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Serious Problems are Afoot in New Orleans (pg. 9)
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by kush paintings
Please... please... don't bring Bush into this, while I am not a supporter of his by any means, every time I hear 'well Bush could've' or 'great leadership by Bush' I just want to smack some bitches up. Yes, the hurricane was bad, but what has caused so much damge was the fact thaqt the levee broke. There are hurricanes every year, and they don't anticipate levees breaking and emptying out the ing ocean into all areas below sea level. Why suppilies haven't gotten there quicker is because, a) transportation is nearly impossible, I believe there is only one road that is somewhat functional into New Orleans and sadly, b) nobody realized just how bad it was. |
I think Bush is doing everything he can with the resources he has. Of course the criticism can come into play that precious resources, such as guard troops, have been diverted elsewhere, however, I'm ignoring those criticisms for now. What appears to be a valid criticism, however, is that federal funding for New Orleans flood controls has been cut by 44 per cent since 2001 - despite a Federal Emergency Management Agency report that year that identified New Orleans flooding as one of three major threats to the United States, alongside a terror attack on New York City and an earthquake in San Francisco. FEMA in general has faced significant cuts to support the war in Iraq and the department of homeland security. It's not really a "hindsight is 20/20" issue anymore if you were warned about it in advance. |
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| Yoepus |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
I think Bush is doing everything he can with the resources he has. Of course the criticism can come into play that precious resources, such as guard troops, have been diverted elsewhere, however, I'm ignoring those criticisms for now. What appears to be a valid criticism, however, is that federal funding for New Orleans flood controls has been cut by 44 per cent since 2001 - despite a Federal Emergency Management Agency report that year that identified New Orleans flooding as one of three major threats to the United States, alongside a terror attack on New York City and an earthquake in San Francisco. FEMA in general has faced significant cuts to support the war in Iraq and the department of homeland security. It's not really a "hindsight is 20/20" issue anymore if you were warned about it in advance. |
Right... but lets not put the blame on Bush alone. Its been 50+ years for the Corp of Engineers, FEMA, and Lousiana residents to address the issue of upgrading the levees to withstand a category 5. There is enough blame to go around for everyone....
The simple reality of it is, the people from Lousiana didn't care, and nobody else did.... sorta like terrorism before 911. |
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| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
It's not really a "hindsight is 20/20" issue anymore if you were warned about it in advance. |
you're right about hindsight. however, after a half a century of funding, it still hasn't been done right? thats a lot of hindsight and lots funding gone where exactly? |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Yoepus
Right... but lets not put the blame on Bush alone. Its been 50+ years for the Corp of Engineers, FEMA, and Lousiana residents to address the issue of upgrading the levees to withstand a category 5. There is enough blame to go around for everyone....
The simple reality of it is, the people from Lousiana didn't care, and nobody else did.... sorta like terrorism before 911. |
Well actually plenty of people in FEMA and Louisiana knew about the dangers and did have some plans to upgrade the levees:
| quote: |
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.
It is too early to tell, however, whether the additional funding would have prevented the levee breeches and overruns that have flooded New Orleans. Scientists, journalists and public officials have been warning for decades that New Orleans could not withstand a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. Even SELA, which was started in the mid-1990s after flooding caused billions in damage, was designed to protect against smaller storms, though planners said it would reduce damages of "larger events."
"If you had engineered everything in America for a Category 5 hurricane, you could not have built anything," said Jimmy Hayes, a former Republican congressman from Louisiana, who now lobbies for federal funding. "There is never enough money."
According to Michael Zumstein, a Corps official working to drain New Orleans, both of the major levee breeches in New Orleans were caused by more water than the Corps' current plans, even if funded, could handle. "It's just the law of physics, that's all," he said, noting that the system was designed to withhold a slow-moving Category 2 or a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Category 4 storm when it hit land Monday morning. He said an unexpected break at the 17th Street Canal occurred 700 feet south of a bridge where the Corps recently completed a troubled construction project.
Flooding also occurred on the east side of New Orleans, in the St. Bernard Parish, an area that environmentalists have long warned would be susceptible to flooding because of a poorly designed canal built in the 1960s that joins the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Since 1998, local politicians have been demanding that the so-called Mississippi River Gulf Outlet be closed, in part because it was allowing salt water to destroy marshland, increasing the danger of a storm surge. Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have been slow to respond to those demands, and earlier this week, the storm surge topped levees flooding the parish, said Zumstein.
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| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by Yoepus
The simple reality of it is, the people from Lousiana didn't care, and nobody else did.... sorta like terrorism before 911. |
MF'n word |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Q5echo
you're right about hindsight. however, after a half a century of funding, it still hasn't been done right? thats a lot of hindsight and lots funding gone where exactly? |
Well you can't do much if you don't get the funding. |
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| LiquidX |
| WHy isnt supplies been throw out of helicopters?!?!.. Cargo Planes?!?.. I mean.. wtf is going on! |
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| LiquidX |
| Also.. theres about 50-60,000 people in the superdome now. People dying in it! |
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| Cyrus King |
| Arent you American's so proud of your president spending $400 billion on "saving" the poor iraqi's, yet he couldnt give two s about his own people? |
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| Subey |
| Any similarities between the *final* level of Hydro Thunder and New Orleans are purely coincidental. |
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| George Smiley |
| quote: | Originally posted by LiquidX
WHy isnt supplies been throw out of helicopters?!?!.. Cargo Planes?!?.. I mean.. wtf is going on! |
From the stories I've been hearing throwing supplies/etc into the middle of that crowd would result in carnage, much better I think to get the army (or national guards whatever) to do it. Altho I have no idea what they are doing cos we knew about this days before it happened, I would have expected the army to have been mobalised during that period ready to move in as soon as the storm ended. I cannot for the life of me work out why this isn't the case? Aren't they supposed to be trained for rapid response? |
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| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
Well you can't do much if you don't get the funding. |
well, this is the same country that built the frikken Hoover Dam in 4 years, decades before anybody gave a damn about the levees.
funding too little is one thing, too late is much more relevant. |
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