[Mb-civic] This could have been avoided! Bush sold this country out for Iraqi oil!

[Jef Bek]

These levees have been in serious need of government funding for years!
Money that was earmarked for the levees went to Iraq. Millions of American
people are in terror tonight now while the National Guard is in Iraq
protecting oil rigs! Did anyone see George read his prepared speech today,
after he went golfing? Pathetic! He spent a minute on The Floods and then
segued into selling his war for 40 minutes. At least he admitted today why
we are in Iraq; ³the country's vast oil fields that he said would otherwise
fall under the control of terrorist extremists² (profit competitors).

PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS

August 30, 2005

When the levee breaks

It appears that the money has been moved in the president¹s budget to handle
homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that¹s the price we
pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can¹t be finished, and we are
doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for
us.

-- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish,
Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.

This picture is an aerial view of New Orleans today, more than 14 months
later. Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city and
the sun is out, the waters continue to rise in New Orleans as we write this.
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 until it's level with the massive lake.

There have been numerous reports of bodies floating in the poorest
neighborhoods of this poverty-plagued city, but the truth is that the death
toll may not be known for days, because the conditions continue to frustrate
rescue efforts.

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. (Much of
the research here is from Nexis, which is why some articles aren't linked.)

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 this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans
CityBusiness:

The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection
project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete
due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists
of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank
of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson
parishes.

The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the
president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.

"The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink," he said. "I've got
at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the
levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now
I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them
interest."

That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' 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 don¹t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we
can¹t stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have
isn¹t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so
that we can¹t 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, as you probably recall, 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. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:

The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve
levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson
and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item
called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7
million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay
salaries but little else.

"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to
go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the
field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.

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 was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street
Canal, site of the main breach. The levee failure appears to be causing a
human tragedy of epic proportions:

"We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of
our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater,"
Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things
that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the
tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll
the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly
benefitted the rich.

And now Bush has lost that gamble, big time. We hope that Congress will
investigate what went wrong here.

The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at
home, and yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian
Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What
does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050830/190f7204/attachment.htm