Posted on 09/04/2005 1:56:57 AM PDT by Crackingham
Whether you like it or not, President Bush's term doesn't end until January 21, 2009. In no way did Katrina or the president's response end his presidency.
Not only did the president respond appropriately, he initiated a proactive response before the hurricane even hit.
I'm aware that liberals like to rewrite history, but it would be nice if they waited say, maybe a month, before doing that.
All this week the defeated liberal media will create all the bogus polls that show people think President Bush did not handle the Hurricane Katrina well, but these are bogus polls and lies that the liberals used to predict that President Bush and the Republicans were going to be crushed in 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections.
WOW! Thank you for posting this.
Hey Andrew, talk nice to Bush and he may tell you when to switch fingers.
Can you name one important battle that liberals and their media whores won against President Bush in the last five years?
Course then again he may not.
The work the levee board and the corp of engineers was working on or trying to fund was improvements that would have only sustained a cat 3 hurricane.
The corp also reported, the areas of the levee that did breach were not the areas of concern.
Do you have a source for the denial by the Klintoon administration? I'm putting together a timeline for the NO levee, and I could use that. Thanks.
***..........Chris Paolino, a spokesman for Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Republican whose district lies just north of New Orleans, said underfunding of Army Corps projects stretched back several decades. "There's been a sense that this is a Louisiana problem, when of course there are national implications," he said. "It hasn't been the national priority it should have been."
Army Corps commander Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock said last week that the uncompleted levee-improvement projects could not be linked to the levee failures. The areas that were breached were at "full project design and were not going to be improved," Strock told reporters in a conference call. "We were just caught by a storm of an intensity which exceeded the design of the [flood protection] project we have in place."
While attention has been focused on the failure of the city's last line of defense, the levees, others are pointing to the deterioration of the area's outer rim of protection against gulf storms: Louisiana's coastal marshes and barrier beaches.
Upriver development and flood-control projects have cut off the flow of river sediments that built the Mississippi delta region to 3.6 million acres over the last 7,000 years. The decision to maintain the river's current path rather than letting it drift westward - done to sustain river commerce in New Orleans and its environs - prevents the broader distribution of sediments.
Marshland has also been affected by oil and gas exploration, which, by carving access channels through the marshlands, exposes it to greater erosion.
With normal erosion at the delta's edges now outstripping new soil deposition, more than a million acres of coastal wetlands have disappeared since 1930 - roughly the size of Rhode Island - and another 300,000 acres are expected to vanish by 2050 if nothing is done.
"These wetlands and barrier islands serve as a natural hurricane protection system," said Scot Faber, a spokesman for Environmental Defense, a New York-based environmental group. "New Orleans will not be safe from another disaster like Hurricane Katrina until we begin to restore this natural hurricane buffer."
The Army Corps and the state of Louisiana are developing ambitious plans to divert river water, and the sediment that goes with it, to help rebuild the marshes and the vanishing barrier islands. There is even talk of transferring dredged sediment from upriver to build up the vanishing delta.
The project would be very costly - an estimated $14 billion, or more than the huge Everglades restoration project. So far, pilot projects for freshwater diversions and island restoration have been funded at only $50 million per year.
But Bahr, the Louisiana coastal official, said it was possible that last week's disaster would build support for such a large investment. After all, the $14 billion price tag doesn't look as big when held against the damage wrought by a single storm like Katrina.
"One side of this tragedy is that the nation is now going to be forced to come to grips with this, the magnitude of this," he said. "Some of us have said in the long run it's going to take a catastrophe to get people to pay attention at the level it is called for ... This is going to get the attention we needed for a long time." ***
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.how04sep04,1,4303548,print.story?coll=bal-home-headlines
Thank you for the information.
Do you think this will be either?
First, from Governor Blanco's press conference today:
I want to introduce you to James Lee Witt. Mr. Witt ran the Federal Emergency Management Agency for eight years from 1993 to 2001. He has more than 25 years of disaster management experience.
I have asked Mr. Witt to advise and assist me and Gen. Landreneau on the recovery effort.
As FEMA director, Mr. Witt turned was credited with turning that agency around. His leadership is proven, his experience is extensive and he is an asset to this recovery effort.
Now that sounds great, doesn't it?
Unless you do a search and find this:
IEM Team to Develop Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan for New Orleans & Southeast Louisiana
June 3, 2004
IEM, Inc., the Baton Rouge-based emergency management and homeland security consultant, will lead the development of a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for Southeast Louisiana and the City of New Orleans under a more than half a million dollar contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
In making the announcement today on behalf of teaming partners Dewberry, URS Corporation and James Lee Witt Associates, IEM Director of Homeland Security Wayne Thomas explained that the development of a base catastrophic hurricane disaster plan has urgency due to the recent start of the annual hurricane season which runs through November. National weather experts are predicting an above normal Atlantic hurricane season with six to eight hurricanes, of which three could be categorized as major.
This is from Howlins earlier post:
Below is a passage from the Houston Chronicle in 2001, which quoted the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the three likeliest potential disasters to threaten America. They were: an earthquake in San Francisco, a terrorist attack in New York City (predicted before 9/11), and a hurricane hitting New Orleans.
I have another quote to share with Andrew:
In 1998, the DoD and the US Army Corps of Engineers drafted a document detailing the fact that New Orleans was protected by levees which were designed to protect N.O. from a LEVEL 3 hurricane. These groups wanted to go into N.O. and assess what needed to be done to improve the levees to at least withstand a LEVEL 4 OR 5 hurricane.
This serious request and supporting information was deemed highly necessary to protect N.O. and was presented in full to the President of the United States for approval of this critical project.
THE REQUEST WAS DENIED BY WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON. For those interested in the details, they are available in the FEDERAL REGISTER as a matter of permanent record.
Every person and every company within 100 miles of New Orleans knew the risks and chose to roll the dice, they just didn't expect it to happen on their watch. They found the money to build a Superdome which was supposed to take 200 mph winds, which it didn't, but they can't find the money to patch the dike. Something tells me fixing the levee wasn't the first thing on their minds UNTIL it broke.
The State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans could find money to promote tourism – but not for levee improvement?
THE REQUEST WAS DENIED BY WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON. For those interested in the details, they are available in the FEDERAL REGISTER as a matter of permanent record.
You may have to check Sandy Burgers shoes if you want to read these documents.
When the levees broke, the nanny State was exposed, individualism and self-sufficiency sank.
Won't ever gain traction because... the Kerry defense will be used, i.e. "I approved it before I didn't approve it." and the idiots will believe that.
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