Posted on 09/08/2005 3:54:05 PM PDT by Rodney King
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a massive new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.
Except barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing...
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
"The Army Corps of Engineers is a disgrace to the Army."
WTF do you know?
I'm assuming that the Army Corps of Engineers does what they're told and weren't the ones making the decisions.
I'm rather fond of the Army Corps of Engineers. I think bureaucracy gets in their way of doing the projects they'd like to be doing.
I've seen the political process that goes into those projects. The local government is the primary hang up.
I see this article says nothing about how the environmentalist groups successfully sued the Army Corps of Engineers from doing any improvements on the levees because it would adversely effect the wetlands. I'd say that when the courts wouldn't allow them to work on improving the levees, they moved on to other projects.
Plenty. They spend all day telling people that the puddles on their land are really wetlands and that you can't build anything.
Snip...From Washington Post.....
Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large. Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon. For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations. The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River -- now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project's congressional godfather -- for barge traffic that is less than forecast
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Snip...From Washington Post.....
Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large. Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon. For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations. The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River -- now known as the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway, in honor of the project's congressional godfather -- for barge traffic that is less than forecast
.
OMG please post an article about this! That would be sweet! I would love to add more RAt finger prints to this mess.
In 1998, the Corps justified its plan to build a new lock -- rather than fix the old lock for a tiny fraction of the cost -- by predicting huge increases in barge traffic. In fact, barge traffic on the canal had been plummeting since 1994, but the Corps left that data out of its study.
The 17th Street Canal breach flooded the whole City of New Orleans because the wind-driven tide from the backside of Hurricane Katrina across Lake Pontchartrain was driven into the Canal, and from there it flowed into the City.
If there had been a lock at the head of that Canal, the only leakage into the City would have been just the water in the Canal itself, NOT the larger and higher contents of the whole Lake.
With typical inability to think logically and long-term, this lib-writer rails against the Corps of Engineers without realizing that this lock would have (maybe inadvertently) saved the City if it had been in place.
Congressman Billybob
Anyone know a good web site to look that stuff up?
I'm in MA, but with our boondoggle Big Dig, MA can't complain (since I'm not from here, don't blame me for the Big Dig).
As a matter of fact, I think we should blame sKerry and the Bloated One for the NOLA flooding.
Think of all the money NOLA could have spent on flood control if MA hadn't sucked 14 to 15 BILLION dollars out of the Federal budget (well, MA may have chipped in a little).
Environmentalists have a lot to answer for. Their agenda has been as much about money and power as any care for the environment.
Exactly - before people jump all over the Army Corps of Engineers we need to know a lot more about the cesspool of LA politicians who surely pressured for the projects that THEY wanted. Many many billions have been spent in LA on Corps projects without any of the pols clamoring for Category 5 protection for NOLA, so far as I know....
But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate.
Yes, I've been telling people that if they want to know why more dollars weren't available for NOLA protection it makes no sense to talk about Iraq (which is only in the past 2+ years when it was far too late to give NOLA a level of protection adequate to this emergency)..... people need to talk about all the other domestic 'priorities' funded in the billions by people like Kennedy, Kerry, and lots of other pols (both Republican and Democrat, certainly, but the 'Rats have many of the worst porkers). Let's see Kennedy and Kerry and all of the 'Rat delegation from MA explain why the "Big Dig" was such a higher priority than NOLA....
Bush didn't make any mistakes. He obeyed the law. Those who want to argue the LAW is at fault may have a case but to blame Bush for operating inside the restraints the law placed on him is intellectually dishonest of the Hysteric Left.
I grew up in a town of around 300 people. In town was a little millpond of about 3 acres. The earthen dam washed out and the pond sat empty for about 2 years. The Army Corp of Engineers came in and rebuilt the dam better than it was before. It will probably be there for hundreds of years.
The township looked at their options and found that the Corps would do the job for less than half of what anybody else would do it for (about 1 million). Somewhere around here I have a photo of the pond and the dam.
There has been a battle between Army Corps of Engineers and BOR for generations. BOR knows how to build dams. ACE how to build earthen dams. Earthen Dams fail... they have failed in the past and they failed here.
What they SHOULD do is bring in BOR and have them do this job right. If they insist on rebuilding, then something like the big dam on the Brazil/Paraguay Border might work... It was built on a river very similar to the Mississippi and specially designed since it didn't have high walls to anchor to... the biggest thing was getting down to bedrock -- and bedrock is the only way to guarantee this won't be a repeat.
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