Posted on 04/12/2007 4:54:08 PM PDT by Ellesu
NEW ORLEANS - To better protect the nation from flooding and hurricanes, the Army Corps of Engineers, and by extension politicians who push pork-barrel projects on the agency, need to acknowledge that the world is heating up and seas are rising, a report by two environmental groups said.
The report, released Thursday by Environmental Defense and the National Wildlife Federation, was a compendium of complaints against the agency that have gained momentum since its catastrophic engineering mistakes caused about 88 percent of the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
The policy analysis said that unless the corps prioritizes its projects to base them on flood risk, more disasters like Katrina will occur as the seas become more dangerous and flood- control structures are taxed by heavier rains and bigger spring floods.
"As climate change raises the stakes, Congress and the corps must make difficult decisions to upgrade and prioritize flood-control projects," the report said.
During a visit to New Orleans for a congressional hearing Thursday, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the head of the corps, said his agency takes into account "physical changes in the environment, whatever the causes," such as sea level rise.
The report cited the latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists. The IPCC says the world is experiencing rising sea levels, the disappearance of species and intensifying natural disasters because of global warming.
Corps spokesman Dana Cruikshank said corps scientists had served on the U.N. network. "They continue to be engaged with scientists from other agencies and academia on the interpretation of climate change science studies, and the implications of climate-change science to the corps mission," Cruikshank said.
With Congress debating legislation that funds corps projects nationwide, the environmentalists' report said lawmakers need to overhaul the corps and enact changes to the nation's water policy.
David Conrad, a senior resource specialist with the National Wildlife Federation, said the United States is at a "key point in history" to overhaul the corps in a way Congress threw out the old playbooks on national security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"Imagine if Congress had done nothing after 9/11?" Conrad said.
But unlike the reaction to 9/11, Conrad said, the House, and to a lesser extent the Senate, have crammed pork-barrel projects into the proposed Water Resources Development Act, the legislation that covers most things to do with the corps.
Jennifer Kefer, a water resources policy consultant for Environmental Defense, said the House version has tacked on $15 billion in new projects despite a backlog of $58 billion in work already weighing down the corps.
Besides, she said, adding new projects isn't the solution to the agency's failures; instead, the corps ought to focus on the most critical work.
For example, the report said Louisiana got $1.9 billion under the corps budget in the five years before Katrina struck, but only 1 percent of that money was spent on New Orleans' levees.
And a pork-barrel mentality is alive and well today, the report said. In the new WRDA bill, $205 million has been set aside to deepen a channel to the Port of Iberia in southwest Louisiana "even though the corps recognizes its chief economic benefits consist of stealing existing business from ports in Texas," the report said.
Other ill-conceived spending projects include a $108 million floodway in Missouri to benefit farmers at the expense of 75,000 acres of wetlands even though it would not prevent flooding, the report said. In Mississippi, the corps wants to drain 200,000 acres of wetlands to create more farmland, the report said.
"Strikingly, the corps has not identified a single home that would be relieved of flooding once the project is built," the report said of the Yazoo Pumps projects in Mississippi.
Meanwhile, in California, the report said, a "major overhaul" of the San Joaquin-Sacramento flood-control system is needed but the corps, citing a lack of funds, has balked at undertaking the work, leaving other entities, such as the state, to tackle the problem.
I don’t accept your hypothesis..I say prove it first!
Nuts! There is no global warming no matter how many times it is said.
Not so sure. There may indeed be a slight warming, but it is NOT caused by CO2/humans.
All the more reason to have NOT rebuilt that cesspool of Liberalism
Of course the world is changing - sometimes getting warmer/sometimes getting colder. However, in today’s politics, “global warming” means the AlGore type warming - manmade - which is crazy. In the true sense of the word, we may be in for a warm period. But in the sense of environmental whackos and their consensus science, there is no global warming.
Hmm maybe they made a mistake about a hurricane with a force that hasn’t been seen in America for years if that, or maybe the people that live in the swamps of Louisiana made a mistake for living in an environment that could be flooded by Rosie O’Donnell jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. :)
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