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Pastimes : Lake New Orleans -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tsigprofit who wrote (537)	9/7/2005 10:52:16 PM
From: Alan Smithee	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1118

Look - they can't protect for every contingency - true - but they can build the levees much stronger than they did - with Federal help and money of course. There's a reason more than a few people have noted that Louisiana is noted for governmental corruption. When The Levee Board Story Breaks... Ace Of Spades blog Get ready for a shock: Louisiana and New Orleans didn't spend money to protect them from floods, and in fact a lot of the federal money earmarked for just that seems to have been pissed away through corruption: But research into more than ten years of reporting on hurricane and flood damage mitigation efforts in and around New Orleans indicates that local and state officials did not use federal money that was available for levee improvements or coastal reinforcement and often did not secure local matching funds that would have generated even more federal funding. In December of 1995, the Orleans Levee Board, the local government entity that oversees the levees and floodgates designed to protect New Orleans and the surrounding areas from rising waters, bragged in a supplement to the Times-Picayune newspaper about federal money received to protect the region from hurricanes. "In the past four years, the Orleans Levee Board has built up its arsenal. The additional defenses are so critical that Levee Commissioners marched into Congress and brought back almost $60 million to help pay for protection," the pamphlet declared. "The most ambitious flood-fighting plan in generations was drafted. An unprecedented $140 million building campaign launched 41 projects." The levee board promised Times-Picayune readers that the "few manageable gaps" in the walls protecting the city from Mother Nature's waters "will be sealed within four years (1999) completing our circle of protection." But less than a year later, that same levee board was denied the authority to refinance its debts. Legislative Auditor Dan Kyle "repeatedly faulted the Levee Board for the way it awards contracts, spends money and ignores public bid laws," according to the Times-Picayune. The newspaper quoted Kyle as saying that the board was near bankruptcy and should not be allowed to refinance any bonds, or issue new ones, until it submitted an acceptable plan to achieve solvency. Blocked from financing the local portion of the flood fighting efforts, the levee board was unable to spend the federal matching funds that had been designated for the project. By 1998, Louisiana's state government had a $2 billion construction budget, but less than one tenth of one percent of that -- $1.98 million -- was dedicated to levee improvements in the New Orleans area. State appropriators were able to find $22 million that year to renovate a new home for the Louisiana Supreme Court and $35 million for one phase of an expansion to the New Orleans convention center. Less than 0.1% spent on improving and reinforcing decades-old levees. Well, who could have foreseen a major hurricane topping or breaking the levees? Apart from everyone, I mean. ace.mu.nu

To: tsigprofit who wrote (537)	9/8/2005 8:47:16 AM
From: Rande Is	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1118

They were cutting money to do this kind of thing over the last few years - when they should have been increasing it. It's a federally run game of political chicken. "We know they need the money desperately to save their city. But nothing has happened so far and we are going to gamble that this is not the year it happens. . . and so are going to use the money elsewhere". This game has likely been the modus operandi of our federal government regarding New Orleans, as well as other such needy places for decades. It is akin to the complacency that sets in against terrorists because we haven't heard from them in a while. It is also akin to the ostrich burying his head in the sand so that nobody can see him. Rande Is

To: tsigprofit who wrote (537)	9/8/2005 9:25:53 AM
From: Bucky Katt	Respond to of 1118

I can't argue with that.

To: tsigprofit who wrote (537)	9/8/2005 9:36:34 AM
From: Constant Reader	Respond to of 1118

The truth is that they've been kicking the can down the road with regard to this and other infrastructure problems for decades - it didn't start with this administration and it probably won't end with it either. Why We Ignore the Risks By Robert J. Samuelson Wednesday, September 7, 2005; Page A25 After almost every great American tragedy, we go through a familiar cycle of self-examination and recrimination. There are presidential commissions and task forces, congressional hearings and investigations, press exposés and think tank reports. We have fact-finding and finger-pointing. The public excavation of prescient warnings, poor judgments and botched assignments leads sometimes to constructive conclusions, sometimes to extenuating circumstances and sometimes to a list of the guilty. We have already started this wrenching ritual with Hurricane Katrina. But missing from these exercises is a candid acknowledgment of an underlying cause of many national tragedies: the human tendency not to contemplate the worst possibilities, which are usually hypothetical and uncertain. Most of us don't want to imagine future problems and horrors that could alter life as we know it. So we don't. We are, in any case, overwhelmed by predicted "crises" (terrorism, global warming, economic meltdowns, budget crackups and so forth), which are aggressively merchandised by ambitious politicians, energetic advocacy groups and an adversarial media. It is hard to know which of these menaces pose genuine threats and which are impostors. The unrelenting alarmism numbs us. Moreover, doing something about most of these purported dangers would be costly, inconvenient and contentious. To save our way of life, we need to alter our way of life. The simplest and sometimes wisest response is to do nothing, which is what most of us do most of the time. The result is a sort of Catch-22 of national disasters: We cannot address serious national problems until they are conclusively shown to be serious, but the required proof is usually the very crisis that we are trying to avoid. In a democracy, it's necessary to mobilize public opinion to undertake unpleasant or expensive actions, but public opinion mobilizes only after the fact. In our world of crisis-mongering, we demand some means of distinguishing the real from the fraudulent. But the screening process is often an episode of national suffering. We do not plan, even when the case for planning seems overwhelming. Examples abound. We know that over the next few decades the number of retirees will double and that the costs of federal retirement programs will explode, requiring huge tax increases (at least a third), unsustainably large budget deficits or deep (and undesirable) cuts in other government programs -- or some combination of all three. All of this has been evident for years: indeed, it is the subject of countless government reports. But successive presidents and Congresses have done little to change matters, the current stalemated Social Security "debate" being a case in point. Or take oil. By the early 1970s, it was obvious that we should curb our use of oil, not because the world was running out of it (even now, that's not clear) but because its supply was inevitably insecure. Two-thirds of the world's known oil reserves lie in the unstable Middle East. Despite four oil "crises" since the early 1970s, we have yet to experience a truly catastrophic cutoff of global oil supplies, although that remains a possibility. Facing it, the country would be more secure with more efficient vehicles and a large Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But in the 1990s, fuel efficiency stagnated and the oil reserve actually declined slightly. A final example: immigration. The Census Bureau reported last week that since 1989 about 70 percent of the increase in people below the government's official poverty line occurred among Hispanics. Over the same period, Hispanics accounted for more than half of the increase in people without health insurance. It seems incontestable that the uncontrolled immigration of poor Latinos increases poverty in the United States, even if many immigrants successfully assimilate (as they do). Yet, illegal immigration is rampant. We have trouble taking costly and disruptive actions in the present to minimize more costly and more disruptive consequences in the future. To wit: Americans regard cheap gasoline as a quasi-constitutional right, not to be governed by the geography of oil. Similarly, they see Social Security and Medicare benefits as inviolate, not to be compromised by an aging population or longer life expectancies. We deal with inconvenient facts by ignoring them. The post-Katrina investigations will reveal blunders and may improve our capacity to deal with future natural disasters or acts of terrorism. But we won't address the larger problem of public delusion, because it is so embedded in our democratic process. Not every national tragedy or crisis can be anticipated or avoided; but some can be defused or mitigated. Up to a point, you can blame politicians for not leading public opinion. But you can't blame them for not leading where the public steadfastly refuses to go. washingtonpost.com