silents of buddy don: caint do nuthin but cut n paste

Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues

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.

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."

Planning, Response Are Faulted

Tens of thousands of people remain stranded on the streets of New Orleans in desperate conditions because officials failed to plan for a serious levee breach and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was slow, according to disaster experts and Louisiana government officials.

Though experts had long predicted that the city -- which sits mostly below sea level and is surrounded by water -- would face unprecedented devastation after an immense hurricane, they said problems were worsened by a late evacuation order and insufficient emergency shelter for as many as 100,000 people.

Terry Ebbert, head of New Orleans's emergency operations, said the response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency was inadequate and that Louisiana officials have been overwhelmed.

"This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control," Ebbert told the Associated Press as he watched refugees evacuate the Superdome yesterday. "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans. We have got a mayor who has been pushing and asking, but we're not getting supplies."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin sent out a frustrated plea for help yesterday as thousands of people remained marooned at the city's Convention Center in the heat and filth, with as many as seven corpses nearby.

"This is a desperate SOS. Right now we are out of resources at the Convention Center and don't anticipate enough buses. Currently the Convention Center is unsanitary and unsafe and we are running out of supplies for 15,000 to 25,000 people," Nagin said in a statement read by CNN.

Critics Say Bush Undercut New Orleans Flood Control

President Bush repeatedly requested less money for programs to guard against catastrophic storms in New Orleans than many federal and state officials requested, decisions that are triggering a partisan debate over administration priorities at a time when the budget is strained by the Iraq war.

Even with full funding in recent years, none of the flood-control projects would have been completed in time to prevent the swamping of the city, as Democrats yesterday acknowledged. But they said Bush's decision to hold down spending on fortifying levees around New Orleans reflected a broader shuffling of resources -- to pay for tax cuts and the Iraq invasion -- that has left the United States more vulnerable.

The complaints showed how the Hurricane Katrina disaster is prompting the same recriminations that surround nearly all subjects in the capital's current angry mood. The reaction was in contrast to the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when for a season partisan politics was largely suspended and Bush had the backing of the opposition party.

A main point of controversy hinges on what until now were obscure decisions in the annual budget process, marked by routine tensions between agencies and local congressional delegations on one side and White House budget officials on the other.

In recent years, Bush repeatedly sought to slice the Army Corps of Engineers' funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain, which Katrina smashed through, flooding New Orleans. In 2005, Bush asked for $3.9 million, a small fraction of the request the corps made in internal administration deliberations. Under pressure from Congress, Bush ultimately agreed to spend $5.7 million. Since coming to office, Bush has essentially frozen spending on the Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for protecting the coastlines, waterways and other areas susceptible to natural disaster, at around $4.7 billion.

As recently as July, the White House lobbied unsuccessfully against a plan to spend $1 billion over four years to rebuild coastlines and wetlands, which serve as buffers against hurricanes. More than half of that money goes to Louisiana.

At the same time, the president has reorganized government to prepare for possible terrorist attacks, folding emergency-response agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency into the Department of Homeland Security. Bush said government functions needed to be streamlined to allow for better communications among agencies and speedier responses to terrorist attacks and other crises.

Anatomy of an unnatural disaster; With FEMA gutted for Homeland Security and flood projects delayed for lack of funding, the New Orleans nightmare should surprise no one

Sept. 1, 2005 | WASHINGTON -- Eric Tolbert, a former top disaster response official in the Bush administration, knew a calamity like Hurricane Katrina would be coming, sooner or later. And he also knew that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where he worked until February, was not ready to properly respond. There were too few full-time employees, not enough contracts in place to provide assistance, and a lack of money to do proper pre-planning. The added burden of the war on terror, he says, diverted funds away from FEMA's core mission.

"FEMA had to compete and had to help finance the creation of the Department of Homeland Security," Tolbert, who now works for PBS&J, a private contractor, said Thursday morning. "They were taking chunks of money out of the budget. We always referred to it as taxes."

Last summer, for instance, Tolbert said FEMA staged a "tabletop exercise" in Baton Rouge, La., to gauge how well it would respond if a Category 3 hurricane hit New Orleans. Officials learned a lot from the role-play, says Tolbert, and then returned to their offices to create a new plan to respond to an actual disaster in the region. "Unfortunately, we were not able to finish the plan," Tolbert said. The funding for it ran out.

FEMA is not the only agency that found itself bled of required funding by White House decisions after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Shortly after the attacks, the Army Corps of Engineers found itself facing deep cuts in funding for the largest flood control and drainage program in the New Orleans area. In the first full budget year after the attacks, the Bush administration funded the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA, at only 20 percent of the Corps' request of $100 million. In fiscal year 2004, the White House funding came in at 17 percent of the request.

For each of these years, Congress, with the support of the Louisiana delegation, appropriated more money, but funding still came in far below the requirements. Work was delayed. Contractors worked without pay. Whole projects were put off. Local project managers complained that New Orleans was competing with the war in Iraq for funding. "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle Homeland Security and the war in Iraq," Walter Maestri, the emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the Times-Picayune in 2004. Of the $500 million requested for levees, pumping stations and new drainage canals between 2001 and 2005, only $249 million passed out of Congress. As recently as March, the Corps warned in a briefing memo that the funding shortfalls "will significantly increase the cost of the project, delay project completion and delay project benefits."

"If the Army Corps capabilities for the SELA program had been fully funded, there is no question that Jefferson Parish and New Orleans would be in a much better position to remove the water on the streets once the pumps start working," says Hunter Johnston, a lobbyist for Johnston and Associates who worked to secure the money.

Government Saw Flood Risk but Not Levee Failure

In an interview Thursday on "Good Morning America," President Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." He added, "Now we're having to deal with it, and will."

Debt of Honor (Jack Ryan Novels) (Mass Market Paperback)by Tom Clancy

I read this Clancy novel the moment it came out in '96. It has one of the BEST ENDINGS of any book I've read. Unfortunately, September 11th, 2001 shed a completely different light on this book. In fact, the first thought I had when I learned of the horrible attack on that morning was, "someone read DEBT OF HONOR." (If I reveal the ending here, there's not much of a point for you to read it...)

So when Condoleeza Rice said to the press that "no one could have imagined" that someone would use airliners to attack buildings I was appalled by the bald-faced lie. Everyone knows that D.C. (the Pentagon, the White House, the CIA) reads Clancy's novels, in galley form before they're published. Not only did the terrorists imagine this, Clancy wrote a remarkably similar and spectacular scenario, allowing the D.C. war-gamers to imagine yet another horrible possibility. After all, Reagan purportedly got all fired up about the Star Wars Missile Defense System after reading Clancy's RED STORM RISING.

Grover Norquist

Norquist was one of the so-called "Gang of Five" identified in Nina Easton's 2000 book by that name, which gives a history of leaders of the modern conservative movement. He has been described as "a thumb-in-the-eye radical rightist" (The Nation), and "Tom Paine crossed with Lee Atwater plus just a soupçon of Madame Defarge" (P.J. O'Rourke). Norquist has been noted for his widely quoted quip: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The pledge of "no new taxes" that many Republican legislators have signed was his project.

Drowning New Orleans from Scientific American

THE BOXES are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of dead bodies."

New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh-an area the size of Manhattan-will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn't go very far.