You also, however, forget that several people were indicted for embezzlement out of the project and that a congressional budget audit made clear that the books could not be reconciled.
Project Impact was always designed at small grants given to communities to develop planning.. example: http://www.fema.gov/regions/vii/1998/98r7n033.shtm Grants were generally smaller then $250,000. As an example of their guidelines: Project Impact is built around 3 basic principles: 1) preventative measures must be decided at the local level; 2) private sector participation is vital; and 3) long term efforts and investments in prevention measures are essential. The idea of project impact was never "the government provides the plan" rather it was that the government would provide seed money for the community to develop a strategic plan.. that was the original proposal in 1994. As a planning organization, it did do well, but let's not say that it had a monumental budget before hand. It was -never- designed to pass around tons of money, and as we know now, a great deal of the grant money never went were it was intended (hell, we have a local mayor now congressmen who may face issues with pilfering some of the money for private projects). We do need to evaluate what went wrong. It is important. Part of the problem is hard to determine. In 1997, the Army Corp of Engineers recommended billions of dollars in renovation projects. The problem was, too much construction within New Orleans was too close to the levees for Lake Ponchatrain and the Mississippi. The problem as they saw it was that New Orleans was being excavated for projects and built too close to current levees as is, and it was "sinking" not only in reference to the ocean, but in reference to nearby land mass. So, rebuilding the levees as they stood would wipe out roadways, result in huge imminent domain fights, and more then that might not work.. So, the proposal was to create upstream spillways through a split levee system, to have a "break point" on the inflow of water or a controlled spilloff to lower the water table. But the problem is, people everywhere protested. Wildlife Defense Fund protested; Conservative Taxpayer Network protested; etc. Also amongst groups that protested: PETA, World Wildlife Fund, National Conservation Society, (Left) Turkey Watch, TaxPayer Network, Government Abuse Hotline (Right) Hell, some groups devoted page upon page to protesting: http://www.taxpayer.net/TCS/wastebasket/water/ Now, part of their issues is legit; far too much was going to pork.. but with so many groups on both sides of the isle protesting the Army Corp projects, very little actually happened.. and there was not a lot of support for additional funding for something so unpopular on the far left & far right. So, what happens? The projects don't get finished. Now, I agree.. a big part of the problem was that the ACE was just throwing money away on ridiculous projects. But the real projects that did need to happen.. alternative spillway construction, upstream lock & flooding systems, etc. make both better sense as well as a much more effective solution then right now. Try to redo the levees around New Orleans.. it's a bowl.. no matter how much money we threw at it, the project couldn't even be planned; something they admitted to in the 1997 proposal.. the solution had almost nothing to do with tearing up New Orleans and redoing the levees... while that's possible now, you try doing that before hand.. say, go to the state: "Hi, we need to redo the levees on the Mississippi and Ponchatrain. So, we need to annex a few hundred acres of the city, btw, we will also need to destroy the Superdome you just put a few hundred million into, and we will need to wipe out two of the larger highways while we build a secondary levee and prepare for the destruction of the older first levee" Yeah. That had about as much community support as offering to randomly shoot people's dogs for sport. CW -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eli Allen Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2005 12:53 AM To: The Hardware List Subject: Re: [H] It's bad, really bad - Katrina Ever hear of the disaster mitigation effort "Project Impact" from FEMA to build a disaster resistant community? Did quite well, for example it helped prevent major damage in the earthquake in the Puget Sound area do to the retrofitting done. Plus it only had a $20 million nation wide budget. Unfortunatly the Bush administration cut the budget in 2001. Earlier this year Bush cut the disaster preparedness function from FEMA. See an important thing to do in disasters is too look at what went wrong and what could have been done better. And sure blaming others just to place blame is wrong, but then when lessons learned from previous disasters are ignored then it is proper to assign blame. Remember hurricane Andrew in 1992? After that FEMA changed its central role from civil defense preparations to a focus on natural disaster preparedness and disaster mitigation. Eli ----- Original Message ----- From: FORC5 To: The Hardware List Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 7:48 PM Subject: Re: [H] It's bad, really bad - Katrina that would be a good trick At 02:15 PM 8/31/2005, Al Poked the stick with: I say, government's job was to prevent catastrophes like Katrina, -- Tallyho ! ]:8) Taglines below ! -- Free men do not ask permission to bear arms
