Unnatural Disaster

Though Harry Shearer is best known for his work in This Is Spinal Tap and his comedic roles on The Simpsons (where he voices Smithers, Mr. Burns, Ned Flanders and Principal Skinner among other characters), The Big Uneasy, his new documentary about why Katrina's destruction to New Orleans was preventable, is far from light-hearted.

Shearer, who splits his time between L.A. and New Orleans, says he made the film in response to the media's enduring portrayal of post-Katrina flooding as a natural disaster, despite mounting evidence that levees were breached due to the Army Corps of Engineers' neglect. The Big Uneasy outlines all this through interviews with experts, journalists and whistle-blowers, revealing, in the film's most lethal moments, that extremely basic structural errors made during the Corps' decades-long installment of a hurricane protection system were largely to blame. (These flubs include building the city's levees on sand, which one expert likens to being as structurally secure as a pile of marbles.) With the June 1st deadline for the completion of Corps' revamped protection system right around the corner, Shearer chatted with PAPERMAG about the film and why something like New Orleans' flooding could happen again.

The federal government's bungled response to Katrina is mostly associated with the Bush administration, yet something your film points out is that both political parties are at fault here.

The seeds for this disaster were sown across four and a half decades under administrations of both political parties. Two successive administrations, one Republican and one Democratic, have ignored lessons that they should have learned. There isn't a partisan bone to pick in this. I think both parties have their oars deep in it.

Do you think that's why the media hasn't shed much light on this story?

That's absolutely why this hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. And it's also why a guy from the comedy world had to make this movie. The national media, based in New York and Washington, are really, really addicted to issues where they can get liberals and conservatives yelling, 'This is your fault! No, it's your fault!' at each other. You can't do that with this story. 

You make a few brief appearances in The Big Uneasy as a narrator.  Were you concerned that your comedic background or association with The Simpsons would be distracting to audiences?

It was a huge concern. I wasn't in the first version of the film at all. I really wanted to avoid people watching it and saying, 'What's Mr. Burns doing talking about engineering?' But the audience who saw that first version said, 'We need someone to be telling us why this is happening now' and I thought I could do that role without upstaging the rest of the people in the film. I had 90 minutes to undo five years of media misinformation, and I couldn't afford a moment where people weren't  focused on the information.

Most media coverage has played to the emotional side of the story, but The Big Uneasy is very information-heavy. Why did you decide to take that approach?

The quote that kept clanging in my mind was from a news anchor from one of the network broadcasts. I asked them, 'Why don't people who watch your show know why New Orleans flooded?' Their answer was, "We just feel that the emotional stories are more compelling for our audience.' I think that was the media's general approach to this matter -- taking the angle of, 'Look at these poor people." I think not to be asking why this happened is as close to an abdication of responsibility as you can get. 
 
One of the most alarming things we learn in the documentary is the amount of time it took the Army Corps to build a hurricane protection system around New Orleans in the first place. When did this project begin? 

The Hurricane protection system was built over four decades and was not yet complete in 2005 when Katrina hit. Back in 1965, following Hurricane Betsy, congress told the Corps, 'Protect New Orleans from the maximum probably hurricane' and they started work on the system. Through fits and starts it was still being built in 2005 when it failed. It took an unbelievably long amount of time. It was supposed to take a fraction of that length of time and cost a fraction of what it did. And, of course, it wasn't supposed to fail. But aside from that they did a great job.

What has the reaction to the film been like in New Orleans?

Well, I made the film for the rest of the country. I really didn't make it for New Orleans. But, that said, it showed for weeks and weeks there and people were kind of stunned. I think it has served to revive and strengthen the skepticism that people in New Orleans have about the Army Corps. We're right around the corner from June 1st,  which is the theoretical deadline for the completion of the protection system. I say 'theoretical' because it won't be completed by then. But, without fail, the Army Corps will stand up June 1st and say, 'New Orleans has never been safer.' This is coming from the people who almost destroyed it. To me, that sounds like the equivalent of saying, 'We ran over your entire family but we kept your grandmother alive. Your family has never been safer.' 

What we're hearing now from the Corps, are exactly the kind of reassurances and statements of presumed safety that we heard for decades before that system failed. That's what they do. They build these big things and they say, 'We've never been safer.' And then, when they fail, they say, 'Well, you can't out-engineer mother nature!' If they can't out-engineer mother nature, then what's the Army Corps' job? What is it that they get all of this money to do?

Your film also points out that this can happen to other low-lying cities near water. These problems and vulnerabilities aren't specific to New Orleans.

Yes. The Corps just told Dallas, Texas, two years ago, 'Oops, the levees on your river that go through the heart of your city are built on sand.'

How many American cities have levees that are built on sand?

The corps released a list of 122 communities a few years ago that have levees that aren't necessarily built on sand but, for one reason or another, won't do the job. Because nobody had connected this to the Corps' failure and incompetence in New Orleans, this list didn't really raise the alarm that it should have. It just looked like the Corps covering its ass saying, 'Uh oh, don't blame us if something goes wrong.' 

And now we're seeing problems with flooding in the South.

The Corps has been managing the Mississippi river for some time and the results of that management have been to make floods more infrequent, but more serious and destructive when they do occur. And that's what we're seeing now.

The Big Uneasy points out that we can learn a lot about managing water for coastal cities like New Orleans from the Dutch, who use their existing landscapes to manage floods instead of these huge levees.   

Yes, it's called 'living with water' -- learning to live with the river in its good times and in its bad times. And, again, learning from the Dutch, in the good times, living with water is a plus. It's a bonus. It's an asset to property value. In the bad times, you have to be able to be somewhere where water can be easily drained. There are places around the country that are adopting these methods -- Napa, California has taken this approach. But, then again, that was a city government doing that. With the Corps of Engineers, when you say, 'Learn from the Dutch,' -- and this has happened -- they go out and hire a couple of Dutch guys to sit at the table and nod their heads when they announce their stuff. And they say, 'Look? See? We've got Dutch guys!' They're very clever at taking whatever people say they should do and folding that into their 'business as usual' approach. That's what you get with the Corps of Engineers. It might be that we need congress to give them a whole new set of rules to live by or we might need to say, 'Thanks for your two centuries of service, but we would like the keys back.'  Because we're going to get more problems with water, either droughts or floods, as we go through a century of climate change. 

So what can people be doing to get the keys back, so to speak?

I go to this: I don't see this as a story about 'bad' people. I see this as a story about a bad system. If you have a system that doesn't punish people when they screw up, you're going to get more screw ups. If you don't have a system that disincentivizes failure, you're going to get more failure. The corps didn't really pay a price for what they did in New Orleans. In 1927, congress gave them a blanket immunity from lawsuits connected to any project they built for the purpose of flood control. If it were me, the first thing I would do is write, email or call my person in congress and say, 'Maybe the Corps have abused that immunity and maybe they need to be accountable.'  Otherwise they exist in this culture of impunity where their failures don't get punished and so we get more failures. There's no grown-up supervision. The only way that they're going to be held accountable is if they say, as a lot of other people in various lines of work do, 'Jesus, if we screw up, we might get sued.'

The Big Uneasy is out now in New York and Los Angeles.