BigC Disco's
Bitch
Registered: Feb
2005 Location:
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Levee funding under
Bush
Did New
Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had
Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues
By
Will Bunch
Published: August 30, 2005 9:00 PM ET
PHILADELPHIA Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved
well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in
New Orleans late on Tuesday. That's because Lake Pontchartrain
continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main
levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the
Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide
may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to
flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the
federal government has been working with state and local
officials in the region since the late 1960s on major
hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a
massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress
authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control
Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army
Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430
million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations,
with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in
crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the
Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees
surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.HURRICANE
COVERAGE
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars
toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to
hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq,
as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as
federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least
nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005
specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of
hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Newhouse News
Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The
Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't
see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms
ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of
preparation."
In early 2004, as the cost of the
conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less
than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake
Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New
Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri,
emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana;
told the 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."
Also that June, with the 2004
hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi
went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee
Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent
work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June
18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"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," he said. "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
panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to
pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the
levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay
for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted
in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a
hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of
Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the
worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government
came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane
and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because
of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring
freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA
project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not
enough to start any new jobs.
There was, at the same
time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to
see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category
4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As
the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
"That
second study would take about four years to complete and would
cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project
manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed
for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to
match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the
Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office
not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer
includes the needed money, he said."
The Senate was
seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But
now it's too late.
One project that a contractor had
been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job
right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on
Monday.
The Newhouse News Service article published
Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional
delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a
stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be
opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush
administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for
southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush
proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say
they need."
Local officials are now saying, the
article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings
about the dire need for hurricane protection, including
building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage
might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to
be."
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