What Would Romney-Ryan Mean for FEMA and Infrastructure? [ cross-posted at DailyKos ] * “One of the themes of the Tampa convention will be the failure of government, and the prosperity that will result if it is cut to ribbons. But in a different corner of the...
army corps of engineers
Is Katrina More Significant Than September 11?
Thoughts on Two American Traumas [ Cross-posted at Daily Kos. ] Between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, which do you think gets most attention, and why? What if the national focus on 9/11 is exaggerated and the nation should focus instead on 8/29—Hurricane Katrina—as the...
Throw Us Somethin’, Mister President
It was good to see the president on Hurricane Season’s eve being briefed by new FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Homeland Security Council president John Brennan on preparations for the upcoming season. We are relieved that the president has appointed serious professionals in these critical positions, as we are encouraged by his nomination of Jo-Ellen Darcy to oversee the Army Corps of Engineers.
How Rumsfeld Aggravated Katrina’s Destruction (How Many Died from SecDef’s Turf War?)
The New York Times and other sources have reported on the biblical quotations that adorned the cover pages of Pentagon intelligence briefings sent to the Bush White House (“Therefore put on the full armor of God. . .”) in a GQ profile of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Not good, especially when the Muslim world had already heard Bush describe the War on Terror as a “crusade.” In our view, however, Draper’s most distressing revelation is that days after Hurricane Katrina, when tens of thousands of victims were in desperate need of rescue and medical care, Rumsfeld refused to deploy a fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters at Hurlburt Field Air Force Base in Florida—only 200 miles from New Orleans—who were waiting for go orders. Indeed, when Bush tried to drag cooperation out of him, Rumsfeld only grudgingly relented.
Roll Up Sleeves, Pick Up Phone
All week we’ve been wondering Where are the f—ing Senate Democrats?! It’s as though the camera hogs have turned into groundhogs, frightened of their shadows, leaving Obama to do all the heavy lifting on the American Recovery and Investment Plan, better known as The Stimulus.
Get Congress on Track to Stimulate Mass Transit
Elana Schor at TalkingPointsMemo.com reports that the economic recovery package being considered in the House of Representatives gives “only $10 billion for rail and other public transportation projects, compared with $30 billion for roads.” The Senate Appropriations Committee is considering even less for mass transit projects: $9.5 billion. In a package projected to cost $825 billion, in a nation where public transit has been shortchanged for over a decade, that just ain’t enough. The U.S. spends about $12 billion each month in Iraq. Ten billion is as much as has been given to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (each) in the $700 billion bailout for banks and insurers—and only one-fifth of what Citigroup is getting.
There Will Be Floods
An excellent Op-Ed piece by Alex Prud’homme in the Feb. 27 New York Times explains the nation’s critical need for infrastructure reinforcement, as seen in Hurricane Katrina and recently in a flood in Nevada. (See “Floods in Nevada?” in In the News, left column.) The U.S. is threatened by dangerously inadequate levees, he says, and Congress must allocate funds for the Corps of Engineers to do its job: “We need to reinvigorate the Army Corps of Engineers and give it a mandate to build and maintain a coherent, robust, nationwide flood protection system—as opposed to the ineffective, piecemeal measures that failed so catastrophically in New Orleans.”
Celebrate! Good News for Water Works! (A One-Two Punch for The Decider)
Within two days, the two chambers of the U.S. Congress have voted to override the president’s veto of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA)—the first water projects bill in seven years (normally passed every two years), and the first override of a presidential veto since 1998. Today the Senate voted 79 to 14—an overwhelming margin similar to that of the House’s 361 to 54—to authorize spending levels for about 900 projects nationwide, including about $7 billion for Louisiana coastal restoration and flood protection. Bruce Alpert of the Times-Picayune notes, “Congress still must approve individual appropriations to get the work done.”
Interview with Mark Schleifstein
Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of
‘Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans
and the Coming Age of Superstorms’
Mark Schleifstein joined the Times-Picayune in 1984 as an environmental reporter after five years at the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi. Since 1996 he and his Times-Picayune colleague John McQuaid have written numerous major environmental series for the paper, most recently in January 2006. Schleifstein and McQuaid won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their series “Oceans of Trouble: Are the World’s Fisheries Doomed?”—a comprehensive eight-day series about the threats to the world’s fish supply, including the effects of coastal wetlands erosion on fish in Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1998 the Picayune published their series “Home Wreckers: How the Formosan Termite Is Devastating New Orleans,” a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer.
America’s Infrastructure: And Unto Dust We Shall Return?
Our friends at the American Society of Civil Engineers are concerned like everyone else about the catastrophic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. ASCE is calling attention to the degraded condition of America’s roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, and proposes an Action Plan for the 110th Congress, including the establishment of a National Infrastructure Commission.
A Brief History of Bush Cuts to Flood Control
From 2001 to 2005, the Bush administration’s budget allocations for New Orleans area hurricane protection averaged one-fifth of the amount requested by Louisiana officials. In the 2005 budget, Louisiana requested about $26 million; even after the very active hurricane season of 2004, the Bush White House offered only about $4 million, an amount that the U.S. spends about every 20 minutes in Iraq. (Current U.S. expenditures in Iraq now run at approximately $10 million per hour, roughly $12 billion per month.)
Interview with Ivor van Heerden, author of ‘The Storm:
What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina:
The Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist’
IVOR VAN HEERDEN of the LSU Hurricane Center is familiar to millions who watched the Katrina news reports as the straight-talking hurricane expert with a Dutch accent (actually he’s South African). In The Storm, he has written a detailed, analytical, and compelling account of Hurricane Katrina and its terrible impact on Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. He shows what happened-and what didn’t have to happen.
What sets The Storm apart from other Katrina books is that van Heerden, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, goes on to propose a workable and affordable plan for Category 5 strength storm protection, modeled on the Netherlands’ successful system: a combination of reinforced levees, storm gates, and coastal restoration, including barrier islands.