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.
Just thinking the same thing.....these people are truly out of touch with reality.....
Yes, but the government's been sending money to La. for 40 years. Other than building the Great Wall of Louisiana, I doubt that extra money could have saved N.O.
It's time to let that land go back to being a swamp, which is what it wants to be. Spending billions on walls and pumps to keep that pit dry is folly. The left is so involved with preserving wetlands. This is the time for them to speak up for one of their favorite causes.
This is a real crap shoot. If you had a list of everything in the country which needed to be done to prevent tragedy, it would be very long. There's not enough funding to take care of everything. Nor will there ever be. The government has to prioritize. When a disaster strikes, it is a random occurance whether or not something on the list may have prevented it. When is happens we can point to the government for it's failure to do something, no matter how impractical it would have been. Human nature and fodder for idiots who want to score political points.
He's gotten sucked into the liberal blogger mindset where they race to be the first to come up with new Bush-bashing columns, instead of stepping back from the abyss and putting a sock in it during a catastrophe like this one.
Your point??
Of course it is. I remember reading where he planned the layout of N.O. and how he said it was a good idea to build on land that was below sea level if they put in levee's and pumps and not to worry about being so close to the Gulf because a Hurricane would never make land fall there.
Sorry, I just could not help the sarcasm.
Kyoto was rejected 98-0. Robert Kennedy Jr. must be back on the Heroin.
If the people of New Orleans & Louisiana chose to live there, then they should have raised the money thru taxes or whatever to build the appropriate safeguards. The idea that everything is laid at Washngton's doorstep is poisonous to the individual effort and local initiatives that built the USA.
People in Philly have to blame Bush, it's actually Fast Eddy's fault!
It doesn't much matter if it was 40 years or 400 years.
Anything that Man builds MUST be maintained or else it deteriorates and eventually fails.
Bush has got some hard work in front of him and I will
support him but it seems to me he has made some gaffes
and bad p.r. as of late.
If it comes out money meant for N.O. went to Iraq he has
got to over come that and roll up his sleeves and help
the Gulf Coast.
Low ball estimates of costs in Iraq are 100 million a day.
That may begin to bother the American people even people
here. As for me it has not but it is still early on
the disaster in the Gulf...we may have to make some
hard choices...bond drives...etc.
“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.”
This writer is so dumb that he inadvertantly includes material that argues against his Bush-bashing case. Here he admits that as of 2004 more research was needed to figure out how to shore up NOLA's levee system and that the research would take FOUR YEARS to complete. So of course even if this research project had been fully funded it never would have been completed in time to help with Katrina. Apparently nobody in Louisiana really knew what to do to stop a Cat 4 or 5 hurricane from flooding the city and they've never done enough research to figure it out. They've been too busy having a good time in Lousiana all these years while neglecting the vulnerability of New Orleans. (Not that I blame them for having a good time.) I'll bet you all that much of the federal money spent on flood control in Lousiana has been wasted on costly pork-barrel projects spread around the state over the past 30 years.
Then there's the sentence where the author writes "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." Well if the contarctor has been "racing to finish" then he must have had enough funding and the problem is the project should have been started ten years ago when Slick Willy was POTUS. Oh I forgot...Slick Willy was doing political grandstanding and buying back 30-year treasury bonds with all the capital gains taxes from the stock market boom/bust of 2000. Not to mention that the Dept. of Education "lost" $9 billion during the Clinton years and doesn't know where it went. (Somebody stole it DUmmies!.) Do you think it would have been worth continuing to pay interest on some bonds so New Orleans could improve its levee system?
Yeah, and what party has had a stranglehold on state and local politics since forever? It certainly ain't the Republicans. There has been nothing but incompetence in the running of that city for years. They could have made sure those levees were shored up. They've had enough near misses with hurricanes over the last 20 years to work on them.
The human toll is only part of the damage. The loss of buildings and basicly their whole civilization was due to failed structures that are alleged to have been left unfixed because of spending on Iraq. That's the argument they are making. That Bush told people to leave doesn't mitigate that much. You could argue that Iraq was necessary and more important an outlay, but that's what you'd have to argue.
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