As federal flood-control officials directed efforts on Thursday to block off the 17th Street Canal, the source of most of the water swamping New Orleans, they faced growing criticism over decades of missed opportunities to prevent precisely this kind of disaster.
In interviews and a telephone conference call with reporters, senior officials and engineers from up and down the ranks of the Army Corps of Engineers conceded that they had no ability to detect quickly small breaches in the matrix of 560km of levees around the city.
Unless such holes can be blocked early, the punch of storm-driven waters will almost invariably rip away at the edges, widening the breach.
The officials and engineers said that after they had found the widening gap in the concrete wall that lines the eastern side of the canal, they had no quick-response plan to repair it.
Even as they tried to improvise a solution, while fresh torrents of water steadily inundated neighborhood after neighborhood, their efforts were impeded by a lack of heavy helicopters, most of which had been dispatched by federal emergency management officials to rescue stranded residents.
"The first priority of the rotary-winged aircraft was to rescue people," Lieutenant General Carl Strock, head of the US Army Corps of Engineers, said in the conference call. "Plugging the gap was a lower priority."
The accumulation of 40 years of compromises of that sort on Thursday resulted in a mixture of grief, frustration and defensiveness from the Corps, which has long been given a mission far broader than its budget.
Ultimately, the Army Corps was being directed, along with 15 other agencies, by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Strock said.
"It is FEMA who is really calling the shots and setting priorities here," he said.
Strock also defended the administration against the idea that spending on Iraq had diminished the Corps capacity to deal with domestic threats like the hurricane.
"I do not see that to be the case," he said.
"We deeply regret the loss of life associated with this," Strock said. "We are committed to doing whatever we can right now to stop the flow of waters and get the city on the road to recovery."
Alfred Naomi, a Corps senior project manager in the New Orleans district, said the New Orleans protection system was a vexing mix: It met the standards that had long ago been agreed on, but it was known to be inadequate.
"This storm was much greater than protection we were authorized to provide," he said.
While Congress appropriated more than US$4.7 billion for the Corps of Engineers this year, the amount spent on the New Orleans levee projects highlighted by the flooding was relatively small. The Lake Pontchartrain project drew about US$5.7 million and that was almost US$2 million more than what US President George W. Bush recommended in his budget.
In the last five years, Congress has repeatedly raised the amount of money for levee projects in New Orleans over what Bush requested, according to numbers provided by Senate Republicans.
In fact, lawmakers repeatedly enlarged the corps' budget overall -- but it was always still far below what corps engineers said would finish the job.
Adam Hughes, a budget policy analyst with OMB Watch, said such tradeoffs far too often err on the side of serving short-term needs and discounting long-term risks. And now, he said, the destruction of New Orleans made an earlier investment in bigger berms and other protections -- all part of that gray universe of what bureaucrats call infrastructure -- look like a bargain.
"This is a classic example of what under-funding infrastructure can do," Hughes said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS