Leadership Quote by Billy Tauzin

Urgency is doing a lot of rhetorical heavy lifting here, almost to the point of laundering accountability. Tauzin frames the crisis as a pure logistics problem: water must be "channeled away" from "population and businesses", and the solution is to "build quickly the interim structures". It reads like a press-briefing sentence engineered to sound decisive while staying safely abstract. No villains, no failures, no mention of why New Orleans is underwater in the first place. Just the reassuring promise of motion.

The word "interim" is the key tell. It lowers the bar from durable protection to temporary triage, a move that fits the post-disaster political imperative: show action now, postpone the reckoning. "Structures" is similarly antiseptic, a catch-all that avoids the politically charged specifics (levees, floodwalls, the Army Corps, maintenance budgets). Even "in my humble opinion" functions less as humility than as a preemptive shield: it softens the speaker's authority just enough to dodge blame if the plan falters, while still claiming the moral posture of practicality.

Context matters: Tauzin, a Louisiana congressman and prominent Washington operator, is speaking from within a system that had long treated Gulf Coast resilience as negotiable - expensive until it became catastrophic. The quote's intent is to focus attention on immediate engineering fixes, but its subtext is political risk management: define the emergency as water management, not governance. It works because it sounds like competence under pressure, even as it narrows the conversation to what can be built fast rather than what should have been built years earlier.