O.T. The Truth About The Levees
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Font Size: Breaks in the Levee Logic By Duane D. Freese Published 09/02/2005 The news and opinion spin cycle is moving faster than the winds of a category 4 hurricane. Barely have we had the opportunity to feel denial about the terrible tragedy, feel sympathy for victims and begin lending our support than we’ve leapt to the stage of recrimination: Who’s to blame? And the rush to judgment is running ahead of appropriate investigation and facts. Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, raised the question "Did the New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen?" He quoted Louisiana officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the New Orleans area in old Tiimes-Picayune’s stories complaining about cuts by the Bush administration in federal funding for levees and flood protection, particularly ACE’s Alfred Naomi, stating in June 2004: "The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement. The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t raise them." The New York Times, in its lead editorial Thursday titled "Waiting for a Leader," churlishly went after President Bush for his first speech which it called terrible. It went on to pretend it knew what New Orleans’ problem was — a lack of federal funding. Specifically it called for the House to restore $70 million in funds for the levees next year. The Washington Post, in an editorial that talked about not casting blame now, nonetheless couldn’t resist casting some, saying the "president’s most recent budgets have actually proposed reducing funding for flood prevention in the New Orleans area, and the administration has long ignored Louisiana politicians’ request for more help in protecting their fragile coast." USA Today did a better job in a pair of edits — one on the disaster response and one on the energy supply — by recognizing that the state and local government had a roll in building Louisiana’s infrastructure. On energy, it even went so far as to say some things some anti-oil groups hate to hear — how obstructionists to development of new refineries, offshore and Alaskan energy supplies share the blame for the nation’s reliance on Gulf Coast supplies. But it, too, got caught up in the drumbeat about the levees, arguing: "[P]eople living along the Gulf Coast have grown up hearing about what could happen if the ‘big one’ hit the region. Yet the levees weren’t raised or strengthened sufficiently to prevent flooding. Initial plans for evacuating the city and ensuring civil order were haphazard at best." Indeed, if editorial writers had a comment to make it was to say something about the levees. And why not? The levees broke, didn’t they? That’s what helped mess up the rescue effort, didn’t it? And there were cuts in federal help, weren’t there? The answers to all these questions are yes. But, the fact is, they miss an important point, which The New York Times editorialists might have discovered had they read their own news story by Andrew Revkin and Christopher Drew. The reporters quoted Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, about how surprising it was that the break in the levee was "a section that was just upgraded." "It did not have an earthen levee," he told them. "It had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick." Worse for the editorial writers were statements by the chief engineer of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Lt. Gen Carl Strock: "I don’t see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case. Had this project been fully complete, it is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm that the flooding of the business district and the French Quarter would have still taken place." The reason: the funding would only have completed an upgrade of the levees to a protect against a level 3 hurricane. Katrina was a level 4 plus. And the reasons for this goes back decades. Since the 1930s, when levee building began in earnest, Louisiana has lost a million acres of its coastal wetlands, and faces the loss of another 640,000 additional acres — an area the size of Rhode Island — by 2050. A new study based on satellite measurement released in May found that the wetlands area was sinking at a half-inch to two-inches a year as of 1995, or up to more than a 1.5 feet a decade. "If subsidence continues and/or sea level rises and human action fails to take place, the entire coast will be inundated," Roy Dokka of the Louisiana Spatial Reference Center at Louisiana State University and an author of the study noted in July. And he went on in a Times-Picayune piece that columnist Bunch apparently failed to examine: "The current plans to save the coast are focused on fixing wetlands, which is incredibly important, but the problem is that subsidence is affecting the entire coast. We need to combine those plans with regional hurricane levees and sand shoals. We have to find some way to protect the people and valuable infrastructure we have on the coast." This echoes a point that was raised by the White House Office of Management and Budget in a review of the Corps of Engineers levee and flood work back in 2003. It noted that while the Corps managed projects that reduced flood damage to specific areas, annual flood damages to the nation were increasing. As such, it wanted the Corps — though well-managed — to broaden its approach by coordinating with federal flood mitigation efforts — to be "more pro-active in preventing flood risks rather than reacting to them." The regional Corps head so often quoted by the media himself said in 2003 that a project to protect the city from a category 4 or 5 storm would take 30 years to complete, with the feasibility study alone costing $8 million and taking six years to complete. At the time he opined, "Hopefully we won’t have a major storm before then." As for the $14 billion plan called Coastal 2050 for wetlands restoration that Louisiana politicians have been pushing for the last two years for the federal government to provide a stream of funds — up to 65% of the cost — some experts say it was only a stop-gap. "We are not going to stop marsh loss. Subsidence is too dominant," James Coleman, a professor of coastal studies at Louisiana State University, told the Times Picayune a few years ago. Coastal restoration "is a temporary fix in terms of geological time. You will see results of massive coastal restorations in our lifetime, but in the long run they are also going to go." Indeed, those interested in getting a taste of the complexity of New Orleans situation, a good place to start is to read "The Creeping Storm" by Greg Brouer in the June 2003 Civil Engineering Magazine: "During the past 40 years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a barrier around the low-lying city of New Orleans to protect it from hurricanes. But is the system high enough? And can any defense ultimately protect a city that is perpetually sinking — in some areas at a rate of half an inch (editor’s note: Or up to 2 inches) per year?" We know the answer to the first question now — obviously not. The answer to the second question will require more investigation. It would be nice if some editorial writers would perform a little more. Snap judgments in this situation are worse than no judgment at all. http://www.techcentralstation.com/090205F.html begin 666 font-size2.gif ` end
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Funding cuts led way to lesser levees – http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-050831corps-story,…. WASHINGTON — Despite continuous warnings that a catastrophic hurricane could hit New Orleans, the Bush administration and Congress in recent years have repeatedly cut funding for hurricane preparation and flood control. The cuts have delayed construction of levees around the city and stymied an ambitious project to improve drainage in New Orleans’ neighborhoods. For instance, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million for this fiscal year to pay for hurricane protection projects around Lake Pontchartrain. The Bush administration countered with $3.9 million, and Congress eventually provided $5.7 million, according to figures provided by the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). Because of the budget cuts, which were caused in part by the rising costs of the war in Iraq, the corps delayed seven contracts that included enlarging the levees, according to corps documents. Much of the devastation in New Orleans was caused by breaches in the levees, which sent water from Lake Pontchartrain pouring into the city. Since much of the city is below sea level, the levee walls acted like the walls of a bowl that filled until as much as 80 percent of the city was under water. Similarly, the Army Corps requested $78 million for this fiscal year for projects that would improve draining and prevent flooding in New Orleans. The Bush administration’s budget provided $30 million for the projects, and Congress ultimately approved $36.5 million, according to Landrieu’s office. "I’m not saying it wouldn’t still be flooded, but I do feel that if it had been totally funded, there would be less flooding than you have," said Michael Parker, a former Republican Mississippi congressman who headed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from October 2001 until March 2002, when he was ousted after publicly criticizing a Bush administration proposal to cut the corps’ budget. A corps plan to shore up the levees began in 1965 and was supposed to be finished in 10 years but remains incomplete. "They’ve never put enough money in to complete it," Parker said. He complained that the corps’ budget has been regularly targeted by the White House because public works projects are perceived as pork and aren’t considered "sexy." "Go talk to the people who are suffering in New Orleans," Parker said. "Ask them, `Do they think it’s pork?’ " Joseph Suhayda, an emeritus engineering professor at Louisiana State University who has worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, said the corps simply didn’t have enough money to build the levees as high as the designs called for. "The fact that they weren’t that high was a result of lack of funding," he said, noting that part of the levee at the 17th Street Canal–where one of the breaches occurred–was 4 feet lower than the rest. "I think they could have significantly reduced the impact if they had those projects funded. If you need to spend $20 million and you spend $4 or $5 million, something’s got to give."
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"Mr Soul" tried but failed to cop out for the DemocRATs again: > Funding cuts led way to lesser levees -<
Remaining lefist cop-out horsehit snipped. New Orleans has existed since the early 1700’s, bush has been in office 5 years. For the remaioning 295 or so years, how much money did the douchs bag DemocRATS (who’ve run the place sine before Andy Jackson saved their asses) put in place to reinforce the levvees? How much money dois the DemoDOUCHES allocate to reinforce the levee system when they controled Congress and all the money for 30+ years? Oh, NOTHING? How quant! No, what money they did allocate passed on to the filty leftist scum that run Loisiana and New Orleans and went to boats, houses, hookers, dope, and payoffs to mob bosses. Nice company you losers run with…..the blood’s on YOUR hands.
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blah blah I hate everybody, I wish I had my leg, it’s those fucking liberals fault I don’t.
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