HIGH STAKES.(The Talk of the Town)(Carol Browner of Environmental Protection Agency critisizes storm forcasting)

Last week's coverage of Hurricane Katrina

Continuing coverage of Hurricane Katrina

Jon Lee Anderson on rescue and recovery in New Orleans

Among the blown-off rooftops, upended pine trees, and other detritus that Katrina scattered along the Gulf Coast were a good number of twisted and bashed-in slot machines. The storm had hurled them ashore as it ripped casino barges from their moorings in Biloxi, Gulfport, and Bay St. Louis.

Carol Browner was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton Administration, when many casinos in Mississippi were constructed. Last week, speaking from her office at the Washington consulting firm where she now works, she recalled the difficulties that her department experienced years ago when they tried to persuade legislators, including Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, that building on wetlands was environmentally risky. Developers, and the politicians who supported them, argued that gambling would attract commerce to the state.

The proposed casinos, Browner said, "were supposed to be in the water because the state didn't want them on the solid land." (To accommodate the moral qualms of conservative locals, the legislature relegated gambling to "navigable waters.") She went on, "But they were huge, and they were right up against the shore. If you put structures this big into an estuary, you're disrupting the aquatic life and changing the habitat and eradicating the wetlands, which has a huge effect on drainage. The wetlands act like a sponge in a storm. They're an incredibly smart and helpful part of nature. But they have to be kept moist, like a sponge on your kitchen counter. If they're dried out, and developed, they don't work. The shoreline's a very important buffer in a storm."

Browner said that Lott was not alone among politicians in his disregard for the environment. "For fifty years," she pointed out, "there's been significant inattention to the environmental consequences of developing the wetlands." But Lott was particularly single-minded in his support of casino development. "I had barely taken office," Browner said, "when I discovered there was a 'hold' on a department nominee." (Placing a hold, which is a common maneuver in the Senate, can keep a nominee's name from moving forward to a vote.) "I didn't have a clue who put the hold on the nominee. Then Trent Lott ...