Posted on 08/30/2005 7:04:35 PM PDT by My Favorite Headache
Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues
By Will Bunch
Published: August 30, 2005 9:00 PM ET
PHILADELPHIA Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans late on Tuesday. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it's level with the massive lake.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming....Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
“That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.”
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late.
One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.
The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night noted that local officials were saying that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Will Bunch (letters@editorandpublisher.com) is senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News. This article, in a different form, also appears on his blog at that newspaper, Attytood.
I was going to type a snide/smart comment - but I am actually without words. This is quite possibly the most obsurd thing I have read or heard all day.
I really WANT the left-wing looney-tunes Bush-bashers to keep it up. Every time they say something they reach a higher plateau of stupidity. They will eventually lose because everyone will be laughing so hard at them their message won't get through.
It's not nice to fool with Mother Rove either...
Hmmmm....
Now that you mention it, I thought he looked a little...."funny".
ping
It would be funny if it weren't for the fact that many people do think this way, and articles like this perpetuate that thinking.
And so it begins....
wouldnt have mattered since that state is so corrupt even if they did build up to date systems they would have been built sub standard and signed off by a corrupt building official. At which point they would have failed anyway.
Wasn't the Kyoto Treaty drafted during the Clinton administration? And didn't Bill wisely refuse to sign it? So why isn't all this his fault?
They've been spending money for 40 years and couldn't get the job done? Seems as though the money was squandered.
I'm still trying to figure out how a State problem is the Federal government's fault?
What else is his fault? Perhaps that he's not fighting back.
And I thought it was Halliburton with top secret weather control equipment in Dick Cheney's basement trying to boost the profits of George Bush's oil buddies. Figures. Jeb Bush had no businees letting that hurricane go past Florida...
The Kyoto treaty banned hurricanes...
The federal government has jurisdiction over our navigable rivers and inland waterways. And the Army Corps of Engineers is tasked with building/operating/maintaining a vast system of locks, dams and levees to control the flow of water as best they can.
There is no way of knowing for certain, of course, whether the proposed levee improvements would have withstood the catastrophic forces of Katrina. But you would have to assume that upgrades and improvements would have fared better than postponement of those projects.
Bottom line: the Bush Administration IS responsible for placing a lower priority on maintainence of this domestic infrastructure. There's not much that can be done now except to sit back and watch the administration apologists squirm, spin, dodge, dance and weave their way out of accepting responsibility for not addressing these infrastructure issues.
And people wonder why we jokingly say "It's Bush's Fault" on every bad news thread.
We live with the same stupid attitude in NC. Fools build their houses in areas prone to disaster and then whine when the government doesn't take care of them. A pox on all of them.
"It makes no sense to build a city below sea level and in a vulnerable location. Let's take ALL the public money now being spent on illegal aliens and use it to relocate the devastated Americans!"
Or...why don't we let in another million aliens, send them to NO and give them a pail and have them start bailing. Might save some money on new pumps.
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