Readings

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 don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t 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?

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EDITORIAL: President Bush, Save Our Coast: Money for restoration should stay in energy bill

The Shreveport Times, July 22, 2005
Good luck, governor. President George W. Bush appears to have made up his mind on Louisiana's coastal crisis: Let it sink. So Kathleen Blanco probably shouldn't hold her breath waiting for the president to take her up on her offer of an aerial tour.

After the state's congressional delegation finally got some bipartisan legislative consensus on giving coastal states a larger share of offshore oil and gas revenues, the president has decided the nation can't afford it. This from the man who took the lead on turning a federal surplus into mounting record deficits.

Time is critical. House and Senate conferees are now hashing out competing versions of a federal energy bill, both of which contain money for coastal restoration. The Senate bill had $540 million over four years and the House version contained $350 million over the next 10 years, jumping to a potential $1 billion annual appropriation after 2016. But the president, through his energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, sent word to delete the money because it is too costly with the current deficits.

Louisiana's congressional delegation was shut out of negotiations. So the state has to count on those on the conference committee to recognize the coastal erosion that costs the state 24 square miles a year also threatens the infrastructure that supplies the nation much of its energy supply.

An estimated $5 billion in federal revenues comes from the oil and gas -- 80 percent of the nation's offshore energy supply -- brought ashore on Louisiana's coast.

In her written invitation to Bush to take a pelican eye view of the fragile, disappearing coastal wetlands, Blanco asks them to "please consider the far greater costs of not addressing the catastrophic coastal land loss occurring in Louisiana, land loss that puts our nation's energy security and economic future at risk." Makes sense. And that's not even mentioning the breeding grounds that support much of the nation's domestic seafood industry.

Coincidentally, the tug match between the White House and Louisiana was occurring during a scientific conference in which new elevation numbers were being rolled out to help emergency planners, builders and scientists accommodate the steadily sinking coast. A May National Geodetic Study showed coastal areas were sinking as much as 20 inches in a decade. The loss may or may not continue at that rate as scientists debate the causes.

Until Bush's intervention, the congressional delegation was sounding relatively confident about the state's chances. It was a fight that served as a unifying point, despite some occasional one-upmanship, between U.S. Sens. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, and David Vitter, a freshman Republican. During a recent editorial board meeting with The Times, U.S. Rep. Jim McCrery had no cautionary notes about the bill as he also mentioned federal assistance for wind turbine technology that affects local manufacturer BeairdCo.

Those on the conference committee should resist the White House and do the right thing and give the same sort of financial consideration that saved both the Everglades and Chesapeake Bay. Sidney Coffee, who head's the state's coastal policy office, perhaps puts it best: "This is a matter of survival for us. This is real.'
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