Posted on 09/04/2005 1:56:57 AM PDT by Crackingham
Like many seismic events, Katrina’s true impact might take a while to absorb. What started as a natural disaster soon became an unforeseen social meltdown and potential political crisis for the president. The poverty, anarchy, violence, sewage, bodies, looting, death and disease that overwhelmed a great American city last week made Haiti look like Surrey. The seeming inability of the federal or city authorities to act swiftly or effectively to rescue survivors or maintain order posed fundamental questions about the competence of the Bush administration and local authorities. One begins to wonder: almost four years after 9/11, are evacuation plans for cities this haphazard? Five days after a hurricane, there were still barely any troops imposing order in a huge city in America. How on earth did this happen? And what will come of it?
In the past, American disasters have led to political changes — the Johnstown flood in 1889 and the Galveston hurricane in 1900 led to fury at class privilege and a government that seemed not to care for the poor. The 1927 flood in New Orleans — and the inequalities it exposed — propelled the rise of the populist demagogue Huey Long. There seems to me a strong chance that this calamity could be the beginning of something profound in American politics: a sense that government is broken and that someone needs to fix it. It did, after all, fail. It failed to spend the necessary money to protect New Orleans in the first place. This disaster, after all, did not come out of the blue.
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.
Read this prophetic passage and weep: “The New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all. In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20ft of water.
“Thousands of refugees could land in Houston. Economically, the toll would be shattering . . . If an Allison-type storm were to strike New Orleans, or a category three storm or greater with at least 111mph winds, the results would be cataclysmic, New Orleans planners said.”
Katrina, of course, was category four.
So what was done to prevent this scenario? There was indeed an attempt to rebuild and strengthen the city’s defences. But the system of government in New Orleans is byzantine in its complexity, with different levees answering to different authorities, and corruption and incompetence legendary.
More politically explosive, the Bush administration has slashed the budget for rebuilding the levees. More than a year ago, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the New Orleans 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.”
It’s still unclear whether even with higher levels of funding the levees would have been strong enough to withstand Katrina in time. The Army Corps of Engineers has backed the president and said that the levees were built for only a category three hurricane and were in satisfactory shape. But levees need constant maintenance and an agency with a one-year budget cut of $71m might have skimped. The connection between shifting funds to fight wars abroad rather than to defend against calamity at home is a politically explosive one. As one Louisianan said: “You can do everything for other countries, but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military, but you can’t get them down here.”
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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