Posted on 01/24/2007 10:04:10 AM PST by SmithL
Gov. Kathleen Blanco angrily criticized President Bush on Wednesday for not mentioning 2005's destructive hurricanes in his State of the Union speech, and said Louisiana is being shortchanged in federal recovery funding for political reasons.
"I guess the pain of the hurricane is yesterday's news in Washington," Blanco said at a news conference.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Moon Griffon is a conservative radio talk show host here in Louisiana and is heard state wide. This morning he started a publicity for a campaign to run an add in USA Today or possibly the WSJ to apologize to the nation for the ingratitude of our Governor.
That's a pretty odd number you pulled out there. Mind sharing where that number comes from?
Error. It was supposed to be Million.
And it's the number I keep hearing about LA.
I believe the total authorized by Congress for Katrina and Rita assistance is somewhere around 110 billion dollars to be spread among all the states involved, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Louisiana will get the most because they suffered the most damage.
It should be noted though that nowhere near that amount of money has actually been distributed yet. In the end though it certainly amounts to a lot of money. And contrary to popular belief a lot of people down here do appreciate it.
Patiently waiting........
Absolutely! Takes a republican to get things going right. Democrats just sit around and talk.
Come to think of it, you don't hear much from Florida regarding their many, many bad storms. Republican governor.
Blank-O should be investigated for her handling of the recovery money already sent and not paid out!
Her recovery plan is a sweet heart deal for her husbands cronies.
Thank you for posting that link... That was amazing! I've heard rumors about the breech but this really confirmed it.
The thing is, the Corps has to take the bullet for this falure but they have been overwhelmed by NOLA politics. The local pols re-allocated levee funds for their pet projects and the Corps couldn't do a thing about it... This has been going on for decades and was an open secret. The Corps is quite capable but it does the bidding of its masters.
I hear you on that and agree with the capabilities of the Corps but I don't believe that in the final analysis it's anywhere close to being that simple. In every every area of jurisdiction (state in the United States or province if Canada), engineers are bound by a code of ethics. In my area for example, the very first line of the code under the category of 'Duty of Professional Engineer to the Public' states the following.... 'A professional engineer shall regard his (her) duty to public welfare as paramount...' another area of the code to reinforce this further states 'A professional engineer shall make provision for the safety of life and health of a person who may be affected by the work for which he (she) is responsible; and at all times shall act to correct or report a situation which he (she) feels may endanger the safety or the welfare of the public....' The question is whether any engineering ethics issues were breached in this instance.... and just in case you don't realize this, an ethics breach is accompanied by a hearing where the decision is made as to whether or not the specific engineer in question should lose his/her license to practice professional engineering. If for example, the engineers on the original levee project were persuaded by politicians that in the interest of cost reduction, a lower (and unacceptable) level of safety should be allowed to pass, the engineer is still on the hook for responsibility - in this instance, the engineer should have stated at the time this occurred "the tools are being put down, you are asking me to compromise the integrity of the structure and I will not do that as it is an ethics violation for which I could lose my license to practice professional engineering". If on the other hand, the engineer was asked to find some cost reduction methods and was able to come back with all kinds of things that could be eliminated that did not compromise the required safety factors (aesthetic features etc), that would of course be fine. Where it gets murky is with respect to what the overall scope of work the Corps had with the levee project and what responsibility that they had with the longterm integrity of what I'll refer to as the end-product. For example, it may be that they only took responsibility for the initial design or perhaps even the design and installation. Does that mean they are responsible for the design in perpetuity? Who took or should have taken responsibility for preserving the longterm integrity of the levees? Were there all kinds of provisos and warning statements in the original documents that the Corps was to be brought in on a regular basis to conduct inspections? Were they prevented from doing so? Is there backup documentation from the Corps warning that 'post installation' maintenance measures are not being followed through on? Or were there reports from those inspections that clearly define work and remedial measures that were not implemented? I could go on and on but I'm sure you get the picture - it all comes down to the basis of what role the Corps signed on for. I don't have many answers to these questions as it would take far more research than I can afford to spend on this right now. However, I do have one basic belief and that is that Hurricane Katrina did not flood New Orleans. It was a failure of the levees to do what they were designed or should have been designed to do.... beyond that, I won't go further as it gets into all those issues that I've touched on above.
You may well be right and this is consistent with what I just stated in Post 97. However, in terms of allocating direct responsibility for the failure, it gets difficult if one does not go right back to the beginning of what the engineering design basis and understandings were when the levee project(s) was originally conceived.
There's nothing difficult about it at all. When you have a body of water such as the Mississippi that you force into a specific channel and then fail to maintain the channel, there's nothing surprising about the end result. Long ago, Lousyana decided to make decisions about the levees and formed their own commission which was then supposed to make requests of/recommendations to the Corps of Engineers for levee maintenance/upgrades.
For decades, they have mostly frittered the money away and done some grandstanding about the whole thing that was more for show than anything else. It is easy to point the fickle finger of fate at the Corps of Engineers for something that was designed and implemented long before most of us were born. The problem arises from the fact that, over time, Lousyana politicians (among the most corrupt in the country) saw a means to make some money and keep themselves on the public dole by wresting control of the levees away from the Corps of Engineers, but keeping them responsible for the levees. They literally figured out a way to have their cake and eat it, too. Even when the Corps did things that were ill-advised, but at the "request" of the levee commission, the commission members would blame the Engineers for doing what the commissioned asked them to.
As I said, I lived there in the 60s and, back then, we knew that anything stronger than a Cat 3 'cane could cause the levees to breach. The fact that the levees managed to hold back the tide until Katrina is more a miracle than anything else. You simply cannot abuse a system like those levees for as long as they have been abused and still expect them to function.
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