Kudos to John Barry for pushing what, until recently, seemed like a dead letter -- a federal "8/29" commission to investigate what went wrong with the New Orleans levee system during Hurricane Katrina:
The resolution approved by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East was proposed by authority Secretary John Barry, also the author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.An 8/29 commission was originally proposed in 2006 by Levees.org, a local group critical of the Army Corps of Engineers and its construction of the levees. The group gained support from Sen. Mary Landrieu for the proposal, but Landrieu has said her attempts have been blocked by Republicans.
Barry's resolution calls for the commission to look beyond the specific reasons levees and floodwalls failed during the 2005 hurricane and include a review of how hurricane and flood protection are designed all along the Mississippi River.
"I'm really asking that they take a comprehensive look at the entire Mississippi River system, the entire Mississippi valley, from New York state to Idaho," Barry said. "They should look, for instance, at the dams on the upper Missouri River in detail, because they have a real impact on the amount of sediment that's carried in the river, which has a real impact on the erosion of wetlands in Louisiana."
This is exactly right: at issue is not merely how some bad designs crept into floodwalls (a question that, criminally, remains unanswered), but why the whole system failed, and what lessons we might glean from that to prevent it from happening again, in New Orleans and elsewhere. As Barry so brilliantly documented in Rising Tide, in the 1920s the Corps of Engineers and other institutions (Congress, state and local agencies) were incapable of responding either to actual changes in the landscape or to advances in the scientific understanding of river flooding -- resulting in the terrible 1927 Mississippi River flood. The same was true of hurricane flooding in the 40 years before Katrina. Incredibly, it's true today as well - for both kinds of floods, as we can see by what's happening in the Midwest now. Only by looking at the whole system from stem to stern can we get our arms around these problems. Will it happen? With the Democrats in control of Congress and perhaps the presidency, maybe.
There's a good piece in the Washington Post today by the redoubtable Joel Achenbach addressing this issue. Agriculture has altered the physical landscape of Iowa in ways that scientists and engineers don't fully understand or appreciate, and that is compounding the current flooding disaster.
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http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:s2826is.txt.pdf
So while all you folks who are still suffering from the Hate Bush Derangement are looking for anything to hang on President Bush....think about this.
In the 1970's, the US Army Corps of Engineers Lake Pontchartrain and Vincinity Hurricane Barrier Project planned to build fortifications at two strategic locations, which would keep massive storms on the Gulf from flooding New Orleans. These flood gates would have alleviated the flooding of New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina. So what happened? According to a report in the Times-Picayune, the plans were aborted because "environmental advocates successfully sued to stop the projects as too damaging to the wetlands and the lake's eco-system". So while you are calling for investigations into the Katrina disaster, lets add the "Save Our Wetlands" group for stopping this project with their lawsuits. And apparently no one had the political will to fight this group even though scientists had long warned about New Orleans vulnerability to the potential for massive loss of life caused by the environmentalist's lawsuit. And now we know the rest of the story.
Oh I forgot, your hatred for this President is so intense, truth is not an option.
You are passing along dis-information. Federal Judge Stanwood Duval in a January 30, 2008 ruling addressed this exact issue. Here is what happened. The corps and the locals, after much discussion agreed to not to build the floodgates which included NO pumps because the city would be vulnerable to rising rainwater. The corps and locals agreed instead to strengthen the walls along the canal. In hindsight, a bad idea, but it was agreed upon by all. You can read about it here:
http://levees.org/Dismissal.pdf
There is just so much you can say in 250 words
The link...."New Orleans: A Green Genocide" by Michael Tremogile...Frontpagemagazine.com 9/08/2005
which by the way includes
The floodgates proposed in the "barrier plan" would have kept water from entering the Lake. In Hurricane Katrina, three protected areas of New Orleans were flooded by the storm surge. Two of those were flooded by water from the Gulf: New Orleans East and St. Bernard (which includes the Lower Ninth Ward). Barriers at the Rigloets, Chef Pass, and Seabrook would have made absolutely no difference.
In calling the plan the "Lake Ponchartrain and Vicinity ..." (LPV), the Corps reveals its blindside. Surge from the Gulf is the danger. The Lake didn't enter the City during Betsy, Camille, or any of the other hurricanes since 1947. The Lake wouldn't have been a problem in Katrina either, were it not for the miserable floodwall designs built by the Corps.
The Corps didn't shelve the barrier plan because the environmentalists sued. They abandoned it because they chose to not perform the environmental studies required by the National Environmental Protection Act of 1967 (NEPA). Conformance with this law is required of all projects funded by Federal money.
Hatred for this president has absolutely no bearing on these truths.
New Orleans should be a wake-up call--levee failure threatens the entire nation, directly by flooding or indirectly by lost commerce, infrastructure or repair costs.
Any improvement depends on accurate information--identifying what failed and why it failed are vital to minimizing future problems.
There is nothing wrong with investigating levee failures. Unless you have something to hide.
Further, there are 3,786 flood gauges in America spread fairly evenly throughout the country. http://www.weather.gov/ahps/index.php
The levees are supposed to hold even as they are overtopped. Some did. Had New Orleans experienced only overtopped levees, the resulting street flooding would have been pumped out in a matter of hours. As it happened very poor designs failed catastrophically at lower than their design levels.
I'm very sorry to hear about your home.
Thing is, that also increases the force of the water passing through. Something has got to give, and that's what we're seeing now.
You can read the language of the legislation Senate Bill 2826 here:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:s2826is.txt.pdf