John Tierney stakes out a hard line on the failures of the federal government:

Why is New Orleans in so much worse shape today than New York City was after the attacks on Sept. 11?

The short answer is that New York was attacked by fire, not water. But then why are urbanites so much better prepared to cope with fire than with flooding? Mostly because they learned to fight fire without any help from the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

[...]

Now it’s New Orleans’s turn. Since Washington didn’t keep its promise to protect the city, the federal government should repair the damage and pay for a new flood-control system. But New Orleans and other coastal cities will never be safe if they go on relying on Washington for protection. Members of Congress will always have higher priorities than paying for levees in someone else’s state.

The federal government has a role in coordinating flood control among states and in organizing outside disaster relief, but the locals should fight floods much the same way they fight fires. Fifteenth-century Dutch burghers didn’t have the financial or technological resources of today’s Louisianians, but they managed to hold back the sea without the Army Corps of Engineers.

Here’s the bargain I’d offer New Orleans: the feds will spend the billions for your new levees, but then you’re on your own. You and others along the coast have to buy flood insurance the same way we all buy fire insurance - from private companies that have more at stake than do Washington bureaucrats.

This site has compiled the history of federal government failure to protect New Orleans and the rest of the country from natural disaster since it assumed responsibility, and as expneditures the powers that be considered more important (I’m talking to you, Ted Stevens) cropped up. A few choice quotes:

The head of the Army Corps of Engineers was forced to resign Wednesday because members of the Bush administration decided he had not vigorously defended proposed budget cuts for key corps flood control and dredging projects, members of Congress said.

Times-Picayune, March 7, 2002

Less money is available to the Army Corps of Engineers to build levees and water projects in the Mississippi River valley this year and next year, the next president of the Mississippi River Commission said Friday. But that didn’t stop Louisiana government, business and environmental leaders from demanding more action from the Bush administration on protection from hurricanes and restoration of coastal wetlands.

Corps officials involved in restoring Louisiana’s wetlands also have been sent to assist those fighting in and rebuilding Iraq, including oversight of a similar wetlands restoration project there, he said.

Ed Theriot, a Vicksburg-based engineer who had directed the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Study, was sent to Iraq four months ago to oversee the restoration of the “Garden of Eden” wetlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that were destroyed by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. President Bush’s 2005 budget allocates $100 million for that effort.

In Louisiana, $8 million is allocated in the Bush budget for completing the coastal wetlands study that Theriot was heading. However, administration officials hope that this summer Congress will authorize the first Louisiana projects as part of a 10-year restoration effort.

Times-Picayune, April 24, 2004

What’s new, said Morehiser and Naomi, is that the agency has run out of money for the next round of lifts. Naomi said this is the first time a lack of money has stopped major corps work on the levees since the project began in 1967. “I can’t tell you exactly what that could mean this hurricane season if we get a major storm,” Naomi said. “It would depend on the path and speed of the storm, the angle that it hits us.

“But I can tell you that we would be better off if the levees were raised, . . . and I think it’s important and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status of these projects.”

The challenge now, said emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri in Jefferson Parish and Terry Tullier in New Orleans, is for southeast Louisiana somehow to persuade those who control federal spending that protection from major storms and flooding are matters of homeland security.

“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,” Maestri said. “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.”

Naomi said the local corps district has no money to close gaps in the hurricane levee on St. Charles Parish’s east bank. That levee is designed to protect St. Rose, Destrehan, New Sarpy and Norco, as well as keep floodwater from closing Airline Drive, a major evacuation route.

“The big danger here is that if we don’t get the money to award these contracts that are ready to go, the backlog will only increase as the levees continue to settle,” Naomi said. “We’ll end up so far behind that we can’t catch up. And the further behind we get, the more critical the safety of the city becomes.”

–Times-Picayne, June 8, 2004

With tens of thousands of their citizen soldiers now deployed in Iraq, many of the nation’s governors have complained to senior Pentagon officials that they were facing severe manpower shortages in guarding prisoners, fighting wildfires, preparing for hurricanes and floods and policing the streets.

–New York Times, July 20, 2005

The corps’ New Orleans District, which stretches across the state’s coastline, will get $290 million, a $34 million reduction from the dollars allocated for fiscal year 2005 by Congress, and almost $300 million less than the district says it needs to complete proposed and ongoing construction projects.

The corps’ fiscal year 2006 budget is part of broad belt-tightening by the Bush administration in response to the war in Iraq and rapidly increasing deficits.

Windell Curole, executive director of the South Lafourche Levee District, said he’s worried that a decision to cut all money for completion of the Larose to Golden Meadow hurricane levee could spell disaster. “Luckily, we have built a substantial amount of this final lift,” he said. “But if we’re a couple of feet low and the water goes over the top, we go from zero damage to millions of dollars lost by our citizens.”

Also facing significant cuts is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Program, whose projects include a variety of canal widenings, culvert replacements and pump station replacements and upgrades in Orleans and Jefferson parishes.

The projects would get $10.5 million in 2006 in the Bush proposal, compared to $35 million in 2005. A number of contractors were advised last year that they had the option of quitting work on their projects or picking up the cost of construction themselves, until the corps could find money to repay them.

–Times-Picayune, February 8, 2005

Even as federal money for flood prevention in southeast Louisiana dwindles in the wake of the Iraq war, local experts and politicians are laying the groundwork to push for millions of dollars for planning a system to foil storm surge from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane…

…”There will one day be a substantial loss of life unless we have Category 5 protection,” said Al Naomi, the corps’ senior project manager for the Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity hurricane protection levee system.

Four years ago, Congress gave the corps permission to begin its study of structures that could stave off storm surge from the biggest of all hurricanes — but not the money to do the study. Naomi has been pushing for that money ever since. But the efforts come at a time when Congress and the Bush administration are steadily reducing appropriations for both hurricane system improvements and flood-protection construction in the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project.

Congress authorized the corps in the 1960s to begin designing and building levees and other structures to protect the New Orleans area against fast-moving Category 3 storms. Much of that construction is still years away from being finished.

Whichever Category 5 system is ultimately chosen, Naomi said, it is likely to cost $2 billion or more. But without it, engineers predict a worst-case scenario in which a storm would push its surge all the way to Interstate 12 and leave the New Orleans metro area underwater for months.

–Times-Picayone, May 28, 2005

The nation’s governors are expressing growing concern that the extended deployment of National Guard soldiers in Iraq is depleting troop resources at home, threatening to leave states unable to respond to the natural disasters, civil unrest and other domestic emergencies that traditionally lead governors to call out the Guard.

…several governors described their states as one disaster away from a calamity. ”Being in the West in the sixth year of a drought, we have concern about what we’ve seen in the past, such as that a wildfire can hit where we have to utilize the National Guard,” said Governor Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho, a Republican.

For Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, the major concern was with hurricanes. She and three other states in the hurricane belt — Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi — have agreed to help one another in the case of the threat, hurricanes or other disasters, as they tried to adjust to tighter circumstances in their states.

–New York Times, July 17, 2005

More than a few readers have accused me of being knee-jerk anti-Bush on this. I think the facts speak for themselves. Does that mean that had Gore or Kerry been elected, things would be any better? I doubt it. The money likely would have been diverted to some natioanl health care scheme, or to some other foreign entanglement (Democrats are good at waging ill-advised wars, too). But it’s a waste of time to consider whether, as one Hit & Run commenter quipped, “Kerry’s hurricane would have been worse.” There’s plenty of blame to go around here. On the federal government, certainly. On the priorities of Bush and Congress. On Mayor Nagin. On the history of corruption in New Orleans city government. On the history of corruption in Louisiana government. No, it isn’t Bush’s fault that the levee system begun nearly forty years ago still hasn’t been completed. This is a massive, wholesale, decades-long failure of government to adequately fulfill its most basic and necessary responsibility.

We have fun on this site with the comical consequences of inept government, bumbling bureaucracy, and waste and inefficiency in the public sector. As was the case four years ago this month, this time, government failures aren’t so funny. They’re deadly. Keep that in mind when leftists inevitably use this tragedy to call for yet more government.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 at 11:19 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.