Comedy legend Harry Shearer (This Is Spinal Tap, The Simpsons) decided to make this documentary about Hurricane Katrina and the US Army Corps of Engineers after watching a town hall appearance by President Barack Obama. In Shearer’s words from a press release: “I heard him describe the flooding as a ‘natural disaster,’ and my head exploded.” According to Shearer and his film, the fatal flooding was a very human disaster that was 40 years—plus lots of incompetence by the Army Corps of Engineers and lots of corruption from Louisiana politicians and business interests—in the making.
The film is excellent journalism: It makes its case with stacks of evidence, lots of interviews, and unflinching clarity. And Shearer, who knows from entertainment, keeps its structure dynamic and engaging even while he digs into a story so wonky (one cannot make a film about 40 years of government building projects without being wonky) and so resistant to easy digestion, most Americans are only barely aware of it.
See, when Katrina hit New Orleans, Shearer was in Los Angeles getting ready to film a movie. When he returned to his adopted hometown, he began talking to journalists, engineers, and others to figure out exactly why the flood walls fell apart and killed people. He was shocked to discover that the disaster was the product of a dangerous, decades-long three-way between Louisiana construction/contracting interests, the politicians who those interests put into office, and the Corps, whose big-ass boondoggles are sought by politicians (as pork for their districts) and celebrated by Louisiana construction/contracting interests.
The result is a system that creates incentives for shoddy workmanship, corner-cutting, poor research, and lots of mutual ass-covering by powerful people when things go wrong. According to The Big Uneasy, New Orleans would have been better off if the Corps had done nothing instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars that made things worse.
Among the details:
Wetlands and cypress swamps are the best way to suck the force out of a hurricane before it hits land, but the Corps undertook massive, expensive projects to drain and destroy the swamps. Those projects changed the geography of southern Louisiana and turned New Orleans from an inland city with a swamp buffer into a coastal city that gets the brunt force of offshore storms.
After the flood, the Corps actively tried to keep teams of independent forensic engineers from doing any research. It fenced off areas and intercepted research teams until the state attorney general sent armed escorts to protect the independent researchers. The researchers eventually found evidence of gross incompetence, shoddy building, and bureaucratic bullheadedness. (One contractor building a flood wall took the Corps to court, saying the specs it provided him weren’t right for the job. The Corps won, compelling the contractor to build the flood wall. It failed.) When the Corps realized what the independent engineers were finding, it contracted a PR firm for a $4.7 million damage-control campaign.
The Corps’s Hurricane Protection Office is on Leake Avenue.
John Goodman (another adopted New Orleanian) is an incredible goofball.
The Corps’ current quick fix to the city’s hurricane vulnerability is a system of pumps that even Corps engineers—and independent auditors—say is dangerously faulty.
And so on. The Big Uneasy is required viewing not just for people who wonder how and why New Orleans was fatally flooded, but for anyone whose geography and safety depends on a large project by the Army Corps of Engineers. As Shearer says at one point in his film: “Helloooooo, Sacramento!” 
I saw this movie in Denver. All y’all should see it twice!
Nutrias!! Blame the nutrias!
They build a city below sea level and the fault belongs to somebody else. Riiigghhhhtttt
#3
…er, said the poster who probably WANTED New Orleans to be wiped off the map so that Louisiana would be reduced to permanent Red State status and take its place proudly in the Goiter and Incest Belt.
@3 is right. the notion of humans building below sea level is ridiculous. no one would ever do it; we’re just not rich enough or capable enough of doing the engineering to pull it off. it’s just like those people who claim that over in europe they have some kind of better health care system, or that in finland the schools are better. all false claims. we can’t do stuff. don’t even try to build under sea level and hold off the sea.
I hope @3 dies when the PNW has its big earthquake. the notion of anyone around here telling people in NOLA they’re dumb for where they sited their city is so self unawarely ignorant it’s hard to fathom.
@ 3. Funnily enough, that whole why-would-anybody-build-or-live-in-a-city-below-sea-level argument is directly addressed in the film. You should see it. You might be surprised by the answer.
Tangential to @3 and @5, consider Holland. They’re well below sea level, in fact never were above it, and yet they have safe and damn reliable dikes around their country. They apparently lack avarice, graft, and the most pernicious forms of political incompetence, which may make all the difference.
Also, it was the French who decided where to build New Orleans, not the folks who lived there during Katrina, so why would this idiot say “serves your right” to people who had nothing to do with the city’s location? Is he saying that everybody was obligated to actually leave the city empty because the hurricane happened? Nobody would ever say such a thing about a place where the majority population was white…and we all KNOW it.