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Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to
Happen? 'Times Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised
Federal Spending Issues
By Will Bunch
(Editor and Publisher )
(Published: August 31, 2005 )
PHILADELPHIA
Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north
of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New
Orleans. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues
to pour through a two- lock-long break in the main
levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much
of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level,
the rising tide may not stop until it's level with
the massive lake.
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.
Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late
Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site,
reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming.
... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever,
serious questions are being asked about the lack of
preparation."
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 a Feb. 16, 2004,
article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency
management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana;
told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money
has been moved in the president's budget to handle
homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose
that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy
that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing
everything we can to make the case that this is a
security issue for us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season
starting, the Corps' project manager Al 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 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.
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: a bridge and levee job right at
the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on
Monday.
The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday
night observed, "The Louisiana congressional
delegation urged Congress earlier this year to
dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's
coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In
its budget, the Bush administration proposed a
significant reduction in funding for southeast
Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush
proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local
officials say they need."
Local officials are now saying, the article reported,
that had Washington heeded their warnings about the
dire need for hurricane protection, including
building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the
damage might not have been nearly as bad as it
turned out to be."
Will Bunch (letters@editorandpublisher.com)
is senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News. He
won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 when he reported for
Newsday. Much of this article also appears on his
blog, Attytood, at the Daily News.
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