The real water policy of the US is evident in the funding graphic - a steady and drastic decline in importance since 1977.
1965 was the year Congress annointed their inhouse water resopurces design and construction company - the Corps - to build the flood protection system for New Orleans. Then they proceeded to underfund it and left it unfinished after 40 years of incremental work when Katrina came knocking to test the effectiveness of that strategy. It would have cost far less - in both money and human life - to have built it correctly in the first place.
Guess what? Same goes for today, and the only way we the people of this country are going to get things done to a safe and reliable standard is to demand it from our federal representatives. The Corps, by their own admission, has a MASSIVE backlog of Congressionally approved but unfunded projects that will take them something like 20 years to complete at their present rate of work. And at their present rate of quality, we have no reason to believe we can expect anything better than what we are seeing today.
If that's what you want, keep reading. If not, you must make a decision to engage in a (lengthy) campaign with your federal representatives to demand an 8/29 investigation and then follow through with the recommendations that result from that inquiry. It's all down to you and me.
Source Asks "What is the Real Water Policy of the United States?"
Near the Mississippi Headwaters, June 11, 2008 -- I am writing this an hour's drive from the Mississippi Headwaters -- you know, that place where you can walk across the Mississippi by stepping from stone to stone -- and it is raining cats and dogs, thunder and lightning galore, four inches or more expected today, and parts of Minnesota to the east are under flash flood warnings.
New Orleans is not alone. Catastrophic dam failures are occurring up and down the Mississippi watershed today in the "Flood of 2008," which has the potential to eclipse the Midwest flood of 1993 in tragic consequences. In Lake Delton, Wisconsin, an Army Corps of Engineers' embankment failed, emptied a 267 acre lake that was the centerpiece of a recreation area, and the torrent of water destroyed homes while carving a new channel into the Wisconsin River. Underground sewer lines were shredded and raw sewage isn't seeping, it is poring out of the broken system and entering the watershed. Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle said the Federal Emergency Management Agency would have teams in the state Wednesday to help assess flood damage. Given FEMA's track record in New Orleans, Wisconsin should not rest easy.
All of the water from where I sit at my desk ends up here on the Mississippi Delta.
"No Idea" What the Corps is Doing
In Cedar Falls Iowa, spokeswoman Susan Staudt told The Huffington Post earlier today (Wednesday) that volunteers and sandbags appear to be holding back the waters of the Cedar River.
If the makeshift barriers fail, downtown Cedar Falls (population 35,000) will be under "several feet of water," Staudt said. The flood stage is 88 feet. At 5 a.m. the river gauge read 101.8 feet. As of 9:30 a.m. the reading was 101.24, Staudt added.
Staudt spoke to The Huffington Post from a cell phone in Cedar Falls City Hall at 10 a.m. She said the skies "looked ominous," and that it was raining. "Quite frankly, the only forces keeping the water from breaching the barriers are the thousands of volunteers who are sandbagging," she said.
Staudt's biggest concerns now are the boils which are cropping up all along the levee. What about the Army Corps of Engineers? "Are they helping you?" we asked.
Staudt replied tersely that she had "no idea what the Corps was doing," but that the National Guard was out in force to assist her crews. What Staudt did not say spoke volumes.
But there is more. Lots more.
In Iowa City, waters topped the spillway at the Coralville Reservoir. Residents in the flooded center of town were told to evacuate and news footage last night showed volunteers hauling boxes of documents from a newly built government building.
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, on John McCain's short list for Vice-president, signed an executive order Tuesday declaring a state of emergency in two counties hit by flooding in Minnesota's southeast corner. Pawlenty is the same guy who vetoed infrastructure funding in the spring before the Interstate 35 bridge collapse last August. But no one talks about that anymore, either.
In Lawrenceville, Illinois a Corps of Engineers-built levee failed along the Wabash River on Tuesday.
Embarrassing Use of Words
The Embarras (one "s") River in east central Illinois embarrassed the Corps when one of their levees crumbled on Tuesday. The press said "broke," but that implies that it was an act of nature and nature alone that caused the failure. When something breaks, it is no one's fault. Use the word "failed," or crumbled," and you start looking around for who designed and managed the thing to begin with.
Local press again used the lexicon of understatement. "Officials say levee breaks in the area are forcing some evacuations." Breaks forcing evacuations, indeed.
The language used in the local press is telling. After interviews with the Army Corps of Engineers in city after city along the broken embankments, dams, and levees, the language blamed "Mother Nature." People were told simply "to evacuate."
The Iowa City Press Citizen glossed it all over with the comment, "but as is usually the case, the river goes on its own schedule." The phrases "uncontrolled waters" and rivers that "threatened" to breach levees and rush over spillways are the journalistic voodoo of the flood of 2008.
Is this true? Does the water really have a will of its own? Sometimes writers (this one included) get so carried away with their passionate prose that they either intentionally or innocently send the wrong critical message to the readers who trust us to get it right. This is journalistic malfeasance. It is easy to blame mother nature, but what or who is behind a water management policy in the United States that allowed the city of New Orleans to be ruined, and an infrastructure up and down the Mississippi watershed to crumble?
NOLA News Ladder has Real Time Data
No one is asking this question. Well there is one guy who is, and he runs a blog about New Orleans called the New Orleans News Ladder
Check him out for real time maps and analysis. His sometimes purple prose can be distracting, but he is telling the story. I understand he has been banned from commenting at the Huff Post. Maybe we should allow him back in. The Ladder should have been the highlight at the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR) held in Minneapolis last week. But he wasn't. Neither was New Orleans.
Yep, folks -- right there on the banks of the Mississippi and a stone's throw from Governor Pawlenty's office -- 3500 of us sat, drinking java from the shiny aluminum mugs tattooed with conference logo of "Free Press." The best and brightest bloggers from across the United States -- everyone congratulating themselves about Iraq while the citizens at home in the heartland were about to be washed away.
This story should be as big as 9/11. The lights are on in the press rooms, but no one is home. Mainstream media has Iraq, American Idol record deals, and horseracing second guessing as the continuing focus and CNN says simply that the 2008 floods could be as bad as 1993. They went to the Governor of Indiana for one of the main quotes, which seemed designed to be reassuring.
"We have a very touch-and-go situation there, but everything that can be done has been done," Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said.
Is that true? Has everything been done that can be done? Are we all being lulled into a somnambulant apathy fed by the fodder of reassurance that it is just Mother Nature?
The 8/29 Commission
Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) called for an investigation of federal levee failures a year ago. Dubbed the "8/29" bill, this legislation would create an investigative panel on the scale of post 9/11 investigations. Top journalists ho were at the NCMR conference had never heard of it. They should have.
On August 9, 2007 the Senator released the following statement, urging the establishment of an 8/29 commission to investigate Hurricane Katrina levee failures:
"Since the early days following Hurricane Katrina, I have joined with Levees.org in calling for a comprehensive, independent 8/29 commission to take a targeted look at the collapse of the levee system and examine the steps we must to take to prevent another storm from drowning us. That is why I introduced an amendment to Water Resources Development Act to create the necessary congressionally sanctioned investigative commission.
There have been numerous studies about Katrina, without any clear direction of how to prevent a flood control system failure in the future. These studies have not adequately zeroed in on the crucial question of how our levees failed us, and the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force chaired by the Corps itself did not provide the completely independent examination that is required.
An analysis similar to that by the 9-11 Commission is the only route to uncovering how 1,071 lives were lost and 786,372 people were displaced when the federal government's levee system failed to protect us. While my WRDA amendment was met by partisan objection, I will continue to push for a thorough and independent analysis of the events leading up to August 29, 2005."
In a statement issued to the Huffington Post from her office this morning, Louisiana's Senator Landrieu said:
"Failures of infrastructure require understanding of the causes. This is no less true when bridges collapse in Minnesota, dams fail in the Midwest, or levees breech in South Louisiana. The flooding in the Midwest reminds us about the dangers presented by declining infrastructure. In fact, the United States spends today roughly two-thirds less on civil works investment than it spent in 1960, relative to the gross domestic product. The 8/29 Commission investigation team would give Congress and the American people the full, unvarnished story of the federal levee failures following Hurricane Katrina and would instruct us on how to avoid similar catastrophic infrastructure failures in the future."
Find the full bill at this link:
The National Weather Service on Tuesday predicted crests of 10 feet above flood stage and higher over the next two weeks at places including Hannibal, Mo., and Quincy and Grafton, Ill.
Read the national press anywhere, and the message is that towns are "protected" by levees. Are they?
Source: Wrong Questions Being Asked
A source with strong connections to the Army Corps of Engineers in the Upper Mississippi Watershed, who asked to remain anonymous, told us we are not asking the questions that need to be asked. "What is the real water policy of the United States Congress and why are they not taking this policy to the people?"
Each of the Army Corps districts has a flow rate plan, but they have different names in each district; i.e., St. Paul is Reservoir Operating Plan Evaluation (ROPE) Study, and in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin, this set of rules is called the Interim Operation Plan (IOP). So it goes for each of the water districts.
"Real deal is the U.S. is running out of water," the source said. There is a need to get more water downstream for development in places like Atlanta which are running out of drinking water."
Why is this happening?
"The plan is to take water from the north and send it south in a controlled manner," the source said. "It is a reasonable idea to try to bring to bring flow rates to pre-settlement rates, but over-engineering in developments such as curb and gutter installations, cause fast run-off because of the impervious surface."
All Water Politics are Local
The source suggested that at local levels engineering firms rule city councils who grant permits for developments. Engineering firms over-engineer for the dollars. So, the developments have unnatural runoff and at the same time farms to the north don't want standing water in their fields
The issue is complicated and failing water containment infrastructure has been the focus instead of policy making. The biggest aquifers in the United States' heartland are drying up because of the reduction of porous and permeable surfaces which would ordinarily allow water to seep into the vast underground reservoirs which provide drinking water. The Colorado River is at a fraction of its historic flow rates, schemes abound to pipe drinking water from the Great Lakes, and the heartland's main aquifer is vanishing. Meanwhile, in a total intellectual and engineering disconnect, communities are drowning.
Is water policy being directed by hidden committees in Congress, as the source suggests? The Corps is culpable, but "they are the low guys on totem pole," the source explained.
The bottom line is that 100 year rain event plans are not being implemented. New Orleans has had billions pumped into levee repair and a "little wet spot" is still growing on the 17th Canal street levee there.
Senator Landrieu sent us a graphic, reproduced here, which shows the falling rates of investment in Army Corps infrastructure. Whether this gets anyone off the hook is anyone's guess. That is why an 8/29 commission seems to be the only way out of this mess. Bloggers can't do this alone, but we had better the heck wake up.
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Does anyone really want to investigate the failure of federal levees that devastated New Orleans? Does anyone truly want to know the truth?
Everyone has been crying about lessons learned since even the first few hours that people were shown trapped on rooftops. Almost three years later nothing has been done. As before Katrina if an emergency in America is small in scope we will respond well, pat ourselves on the back and note that all is well " we can handle anything. If something the scope of Katrina and the Federal Flood of New Orleans or worse occurs the federal government will again fail miserably.
Of course the 8/29 Investigation is needed. We need to know about our levees and about all that happened and did not happen since that day.
Why were early plans, by a Republican Congressman even, to rebuild homes in a much more reasonable fashion than has happened shelved and not considered with the worry that it would set a precedent for helping homeowners? Did someone know what was coming with the entire housing sector those many years ago and therefore feared the precedent more than they desired to help those damaged by federal failures?
Does anyone want to know the truth? Does anyone care?
Herbert, you are asking the questions that people in NOLA are crying real tears to have answered. I am only one person, and certainly don't have the resources to figure this out..even a team of investigative journalists would not have that ability. We need 8/29.
Here are some answers:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_georgian_080217_baghdad_on_the_bayou.htm
Georgianne,
I am in New Orleans crying those tears and asking the questions every day. The hope is to get people to understand what happened.
There is a difference between levees that are overtopped and those that are not ( our levees were not overtopped). There is a difference in levees that fail under tremendous acts of God that were greater than ever imagined and designed to withstand and those levees that fail before design standards are met due to improper design. We are in that number and had improperly designed and built levees by the Corps of Engineers, aka - the federal government - hence; The Federal Flood.
As Colin Powell said, by way of Thomas Freidman - " You break it, you own it." The US Government broke our city. We will do the work to rebuild our city, but it is time for the culpable party to get out the checkbook to cover the full extent of the damage.
Thank you for sticking with the true and deep threads of our story.
Let me add;
Why was the government response so incompetent? Why have all city and state records of the time of the hurricane, Federal Flood and aftermath been released in the case of Louisiana and New Orleans while the federal records, including those of the White House, have yet to see the light of day? What is there to hide on all of these issues? What went back and forth on those White House Black Berries?
Why does John McCain claim recently while in New Orleans that this will never happen again " while it (the fallout of crime, homelessness, lack of health care facilities and so many other problems from the Federal Flood) continues to happen all around him in the great City of New Orleans? Will Barack Obama be the one to stand up, aid the hard work of New Orleanians and volunteers, stop this from happening now and truly never let it happen again?
Is there really any interest to learn lessons and improve or only a desire to get past this chapter of incompetence in US history?
BTW...in da'wilderness of da'banned I became Editilla O'rilla d'Aphasia, the Beast of the Ladder. Thanks again James...you can still find me hangin articles for the Burma News Ladder: http://burma.newsladder.net/
I would urge everyone to go and hop on that Ladder too.
Through my work there I have met and fell in love with Burma and hence came to see the man'made disasters of Burma and New Orleans as opposite sides of the same coin.
Through the other News Ladders I have come to know about all kinds of sides to this tossing coin we call The Progressive Movement in America.
It is We who are the Good Hands People.
Is this thing on? Tap Tap Tap Testes Testes...
All I said, I think, was that I hoped that Huff Post wasn't paying one of their bloggers by the word. Is thaaaaat soooo wrooooong?
Huff Post, Harry Shearer and James Boyce got me into this racket.
Thank Y'all if this is working...
The whole system is outdated.
"If we knew then" scenarios suggest a full modernization is necessary.
We need to choose areas to protect, and build a modern system that actually protects those areas, while pulling back most levees and buying out homeowners or raising their houses and allow areas to flood naturally.
Recreating wetlands that hold water and release it slowly upstream and reintroducing beavers could go a long way too.
A national water system like our highways or gas pipelines would make sense.
If we did it right, powered by renewable energy day to day but with back ups for extreme events, we could satisfy cities, farmers and nature while reducing carnage.
We're already playing god, and I don't see that ending.
We may as well try and do it well.
You sound like someone who has been thinking about this. Check out an organization called Voice of the Wetlands in South Louisiana. They are doing good work. http://www.voiceofthewetlands.com/
You need to elaborate on the beavers. I was just told that the little critters can be a mitigating factor--they have tried it up here and it works in Minnesota. Perhaps an interesting story worth pursuing. At time I thought,''Oh, to mention that would appear to be making light of the tragedy up here." The gods work in mysterious ways.
The 8/29 Commission (Senate Bill 2826) is a great idea. It would examine decades of possibly flawed governmental policy at the federal, state and local level. And the results would be used to examine levee building nationwide and would probably change the way levees are built from here forward.
If you want to write your Members of Congress about it, you can at this website created by concerned citizens after New Orleans got clobbered by poorly built federal levees.
http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/1625/t/2541/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=2124
With my own close ties to New Orleans, I would like to suggest that the blog team allow the News Ladder blogger access once again to posting comments as long as he behaves himself. The guy is doing good work with information gathering. Just a suggestion. What do Huff Post readers think?
I say, yes, to letting the New Orleans News Ladder back in.
He might just need more coffee in the morning.
In response to the main topic: yeah, I hope that sooner rather than later some sort of comprehensive water policy is determined before it comes down to legal battles to drain the great lakes to support cities in the middle of deserts.
In response to unbanning people:
Too bad they can't just implement an ignore feature to ignore certain people's comments and replies to those comments. Then the only reason that they'd need to ban people would be for making threats or whatever.
That being said, expecting anyone to behave themselves online, particularly with a past history of not being able to do so is wishful thinking :P
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Posted June 11, 2008 | 12:39 PM (EST)