Voices for a Blue Tomorrow: Levee Activist Sandy Rosenthal on Environmental Awakenings, Green Infrastructure, and Seasonal Housing for Purple Martins
An interview that will leave you inspired!
Last week’s post on the safety of New Orleans definitely attracted reader’s attention. My big point is that we get to decide how we face future risks and we should do it wisely and with as much information as possible. Many of you have noted that, thanks to some smart investments, New Orleans now has one of the most impressive flood-protection systems in the world. But maintaining it requires vigilance, a job made harder by the state governor’s decision to reverse post-Katrina reforms meant to keep politics out of science.
On this theme, I’m introducing a new feature that I’m calling “Voices of Blue Tomorrow.” Here, I will occasionally offer interviews with community advocates, scientists, lawyers, and others with insight and expertise to talk about resilience in the ocean and on the coast.
My first guest is Sandy Rosenthal, a civic activist and founder of Levees.org, an organization fighting to protect the Crescent City from floods and human failure. She writes about her efforts after Hurricane Katrina and beyond in her wonderful memoir, Words Whispered in Water.
I recently met with Sandy for a conversation about her environmental awakening, the lessons she’s learned as an organizer, the importance of nature-based infrastructure, and her recent fight to protect seasonal housing for migrating swallows.
This is Blue Tomorrow—a weekly look at the law, science, and stories shaping the future of the ocean and coasts. If that matters to you, you can subscribe here.
Sandy’s book plus those mentioned in the interview:
Words Whispered in Water, by Sandy Rosenthal
Nature’s End, by James Kunetka and Whitley Streiber
The Octopus in the Parking Garage, by Rob Verchick
Facing Catastrophe, by Rob Verchick
TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited)
Voices for a Blue Tomorrow: An Interview with Sandy Rosenthal
Rob Verchick: To hello everybody, welcome to Blue Tomorrow. I am here today talking with a friend of mine, Sandy Rosenthal. She is an American civic activist and founder of Levees.org which is based in New Orleans. That’s an organization that she created back in October 2005 in order to educate the American people about the cause of the levee failures here in New Orleans, and the catastrophic flooding that occurred after the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. Now we have more than 20 years between us here in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, but we’ve still got issues down here, and we’re trying to control our flood waters, and we’ve got a super big levee system now that we hope is going to protect us from a lot of that, but I’m here to tell you that Sandy is still going strong with her organization, levies.org and she’s done a number of other things since, since the damage of Hurricane Katrina, and a lot of those things are concerned with keeping people safe on the coasts in, in the shadow of climate change, and in the shadow of threats from from hurricanes and other ocean-related disasters, and so I want to welcome you, Sandy, and thanks for being here today.
Sandy Rosenthal: My pleasure. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Verchick: I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how you got involved with public activism. Was this first rodeo, with Hurricane Katrina? How did you decide this is how you were going to devote the next 20 years of your life?
Rosenthal: Well, it started 40 years ago, because 40 years ago I read a book called Nature’s End, and this is a book that is written by James Kunetka and Whitley Strieber, and it was published in 1986 exactly 40 years ago. Hopefully, everyone listening can say that there’s been a time where they’ve read a book that changed their life or changed their outlook on something, and in my case it was Nature’s End, because what it did, even though it’s a purely fictional account of the of the trouble our planet is in, it’s fictional, it woke me up to things I should have been paying attention to, and I’ve been paying attention to ever since. So that’s how it all started. 40 years ago, 20 years ago, when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina, I realized soon that there was a disconnect, that the reasons that were being held forth for the levees breaking were wrong, made no sense. And when something doesn’t make sense, there’s a reason, and I started to ask questions, and then immediately I received vicious pushback from all sides, and that’s when I realized I must be on to something. Why else would I, a nobody, really, in the world of engineering and architecture be attacked so viciously?
Verchick: What were you seeing that other people weren’t seeing?
Rosenthal: I know, how is it that I—a non-engineer, a non-architect, not a contractor—how is it that I could see that local officials were being blamed for this flooding when it was actually the fault of our federal government? Now, how is it that I could see that?
And the answer is simple, Rob. I can read.
I know it’s this mind-blowing thing, I can read. And maybe things were a little different for me because I didn’t flood. So, I didn’t have to spend all my days and nights dealing with FEMA, a contractor, and my insurance company, and my son’s school didn’t flood. I had the luxury that I could read and listen to the radio and watch TV. Keep in mind this is 20 years ago, and that’s how I got our information. I realized pretty early on that the whole narrative was wrong, that this was not any fault of ours—the people who lived here—but the federal government. And I continued to ask questions, and I continued to learn. The more questions I asked, the more I learned, and then I started the organization Levees.org, and I’m still at it today.
Verchick: One of the stories you helped uncover was about the New Orleans levee system—a levee system that was under federal control, funded by federal money, built under federal contracts, and under U.S. Army Corps of Engineers supervision. And, of course, later we found that the levees, first, weren’t designed to spec and then weren’t built even to the designs that they were meant to be, and that there were many failures, over 50 major breaches. That failure of government infrastructure really is the story for at least New Orleanians, whose city was flooded. Looking at things 20-plus years later, what are you still concerned about in terms of the safety of New Orleans and its relationship to hurricanes and to the Gulf of Mexico?
Rosenthal: Well, just three or four years ago, it came to our attention the leaders of Levees.org that, that even, even now very few students in engineering colleges are being taught why the levees failed during Hurricane Katrina. And it’s not just that it turns up that exposure to engineering failures in levees. It can be any kind of engineering failure. We can all list them—the Hyatt walkway collapse that that a lot of your listeners may remember, and then before that the Tacoma Bridge collapse—
Verchick: The BP Oil Spill.
Rosenthal: And the Challenger disaster. These were all engineering failures, so you would think that it would be standard procedure for engineering students to be receiving instruction on failures and lessons learned, and it is not. So, it is the mission of our, the current mission of our organization to make sure that all 200 plus schools in the United States, that it is standard procedure that in order to be accredited you have to provide instruction to the students on engineering failures and lessons learned, and not necessarily levee failures, although since that is the worst engineering failure in the history of the United States, we would certainly hope that that particular failure does come up at some of these 200 plus schools, and that’s what we’re working on right now. We launched this three years ago, we launched this campaign, and we’re still working on it very hard. The climate is not very good right now for such a goal. But politicians come and go. The goals, the mission and goal doesn’t change.
Verchick: Tell me about your approach. How do you decide which universities, which engineering programs you were going to target? How does this conversation normally go?
Rosenthal: It turns out that my organization is not the first to have figured out this problem. In the 1990s the American Society of Civil Engineers noticed the same thing. And they went directly to the universities and the colleges and said, you know, you really need to be teaching the students about failures and the lessons learned. And the response was: “We teach the students what we’re required to teach in order to be accredited.”
So fast forward to 2024 when we launched this campaign. We decided not to do it that way. We’re not going straight to the universities. First thing we’re doing is we’re building broad, diverse support nationwide from experts, engineers, people who are with a familiarity for what happens when things go wrong, such as yourself, Professor Verchick. And once we get this broad support of experts, we go to the everyday citizen at large, like me, and get our support for such education. Then we work our way up and get other organizations to join us. So far we’ve got the Audubon Society, Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity, and lots of others. The historic historic organizations are very interested in protecting our infrastructure and making sure that things don’t fall down. Then the next step is talk to the deans of the colleges. Then you go to ABET, Accreditation Bureau of Engineering Technology, which is the organization for accreditation of colleges. It’s bottom-up, not top-down. And obviously it’s not going to happen in a month.
Verchick: What progress have you made?
Rosenthal: I’m very happy to say, if you go to our website that we’ve created, called “Engineering Failure Education,” you can see the long list of experts that we have signed up. The next step, as I say, is going to be going to the deans of universities, we’re not quite there yet, but as I mentioned a moment ago, it’s just not going to be in a month. This isn’t a sprint, this is a marathon.
Verchick: There are two things I really like about this story. One is you have managed to find a point of leverage. You’re thinking, “Hey, if I want to change the next generation of engineers, I need to find the conduit through which they get information, and then I’ve got to tweak that somehow.” Get the information to them, you find the find the mechanism, which in this case is universities and training.
There’s a second thing I really like about this. As you know, I teach a course on disaster law and policy, and we often talk about infrastructure. And one of the things that I try to convey is that while infrastructure can be made of concrete, machinery, and structures, infrastructure also describes the systems that we use, including these social systems that you are so good at tapping into.
I mean, the whole educational system is an infrastructure. The local people on the ground, as you say, are part of an infrastructure because they have to know how to respond to warnings, how to protect their own property. They have to get out of harm’s way with the government’s help and sometimes without the government’s help.
Tell me, what have you learned over the your time working in this organization? What have you learned about activism, about looking for leverage points, persuading people that maybe aren’t on your side to begin with. Are there any superpowers that you’ve developed that you think are especially helpful to someone in your position?
Rosenthal: Well, I’m really glad you asked that question, because it’s the one thing I really wanted to discuss. But before I do that, I’m going to add to what you just said about infrastructure. There is something called natural infrastructure, and I’m going to name an example, and it’s the natural levees along the Mississippi River. They’re there naturally, and of course. We have to take care of those too. Our natural infrastructure, we don’t want to knock down our natural infrastructure or damage our natural infrastructure. So, I’ve read one of your books—not the recent one, The Octopus in the Parking Garage—the one before that, Facing Catastrophe, which was partly about Hurricane Katrina, and that’s when I first heard the term “natural infrastructure.”
Verchick: And you know what I was talking about at the time was the wetlands, right? I mean, we have the largest continuous coastal wetlands in, in the Lower 48.
Rosenthal: Which are natural infrastructure, yeah, which unfortunately the energy industry did not respect, but that the rest of us do.
But getting back to answering your question, this is one of the things I found out in the past 20 years of working to get the truth out about why New Orleans flooded, is I discovered, you know, I’m a not only a skilled community mobilizer, I’m a really experienced one—meaning I really know how to do it. Okay, and so what I’ve been having a lot of fun doing in the past couple of years is helping other people who have a problem and have no idea what to do, or how to build community support, or even why they need community support. They may not know they need it.
A great example, which into this theme, is there is a couple, a retired couple in Harahan, who every year put up nest gourds, nest boxes, for a songbird called the Purple Martins. They’ve been doing this for 35 years. Well, one neighbor, and not kidding you, decided he didn’t like the inconvenience of a little bird poop and actually managed to get the mayor of Harahan, Louisiana, to file criminal charges against this retired couple. Criminal. Well, when I saw this, I thought I got this, and got to work. The first thing I did is I built a Facebook page to build a community of support for the couple, and I just happened to check it this morning. It’s 300 members. [Now 500+! —ed.]
Verchick: Oh my gosh.
Rosenthal: Three hundred just on Facebook—of people who are there to support this couple and their goal of putting up nest cords once for once a year. The gourds are only there when the birds are in town. The birds are only there for ten weeks and then they’re off. The babies fledge and they go off. And in addition to that, on there’s a platform called Rally Starter, a great platform if any of your listeners aren’t familiar with it, and it’s how to build community support. I set up a petition, people add their name, and automatically it shoots off a letter to the Mayor of Harahan saying, “Please drop the case. Please leave this couple alone.” And that racked up 1,000 supporters in just a couple of days. And then I also have put notices up on Next Door, and I’m sure your listeners have heard of Next Door.
Verchick: Sure. [Well, now you have. —ed.]
Rosenthal: Yeah, very popular platform. And by the way, all of these are free. None of them cost a dime. [On March, 25, 2026, a Harahan court ruled that the nesting gourds created a nuisance, but stopped short of ordering that the gourds be removed. The defendant couple, Carol and Andrew Stramm, plan to appeal. —ed.] So, that’s what I’ve been doing recently. And I’ve been having a lot of fun, because who doesn’t have fun doing what they love to do?
Verchick: That’s an important point, right? I mean, even though we deal with a lot of serious subjects, sometimes it’s getting us in touch with people, it’s getting in touch with our homes and our lives, and there’s something really satisfying about that.
Rosenthal: Meaningful, yeah, meaningful. And also, I’m learning. You know, to be honest—and this is embarrassing—I had never heard of a Purple Martin. And now I could teach a course on it!
Verchick: I love that. That’s what I like about my job too.
Rosenthal: So there you have it, and I hope that my experience has been helpful, even though what I do isn’t purely environmental. I am an environmentalist through and through, ever since I read a single book 40 years ago, 1986. I didn’t share with you that I immediately decided then that I had to use cloth diapers—I had a one-year-old at the time—to the great dismay of my husband.
Verchick: Oh my.
Rosenthal: He was not happy.
Verchick: That’s what my mother-in-law would call a “marital compromise.” Well, that’s great. I’m going to put a link to that book too, so so other people can find it. And Sandy, thank you so much for joining us today, and for taking some time to to inspire us today.
Rosenthal: It was my pleasure. It was a fun conversation.
You are so welcome! I'm rooting for those purple martins (and the levees too)!
I’m glad she read that book 40 years ago!