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Budget
cuts delayed New Orleans flood control work
By Andy Sullivan Thu Sep 1,
7:33 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration funding
cuts
forced federal engineers to delay improvements on
the levees, floodgates
and pumping stations that
failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane
Katrina's
floodwaters, agency documents showed on Thursday.
The
former head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,
the agency that handles
the infrastructure of the
nation's waterways, said the damage in New
Orleans
probably would have been much less extensive had
flood-control
efforts been fully funded over the
years.
"Levees would have been
higher, levees would have been
bigger, there would have been other pumps
put in,"
said Mike Parker, a former Mississippi congressman who
headed
the engineering agency from 2001 to 2002. "I'm
not saying it would have
been totally alleviated but
it would have been less than the damage that we
have
got now."
Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water
after
Katrina blew through with much of the flooding coming
after two
levees broke. A May 2005 Corps memo said
that funding levels for fiscal
years 2005 and 2006
would not be enough to pay for new construction on
the
levees. Agency officials said on Thursday in a
conference call that
delayed work was not related to
the breakdown in the levee system and
Parker told
Reuters the funding problems could not be blamed on
the Bush
administration alone. Parker said a project
dating to 1965 remains
unfinished and that any recent
projects would not have been in place by the
time the
hurricane struck even if they had been fully funded.
"If we do
stuff now it's not going to have an effect
tomorrow," Parker said. "These
projects are huge,
they're expensive and they're not sexy." White
House
spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration had
funded flood
control efforts adequately.
Tensions over funding for the New Orleans
levees
emerged more than a year ago when a local official
asserted money
had been diverted to pay for the Iraq
war. In early 2002, Parker told the
U.S. Congress that
the war on terrorism required spending cuts
elsewhere
in government. Situated below sea level, New Orleans
relied on
a 300-mile network of levees, floodgates and
pumps to hold back the waters
of the Mississippi River
and Lake Pontchartrain.
Levees were
fortified after floods in 1927 and 1965,
and Congress approved another
ambitious upgrade after
a 1995 flood killed six people. Since 2001, the
Army
Corps has requested $496 million for that project but
the Bush
administration only budgeted $166 million,
according to figures provided by
the office of
Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio,
voting
record). Congress ultimately approved $250
million for the project during
that time period.
Another project designed to shore up defenses
along
Lake Pontchartrain was similarly underfunded, as
the
administration budgeted $22 million of the $99 million
requested by
the Corps between 2001 and 2005. Congress
boosted spending on that project
to $42.5 million,
according to Landrieu's office. "It's clear that
we
didn't do everything we could to safeguard ourselves
from this
hurricane or from a natural disaster such as
Katrina but hopefully we will
learn and be more
prepared next time," said Landrieu spokesman
Brian
Richardson.
The levee defenses had been designed to withstand
a
milder Category Three hurricane and simply were
overwhelmed by
Hurricane Katrina, said senior project
manager Al Naomi. "The design was
not adequate to
protect against a storm of this nature because we
were
not authorized to provide a Category Four or Five
protection
design," he said.
A study examining a possible upgrade is under way,
he
said.
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