-------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 02:51:35 -0500 (CDT) From: <•••@••.•••> Subject: NY Times - 3 Pieces re Levee Story To: •••@••.••• three NY times pieces here. First the news story. Then Krugman's column. Then the Times 9/1 editorial "Waiting for a Leader" ======================================================== Engineers' warnings and pleas for money went unheeded By Andrew C. Revkin and Christopher Drew The New York Times FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2005 New York - The 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate, aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically underfinanced that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years. Often leading the chorus was Alfred Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps and a 30-year veteran of efforts to waterproof a city built on slowly sinking mud, surrounded by water and periodically a target of great storms. Naomi grew particularly frustrated this year as the Gulf Coast braced for what forecasters said would be an intense hurricane season and a nearly simultaneous $71 million cut was announced in the New Orleans district budget to guard against such storms. He called the cut drastic in an article in the magazine New Orleans City Business. In an interview Wednesday night, Naomi said the cuts had made it impossible to complete contracts for vital upgrades that were part of the long-term plan to renovate the system. This week, amid news of the widening breach in the 17th Street canal, he realized that the decades-long string of near misses had ended. "A breach under these conditions was ultimately not surprising," he said. "I had hoped that we had overdesigned it to a point that it would not fail. But you can overdesign only so much and then a failure has to come." No one expected that weak spot to be along a canal that, if anything, had gotten more attention and shoring up than many other spots around the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls. Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said it was particularly surprising because the break occurred "along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee. It had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick." Now the corps is scrambling. After failing to close a 300-foot, or 100-meter, break in the canal through which most of the floodwaters were entering New Orleans, federal engineers decided to take the battle with Lake Pontchartrain to the lakefront. They are preparing to drive corrugated vertical steel plates, called sheet pile, into the mud near where the narrow canal meets the lake, sealing it off so that the big breach farther in can be more methodically attacked, Naomi said. The decision was made after a day of fruitless efforts to figure out how to drop concrete highway barriers or huge sand bags into the torrent. For the most part, the water between the lake and the filled bowl of the city has leveled off, officials said. Weaknesses in the levee system were foreshadowed in a May report on the New Orleans-area hurricane protection plan and budget gap. The district headquarters concluded that "The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs." They also meant that there was far too little money to conduct a thorough study of how to upgrade the city's protections from the existing standard, sufficient to hold back a hurricane at Category 3 on the five-step intensity scale, to a level of ruggedness sufficient to withstand floods and winds from a Category 5 storm. Hurricane Katrina was on the high end of Category 4 and, despite the extreme flooding, is still seen by many hurricane experts as a near miss for New Orleans. Since 2001, Louisiana's congressional delegation had been pushing for far more money for storm protection than the Bush administration had been willing to accept. Naomi said all the quibbling over the region's storm budget, or even over taking New Orleans to full Category 5 protection, which would cost several billion dollars, seemed tragically absurd. "It would take $2.5 billion to build a Category 5 protection system and we're talking about tens of billions in losses, all that lost productivity, and so many lost lives and injuries and personal trauma you'll never get over," Naomi said. "People will be scarred for life by this event." He said there were still no clear hints as to why the main breach in the flood barriers occurred along the 17th Street canal, normally a conduit for vast streams of water pumped out of the perpetually waterlogged city each day and which did not take the main force of waves roiling the lake. Andrew C. Revkin reported from New York for this article and Christopher Drew from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Cornelia Dean contributed reporting from New York. Copyright ? 2005 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com =============== KRUGMAN COLUMN -- NY TIMES September 2, 2005 A Can't-Do Government By PAUL KRUGMAN Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening. So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability. First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all. There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response. Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!" Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago. Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "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." In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending. Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals. Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared." I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor. At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice. Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk. So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying. E-mail: •••@••.••• ======== NY TIMES EDITORIAL September 1, 2005 Waiting for a Leader George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end. We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported. Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis. While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection? It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal. The New York Times -- ============================================================ If you find this material useful, you might want to check out our website (http://cyberjournal.org) or try out our low-traffic, moderated email list by sending a message to: •••@••.••• You are encouraged to forward any material from the lists or the website, provided it is for non-commercial use and you include the source and this disclaimer. Richard Moore (rkm) Wexford, Ireland blog: http://harmonization.blogspot.com/ "Escaping The Matrix - Global Transformation: WHY WE NEED IT, AND HOW WE CAN ACHIEVE IT ", old draft: http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/rkmGlblTrans.html _____________________________ "...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the Reichstag fire." - Srdja Trifkovic There is not a problem with the system. The system is the problem. Faith in ourselves - not gods, ideologies, leaders, or programs. _____________________________ cj list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=cj newslog list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=newslog _____________________________ Informative links: http://www.indymedia.org/ http://www.globalresearch.ca/ http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/ http://www.greenleft.org.au/index.htm http://www.MiddleEast.org http://www.rachel.org http://www.truthout.org http://www.williambowles.info/monthly_index/ http://www.zmag.org http://www.co-intelligence.org ============================================================
