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September 01, 2005

Bush and New Orleans

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we're having to deal with it and will," said [Bush].

Well, Joseph Suhayda, director of the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said in 2000 that

the 15-foot levee [that holds back Lake Pontchartrain] will protect the city from a minimum hurricane of Category 1 or 2 intensity and at best a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale. "A slow-moving Category 3 or any Category 4 or 5 hurricane passing within 20 or 30 miles of New Orleans would be devastating".

From the BBC:

A former official in the Clinton administration, Sydney Blumenthal, has written in Der Spiegel: "In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the US, including a terrorist attack on New York City.

"But by 2003, the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war."

More recently, Congress cut the 2006 budget of the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by $71.2 million. The South Eastern Louisiana Flood Control Project, which had been in financial trouble for several of the years of its existence from 1995, and which in 2004 left several contractor bills unpaid, got an extra $20 million this year, bringing it to a total of $36.5 million in 2005. But for 2006, the House of Representatives and Bush have suggested reducing it to $10.4 million. This still leaves bills unpaid, and so no new contracts can be awarded - in other words, it won't even clear the debts.

To say that no-one anticipated this is to fly in the face of all the known information about these levees and the work required to mitigate the damage which could be caused by severe flooding in New Orleans.

Sorry Mr President, what you say just doesn't hold water.

Posted by daen at September 1, 2005 03:51 PM