Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett
“The Big Uneasy” marks the beginning of the end of five years of ignorance about what happened
to one of our nation’s most treasured cities ─
to one of our nation’s most treasured cities ─
and serves as a stark reminder that
the same agency that failed to protect New Orleans
still exists in other cities across America.
─ International Documentary Association─
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on an August morning five years ago. Floods broke through catastrophically failed levees. Eighty percent of the city and large tracts of neighboring parishes fell gradually under raging waters. Floodwaters lingered for weeks. In his feature-length documentary ‘The Big Uneasy,’ Harry Shearer goes to the people in the storm and “gets the inside story of a disaster that could have been prevented.”
Shearer talks with investigators who poked through the muck as the water receded and a whistleblower from the Army Corps of Engineers, revealing that some of the same flawed methods responsible for the levee failure during Katrina are being used to rebuild the system expected to protect the New Orleans from future peril.
Shearer’s mix of documents and previously unseen footage and new interviews with people such as the former deputy director of the [Louisiana State University] Hurricane Center and a whistleblower at the Army Corps of Engineers produces, what Kevin Allman calls, “a damning report on the Corps, its disastrous civil engineering and the sad outcome for the New Orleans metro area.…
“Defective pumps: do you remove them and leave the city with no protection while new ones are built, or do you work with what you have? Can Americans understand (or will they care) about the difference between Option 1 and Option 2 levees … What of the American cities protected by the more than 100 other levees maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers? How safe are other places ─ How will we know?”
“The Big Uneasy,” Allman writes at the Best of New Orleans website, answers many questions and raises others about failures of the levees.
Shearer presents a straightforward account, Allman says; “but, as a near-full-time resident of New Orleans, it is clear where [Shearer’s] sympathies lie. His hurt and outrage are palpable, despite his documentarian, dispassionate tone.”
“The Big Uneasy” opens, simultaneously, in theaters across the United States on Monday, August 30. After a 7:30 p.m. screening at New Orleans’ Prytania Theater, Shearer will appear for a question and answer session.
Sources and notes
Harry Shearer, self-described, is “first and foremost an actor [and] also an author, director, satirist, musician, radio host, playwright, multi-media artist and record label owner.” http://www.harryshearer.com/about/
The Big Uneasy Event Type: Screening, 08/30/2010 @ 7:00 pm to 11:00 pm, International Documentary Association, August 26, 2010, http://www.documentary.org/calendar/big-uneasy
http://www.screenvision.com/s/showing/TheBigUneasy/; http://www.screenvision.com/s/showing/register/
“The Big Uneasy Harry Shearer’s documentary premieres nationally” (Kevin Allman), August 23, 2010, http://bestofneworleans.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A80196
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