Durango Bill’s
New Orleans Underwater
“No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming”
By Sidney Blumenthal
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans
was one of
the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration
cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq
war.
Reuters:
An aerial view of the New Orleans airport underwater.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane
Katrina has left
millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to
thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated
city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the
damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an
act of nature.
A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to
study how New
Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush
administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a
flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast
Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers
strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a
hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely
disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City.
But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project
essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the
Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district
of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake
Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning
of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since
2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring
freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans'
levees, but it was too late.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane
published a
series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now
underwater, reported online: "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."
The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands
to developers
almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm
surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands
surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the
Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had
promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's
administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his
approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of
Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they
could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to
interstate commerce.
In response to this potential crisis, four leading
environmental groups
conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without
wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary,
much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how
mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said
one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council
on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable,"
and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."
"My administration's climate change policy will be science
based,"
President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the
Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to
the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as
"a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change
assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA
issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating,
"Climate change has global consequences for human health and the
environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and
all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush
successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists,
meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising
temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.
In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists,
including 20
Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity
in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large
part in the policies that have made the United States of America the
world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous
and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by
presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and
implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has,
however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific
knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely
ignored this statement.
In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the
trumping of
science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The
Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of
the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific
evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific
advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa
accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage
in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian
agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice
Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to
delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are
subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to
buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of
Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion
no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at
which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite
her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a
former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional
background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and
prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious
materials through the Park Service.
On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered
a speech in
Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin
D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and
stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had
boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor
to President
Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for
Salon and the Guardian of London.
The above article was printed in Spiegel Online on August 31, 2005
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,372455,00.html
There were earlier
advance warnings
Scientific American Oct., 2001
“Drowning New Orleans” by Mark Fischetti
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/jkbrooks/pictures/New%20Orleans.pdf
“New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen” - Year
Old Report Predicted Destruction
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=f4b7753ef490d4e01027f723ae275dba
Yet on ABC TV’s “Good Morning America” on Sept. 1,
2005, George Bush stated:
“I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the
levees”.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-delays2sep02,0,3594528.story?coll=la-home-headlines
If the
recommended
solutions that were presented in the Scientific American article had
been
implemented, it is highly probable that New Orleans would still be
fully habitable today. However, as part of “The Republican War on
Science”, “Scientific American” and anything printed
in it are classified as “The Enemy”. Nothing was done. To
make things worse, funds for normal maintenance of the levees were
severely cut.
Next question - how to you restore New Orleans and resurrect all the
people who died?
See “The Republican War on Science” by Chris Mooney
and other related books at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465046754/qid=1125678309/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0549060-4406438?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Also please see: George Bush Misrepresents Science and Knowledge
http://www.durangobill.com/CreationismBush.html
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