell's main concern was with elevation. He became sort of obsessed, even developed a personal motto.
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There Will Be Flood
And here, Wendell faced a choice. He knew that he could continue his partnership with the Army Corps. The Corps did want their levies built higher as part of their design rehaul.
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There Will Be Flood
For Wendell, going through the Army Corps might ultimately lead to a sturdier levy, but it would be slow and costly. And he knew every year that he wasn't adding height to the levy was leaving his community vulnerable. It could mean the difference between surviving the next major storm or not.
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There Will Be Flood
Wendell brought the idea before his colleagues at the Levee District. They agreed.
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There Will Be Flood
So Wendell went on the offensive, courting the local press, giving talks at libraries and town halls and making TV ads, imploring the citizens of South Lafourche to help him protect them. They were facing a potentially biblical flooding event here. Though, he says, the tone of the ads was anything but sensational. It was more PBS documentary than Armageddon.
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Now, Wendell says he and his colleagues did reach out to the Corps to try to get permits for their new levee plan. He knew that there could be big consequences if the Corps didn't approve the project. As part of the federal government, they just had much more legal and financial firepower.
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But after a couple of years without approval from the Corps, Wendell says he told his engineers to ask for it one more time.
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Despite this pressure from the federal government, Wendell kept building. He knew it could mean his levee district would have to pay millions of dollars if the levees were significantly damaged. But Wendell had that different calculation. He saw his job as doing everything he could to prevent his community from getting washed away. So, he says, they could worry about repair costs later.
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So in addition to the taxes that the citizens of South Lafourche were paying to build and maintain the levee, some were taking on even more of the costs because of Wendell's decision to go rogue. Some people were angry. One person even put up a billboard by the side of a busy road that thanked Wendell for, quote, screwing the levee and the people.
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After the break, the tiger of a storm that Wendell had been worrying about finally pounces. And we learn whether Wendell's wager paid off.
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There Will Be Flood
16 years after Hurricane Katrina, in 2021, the storm that Wendell Kural had been worrying about, the reason he and his team had been scrambling to build his levee higher and higher, started gathering strength off the coast of Louisiana.
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As Ida made landfall, Wendell and several of his co-workers at the levee district decided to wait out the worst of the storm at the local hospital on the third floor. They actually brought rescue boats along with them in case they needed to make their escape by water.
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At some point that night, Wendell says the winds died down enough for him and his team to get out onto the roads and inspect the levees and the pump stations. And the first signs were promising. But it wasn't until the next day that he was able to actually see green grass on the ground, to see that his levees had managed to keep the floodwaters out.
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There Will Be Flood
Wendell says the magnitude of all this didn't really hit him until a couple weeks after the storm. By that point, people who'd evacuated had returned and had started picking up the pieces and assessing the damage from all the wind and rain. And as he drove into his neighborhood, he noticed a dozen or so people standing around talking.
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There Will Be Flood
When you ask folks like Heath Jones at the Army Corps of Engineers about the story of Wendell's levy, it's clear they can't exactly sanction what he did.
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Heath says that doesn't mean that Wendell's levee didn't do its job. Unlike several neighboring communities, the structures within Wendell's levee were mostly spared from major flooding during Hurricane Ida, and no lives were lost, which is not a bad outcome. And Heath says there's a good chance this levee will get back into the Army Corps' system.
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Wendell's Levee District and the Army Corps may have been at odds about how exactly to build the levee higher, but they're still fighting a common enemy. And no one from either side has lost sight of that.
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This episode was produced by Emma Peasley and edited by Jess Jang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Gilly Moon. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
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And I'm Mary Childs. A couple decades ago, Wendell Kural found himself at a fork in the road. On one path, he could stay within the framework the federal government had laid out to build these hurricane defenses. And on the other, he could create his own path, building his levees as high as possible, as fast as possible, in a race against larger and larger storms.
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And he knew his decision could mean life or death for over 10,000 people.
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Growing up in southern Louisiana, the specter of hurricanes hung over everything. Over the last century and a half, whole towns here have been decimated and ultimately abandoned after flooding from hurricanes. Wendell's own great-grandparents had to resettle after a hurricane in 1893 flooded their town and killed half the population.
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And one of the first things Wendell learned about the job was that it entailed a close partnership with the part of the federal government that builds these levee systems, the Army Corps of Engineers.
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To hear the story of how this branch of the military got put in charge of the nation's flood protection, we called up Heath Jones. He's the emergency manager for the Corps' New Orleans district. And apparently something of a Star Wars fan.
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Their job was to help bring all the products of America's burgeoning breadbasket down to the port of New Orleans and out to the rest of the world. And by the late 1920s, the Corps was also drafted into building systems to fight floods.
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And here is how the system is set up. If a local community like South Lafourche finds itself facing repeated flooding, they can lobby Congress to have the Corps come in and solve it. And then the Corps has to decide, well, does it make economic sense to protect this community?
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Harsh, but building flood infrastructure can get really expensive, and communities around the country are competing for these resources.
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Because when a major disaster strikes, some huge portion of the costs will fall to the federal government. That could be in the form of temporary housing or food for people who have been displaced, or money to repair basic infrastructure like the power grid or drinking water supply.
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Or it could come in the form of federal flood insurance, which often pays out over a billion dollars in claims a year.
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They do this, Heath explains, by conducting a sort of economic census. They'll take a place like Wendell's community in South Lafourche and tally up the number of structures. First, all the homes.
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If it's a rural area with low population density, they might suggest elevating individual buildings.
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But if the value of homes and businesses is high enough, they may propose building something bigger, like a series of levees.
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And that is exactly what happened to Wendell's community in South Lafourche. Back in the mid-1960s, the Army Corps determined that it would be worth the estimated initial $5.5 million in federal investment to build a system of levees around this part of South Louisiana.
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Now, Wendell's job as the head of the levee district was to partner with the Army Corps to build this massive ring of levees around his community. He had to raise funds every year to keep construction going.
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Because the way the system was designed, local organizations like his were responsible for paying around 30 percent of the costs of any Army Corps project in order for the feds to pick up the rest.
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But Wendell powered through this incremental, bureaucratic, and occasionally threatening process. And by the early 2000s, nearly three decades after breaking ground, thanks to Wendell and the Army Corps, there was now a dirt fortress around his community, reaching as high as 13 feet.
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The failure of the New Orleans levy system took the country by surprise. And the Army Corps took a lot of the blame for having allowed it to happen.
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The Corps changed their specifications for how thick the levees had to be. Wendell says they started requiring heavier and more expensive clays that often had to be transported from further away.