presley wrote:
There is no clarification of what is meant by the phrase "is
reponsible for the levees" in any website I can find, other than
many assertions that the Levee Board is responsible for the
inspection and maintenance of the
levees - NOT the building of them. What complicates matters is that
in the 19th century, levee boards all up and down the Mississippi
were individually in charge of building AND maintaining their own
levees. However, in the 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers
took over the building of levees in most instances, partly because
of the many devastasting floods all along the Missisissippi from
Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, through Tennessee and Arkansas, to
Mississippi and Louisiana. (It was recognized that rural,
agricultural states lacked the financial resources to accomplish
this on their own). An additional complication is that New Orleans
AND its levees are steadily sinking. So the responsibility is
murky. It's not quite the same situation as in other parts of the
river, where the levees are stable. Is it up to the Army Corps of
Engineers to constantly add to (build) the levees which are sinking
- or are the local levee boards supposed to come up with the
engineering and earth moving equipment to organize this every
single year for hundreds of miles of levees ringing New Orleans?
Because, essentially, there needs to be substantial levee
rebuilding every year to counter the sinking. Then you have the
additional arguments about why should the federal government give
"extra" money to Louisiana and New Orleans for the levees there?
And the answer is simple. Louisiana has always "given" more value
to the nation than it receives. Not in taxes, but in providing deep
water access to shipping for every kind of agricultural product
grown in the Midwest and every kind of industrial product made in
those states (Billions upon billions every year) and of course
in supplying workers and a network of pipelines and refineries to
supply the oil and natural gas that 30% of Americans rely upon.
Look, I'm not someone who lays the blame for all of this on Bush,
I'm merely pointing out that his policy of underfunding the Army
Corps of Engineers contributed to the immediate problem of this
year's flooding in New Orleans. In the long term, the entire
ecosystem of coastal Louisiana has to be reconsidered. Right now I
don't see any way of guaranteeing the safety of New Orleans in
future storms. No one even seems to be looking at the very real
possibility that New Orleans could be hit by another hurricane this
very year. (Two or more hurricane strikes on the Gulf Coast per
year are pretty much standard - and this is a much more active year
than normal). In the long run, I think the southernmost parishes of
Louisiana will have to be completely abandoned, and the levees from
New Orleans southward breached to allow the Mississippi to flood
the wetlands every year, as it did for 1,000,000 years before the
coming of Europeans. That is the only way to rebuild the wetlands,
raise the level of the land, and rebuild the barrier islands that
protected the mainland in the past. That leaves the questions of
where and how do we transport oil and natural gas from the gulf,
where will the oil workers live, and where will we put the
refineries? Those are very serious questions, and questions which
I'm not sure either we OR the Bush Administration are prepared to
deal with.

Yeah. Let's defer everything until 2066.

snip

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Travis in Shoreline Washington