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The Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans was a wake-up call for California, whose capital city of Sacramento faces a similar calamity should its aging and deteriorating river levees be breached by storm surges. To his credit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger acknowledged the potential danger, declared a state of emergency, obtained a half-billion-dollar emergency appropriation to repair the most critical spots along the Sacramento River and its tributaries, persuaded federal authorities to speed up work and then won legislative approval of a $4 billion levee repair bond issue. Rock-filled barges, cranes and other heavy equipment have been working night and day...

Scientists have long said the only way to restore Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands is to undo the elaborate levee system that controls the Mississippi River, not with the small projects that have been tried here and there, but with a massive diversion that would send the muddy river flooding wholesale into the state’s sediment-starved marshes. And most of them have long dismissed the idea as impractical, unaffordable and lethal to the region’s economy. Now, they are reconsidering. In fact, when a group of researchers convened last April to consider the fate of the Louisiana coast, their recommendation was unanimous: divert the...

Forget F911, the left's hypocrisy can be found in HBO's "When the Levees Broke"

Kevin Aylward: Katrina: Forget everything you thought you knew Kevin Aylward, The Examiner Aug 31, 2006 WASHINGTON - If you’ve only gotten your news about Hurricane Katrina from the mainstream media, everything you think you know about Katrina flooding New Orleans is probably wrong. On this first anniversary of the tragedy, while the networks congratulate themselves on their often wildly inaccurate reporting in the days following Katrina, there’s a far more important story not being told. We’ve all heard the story: In the early morning hours of Aug 29, 2005, the Category 4 Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, overwhelming the New...

Officials who OK'd Delta homes illegally failed to consider sea level rise, groups say. Environmental groups plan to file a lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court today claiming that flood-control officials violated state law by allowing major levee modifications in San Joaquin County without considering the effect of global warming. The groups, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, assert that the sea level rise associated with climate change could eventually overtop those levees, putting thousands of people at risk. The suit targets a permit approved June 26 by the state Reclamation Board that cleared the way for the River Islands...

SACRAMENTO State lawmakers are betting that voters eager to avoid a Katrina-style disaster in California will rally behind a $4.1 billion bond on the November ballot to shore up the state's fragile levees. While few experts disagree that California needs to rebuild its aging levee system, an Associated Press review of the bond has found the measure requires voters to take a leap of faith that the state will spend the money the way lawmakers have promised. An extensive examination of the measure, reviews of state and federal studies, and interviews with two dozen water experts, lawmakers and environmentalists have...

California voters will be asked to approve a $4.1 billion levee bond in November. The figure represents a compromise between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had sought about $6.5 billion, and Democratic lawmakers, who had wanted to spend about half that. THE PROBLEM: _ Levee system: A fragile network of 2,300 miles of levees in the state's Central Valley and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is in need of major repairs. The system includes 1,600 miles of levees that were reinforced in the 1960s and 1970s and 700 miles that amount to little more than grassy berms. It was built more than...

Sacramento and New Orleans are 2,000 miles apart. But when the Crescent City was submerged in what the media insisted on calling "toxic gumbo" following Hurricane Katrina, it brought overdue attention to the neglected levees of California's Delta. That's the good news. The bad news is that estimates for the amount of money needed to completely fix the Delta levees could range up to $1.5 trillion, according to Ron Ott, deputy director of the California Bay-Delta Authority. Ott came up with that shocking figure by comparing the Delta system to Holland; that country is in the midst of investing $2.5...

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Opponents of a plan to consolidate the levee boards of southeast Louisiana on Tuesday relaunched their efforts to postpone the plan, four months after the Legislature approved it in the name of ridding the New Orleans area of cronyism and patronage. The levee boards, often blamed for poor upkeep of the levees surrounding New Orleans, were the subject of scrutiny in two special legislative sessions since Hurricane Katrina, with business and community groups calling for their dissolution. The issue became the subject of bitter fights during a special legislative session in February, as Gov. Kathleen...

Corps Takes Blame for Katrina Flooding By CAIN BURDEAU ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW ORLEANS (AP) - 0602dvs-blanco-fp A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data. "This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, `We've had a catastrophic failure,'" Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season. The Corps said...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data. "This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, `We've had a catastrophic failure,'" Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season. The Corps said it will use the lessons it has learned to build better flood...

On Tuesday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the 2006 hurricane season was expected to produce 13 to 16 named storms, including four to six "major" hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher. No leading forecasters came close to predicting what happened in 2005, when 28 tropical storms spawned a record 15 hurricanes. The 2006 forecast for News Orleans was worse than Watson's prediction for the city last year, he said. But for now, he considers the 2005 season an aberration rather than a trend or a definitive sign of effects from global warming. "If it happens again...

Big Questions About the Big Easy Hughes Joseph Hughes chairs the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech and serves on the EPA's environmental engineering advisory committee. He toured the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast with President Wayne Clough in November, spoke to former Alumni Association trustees in January and recently sat down with the ALUMNI MAGAZINE. Hughes now is helping coordinate a conference that will address the future of New Orleans.What is Georgia Tech's role in the rebuilding of New Orleans? We're at the stage right now in the discussion where there are real questions whether we should rebuild...

In just eight months, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has done years of work on the Katrina-battered ramparts around New Orleans. The Corps has repaired 169 miles of damaged levee. Replaced long stretches of inadequate concrete floodwall with a much sturdier design. Installed 70-ton gates at the mouths of ruptured drainage canals. But it isn't good enough. Even the man who has led the monumental effort to bring the Big Easy's hurricane protection infrastructure back to pre-Katrina standards says so. The defenses are "better, stronger and more resilient" than ever, said Col. Lewis Setliff. "But I'm only fixing about...

With the May revision of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget for 2006-2007 due out in just days, he is facing a new issue: What to do with the surplus of tax revenues currently flowing into the state treasury? With history as his guide, he must focus some of that revenue on essential one-time projects that do not plunge California into ongoing commitments that could jeopardize California's current fiscal stability. The governor could hit another home run for Californians by allocating a portion of the state revenue increase to levee repair -- something we have all become too aware is a...

The Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations have reached agreement on accelerating environmental reviews that state officials say will allow critical levee repairs to start in July and end by November first. On April 21st, President Bush directed several federal agencies to speed up their reviews under the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Protection Act and other federal laws. It sets out what is called a "critical path timeline" meant to "ensure completion of all regulatory processes" by June 21st. State officials said today that without the agreement, it could have taken a year, or up to four...

NEW ORLEANS (UPI) -- New Orleans levees completed in the 1980s and 1990s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were not designed for a sinking city, a report says. The design decision was made in 1985 by Frederick Chatry, then the head of engineering for the New Orleans district, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. The corps was in the midst of a massive project building levees and flood walls that had been authorized by Congress in 1965. In 1985, the U.S. Geodetic Survey released a new map that put the baseline elevation of New Orleans as much as a...

Interview with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on ABC This Week with George Stephanopoulos, April 23, 2006 Transcript below. Video available at ABC website: STEPHANOPOULOS: (intro): Our next guest California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He marked Earth Day this weekend with a beach clean up in San Pedro, a day after meeting up with President Bush in San Jose. As they both try to recover from record low approval ratings, Schwarzenegger and Bush are locked in an uneasy embrace. When I sat down with the Governor in Sacramento before his summit with the president, it was clear that Schwarzenegger thinks the key to...

SACRAMENTO – Federal officials still are not taking seriously the threat of a failure in California's aging levee system and are risking another New Orleans-style disaster by failing to provide funding for repairs, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Tuesday. During a visit to California last week, President Bush turned down the governor's request for a pre-emptive federal disaster declaration. Instead, he issued a rare directive letting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers help with badly needed levee repairs. Schwarzenegger also met privately with Bush, but he said Tuesday that the message isn't resonating with the administration. He did not mention the...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sharply criticized the Bush administration Saturday for refusing his request to declare a pre-emptive federal disaster for California's fragile levees. President Bush offered California some aid Friday, issuing a rare directive letting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers help with badly needed levee repairs. "I think the response that the federal government has given us is unacceptable," the governor told reporters at an Earth Day event on a San Pedro beach. "We need the federal government to come in and help us so we can build the levees as quickly as possible." Schwarzenegger said the state would...