A historian -- John Barry -- is behind the biggest environmental lawsuit in US history
... The oil and gas industry [in Louisiana] has extracted about $470 billion in natural resources from the state in the last two decades, with the tacit blessing of the federal and state governments and without significant opposition from environmental groups. Oil and gas is, after all, Louisiana’s leading industry, responsible for around a billion dollars in annual tax revenue. Last year, industry executives had reason to be surprised, then, when they were asked to pay damages. The request came in the form of the most ambitious, wide-ranging environmental lawsuit in the history of the United States. And it was served by the most unlikely of antagonists, a former college-football coach, competitive weight lifter and author of dense, intellectually robust 500-page books of American history: John M. Barry.
When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005, John Barry was a year and a half into writing his sixth book, “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul,” about the puritan theologian’s efforts to define the limits of political power. Barry is not a fast writer; his books take him, on average, eight years to complete. “I tend,” Barry says, “to obsess.” Earlier in his career, he spent nearly a decade as a political journalist, writing about Congress, an experience he drew upon for his first book, “The Ambition and the Power.” But after that book’s publication, he quit journalism and cocooned himself in research, reading and writing. He took on vast, complex episodes in American history that in his rendering become Jacobean dramas about tectonic struggles for power. “The Ambition and the Power” would make an appropriate subtitle for any of his books — particularly “Rising Tide,” his history of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the most destructive in American history.
Barry’s research for “Rising Tide” had made him an amateur expert on flood prevention, and in the days after Hurricane Katrina, he received requests from editors and television-news producers for interviews. He accepted nearly every one of them and within days of the storm had become one of the city’s most visible ambassadors in the national press. “I felt I had an obligation,” Barry told me, “to convince people that the city was worth rebuilding.”
Like many others, Barry was frustrated that he couldn’t figure out why New Orleans had flooded so catastrophically. When he studied the numbers — the wind shear on Lake Pontchartrain, the storm surge, the inches of rainfall — they didn’t add up. After making calls to some of his old sources, he concluded that the levees hadn’t been overtopped, as officials from the Army Corps of Engineers assumed, but had collapsed because of design flaws. (He was among the first to draw attention to this fact in an Op-Ed article published in The New York Times that October.) Barry concluded that just as in 1927, people died because of cynical decisions made by shortsighted politicians drawing on bad science. For Barry, Hurricane Katrina was not the story of a natural disaster; it was a story of politics, science and power....
[In 2007 he was appointed to a board overseeing the reconstruction of the levees.] Although the board had questions about the quality of the levees being rebuilt around the city, of far greater concern was the condition of the marsh south of New Orleans. As the marsh disappeared, even weak storms would inundate the city, no matter what condition the levees were in. The board realized that it was focusing on the wrong thing: The marsh, not the levees, had to be the priority. The board soon found itself pushing most aggressively for work as many as 75 miles south of New Orleans....
[Because the oil and gas industry itself conceded that it was responsible for 36 percent of the loss of land, Barry concluded it should be held responsible for paying proportionately for the repairs, which was estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars. He finally decided the way to do that was to file a lawsuit.]
On the morning of July 24, 2013, Barry announced the lawsuit at a news conference held in the Orleans Levee District’s safe house, a structure elevated 20 feet off the ground inside a warehouse built to withstand 180-mile-an-hour winds. Barry was unnerved by the ceremony of the event. He was a veteran of book tours and television interviews, but this was different. When it came time to deliver his main declaration, he stumbled, announcing that the board had filed a lawsuit against “97 oil and gas attorneys,” when he meant to say “companies.” He cursed into the microphone and reread the statement.
“From now on,” one of his lawyers said when they convened afterward, “I’m going to have my interns start my car.” Everyone laughed, except Jones. “This is going to get dirty,” he said....