Mitt, Big Government, and the Deeply Confused Deep (Red) South

People living on the Gulf Coast, especially Louisianians, should be the last ones complaining about big government programs.  D-SNAP, FEMA, NFIP, USACE, National Guard, Road Home Program, etc.  Need I say more?

No I don't.  But I will.

Many local Republicans decry the amount of federal dollars spent on those no-income-tax-paying leeches living off the government dole, those same leeches who Mitt believes will never support him.  What many local Republicans seem unable to recognize, or at least admit, is that they are those leeches.

Source: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/nonpayers.banner.taxfound.jpg

Such folks are either misled, uninformed, or disingenuous.  Either way, if they want the rest of us to start taking them seriously, Republican politicians and their local supporters need to walk their talk.  The ones living in St. John the Baptist, Plaquemines, and St. Tammany need to vote for enough new taxes to cover the full cost of the levees they want.

(Well OK, they don't have to hold that vote now.  We can wait until after they get out of the disaster food stamp line.)

Like After Katrina, Outside Folks Getting the Disaster Contracts

The fine folk over at The Lens informed the citizenry today that "Gulf Coast states lag behind other states in getting contracts for oil disaster work." Only 12% of the $53.3 million in federal oil-spill related contracts have gone to Louisiana companies. Most of the rest of that has been contracted to companies in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Colorado -- not to other Gulf Coast states suffering the direct environmental and socioeconomic consequences of this disaster.

People in other states need work too, and it seems quite plausible to me that some of corporations best able to execute the particular terms of some contracts are not Gulf Coast business. Maybe many Gulf Coast businesses were already at full capacity due to having already received state or local contracts or contracts directly from BP to do disaster-related work.

My point is I just don't know enough about the details to know whether we're getting shafted down here in the federal contracting game for this disaster. I do know, based on past experience, that we need to dig deeper into this before it becomes like the Katrina recovery in which local workers were brazenly left out of the citizen driven recovery we were promised. That is, if it's not too late. I blogged about it on 9/16/2006, and I'm going to be quite pissed if this sort of thing is happening again...

The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton are using the very same "contract vehicles" in the Gulf Coast as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are "indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity" open-ended "contingency" contracts that are being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out local companies. These are also "cost-plus" contracts that allow them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive to overspend. [Corpwatch.org, 8/17/2006]

...and we were supposed to have learned our lesson so that our federal government could protect us from shady contract deals.

I hope that last part didn't make you laugh TOO HARD.

The First Step to Recovery...

...Is Admitting You Have a Problem.

[I've been planning this one for a while, so set on down, grab a cup of coffee (or the vodka if you prefer to swing that way) 'cuz I gots a lot to say.]

When it comes to flood protection, too many of us haven't admitted this. Everyone in the world knows we have a bit of a drainage & elevation problem, but I'm asking how many of us in the N.O. area have been honest enough to outwardly admit that we have in fact exacerbated and even caused -- Oh yes I did say it -- our own flood protection problems. At the very least we ignore the obvious, even to the point of denial, and you only need to have watched one after-school special to know that people who are in denial are nowhere near to achieving recovery (no matter how blonde and popular you are, nor whether you're prom queen).

Ironically, it's the citizen group working to improve our flood protection system, Levees.org, that has added a lot of the fuel to this fire, first with what I saw on their FAQ and Factsheet pages and then by their founder's allegations that the Corps has been unfairly attacking her and all citizens by saying that we are partly to blame for the 2005 federal flood.

Well, we are. And it's high time we stop running from that sad, uncomfortable truth. I don't believe we are to blame for the shoddy workmanship done on the levees. However, we are not idle, innocent bystanders in all of this.

Let's start with Fact #1 on the levees.org Factsheet: "The flooding of New Orleans and nearby St. Bernard Parish was an engineering disaster, not a natural disaster." Yes, the structures were poorly constructed, but the levee and canal wall failures did not happen on a clear, sunny day. They were overwhelmed by hurricane storm surge -- a.k.a. a natural disaster. Hurricane Katrina was a strong Category 3 storm as it passed New Orleans, true. We were led to believe that our flood protection structures should have withstood such a storm (or roughly, a 100 year storm), true. However, thanks to Katrina, we now know that the five-category Saffir-Simpson scale is an inadequate classification system. While New Orleans received Category 2 winds, perhaps stronger gusts, Katrina brought with her storm surge well beyond that even seen during Camille, the strongest Cat 5 we have ever seen in the U.S. with winds approaching 200 miles per hour.

Fact #2 on levees.org: "Responsibility for the design and construction of the flood protection in metro New Orleans belongs solely to the US Army Corps of Engineers..." Solely? Really? Then why the required public commenting wherein they are pressured to spare volleyball courts at the cost of weakening the better designed plans presented by the Corps? What about when people insisted on putting pumps even further south of the lake (i.e., in City Park) when it is clearly in our best interests to block lake surge from intruding that far into the city?

How are WE at fault? We must shoulder part of the blame because many people here keep failing to acknowledge two key facts of life: 1) we have always been and will continue to be vulnerable to the destruction wrought by hurricanes; and 2) man can never, and I mean NEVER, guarantee that anything he builds can withstand whatever Mother Nature may send our way. Yet, just this summer the news featured coverage of people relying on updated flood maps, which are already outdated by the way, to decide whether or not to raise their homes. Let's review. Many people whose homes flooded had no flood insurance before Katrina not because they couldn't afford it but because based on the presence of a flood protection system federal maps zoned their homes as being outside of a 100 year floodplain (i.e., insurance guy told you you don't need flood insurance). OK, fine, many people didn't really understand the statistics behind 100- and 500-year storms and the variables involved, but you should now. However, many people understood back then that their neighborhoods existed only because the levee system was extended to incorporate that area of the city. Levees.org even acknowledges this fact:

("...the water table was drastically lowered by the city’s drainage system and some areas settled several feet due to the consolidation of the underlying organic soils. After 1965, the US Army Corps built a system around a much larger geographic footprint that included previous marshland and swamp.")

In the weeks after the storm, I remember pissed off residents blaming "the feds" who told us we were safe behind levees. Yet here we are, going right back to where we started, with the City Council (not the Corps) not approving flood maps because doing so would require people to elevate their homes several feet...Unless they wait a couple years for the levee system to be rebuilt and the next round of flood maps putting them outside 100-year floodplains once again so they can build their houses at or very near ground level.

For some, particularly in neighborhoods such as Lakeview, the maps show their risk has abated and if the city would adopt the FEMA maps, huge savings on flood-insurance premiums would follow. But those residents will have to wait. The City Council didn't want to adopt the maps and force others in areas where flood risk has increased, like the Lower 9th Ward and parts of Gentilly, to elevate now when adequate protection should be in place in a couple of years. (T-P, 6-18-09)

Levees.org FAQ: Haven't N.O. residents known for years that this could happen? "No, because the Corps assured the city’s residents that they were safe from a Standard Project Hurricane (roughly equivalent to a Cat 3 Storm). New Orleans residents did not know that the flood walls could rupture 4 feet below design specs or that the floodwalls were designed to collapse if water briefly overtopped them."

[The initial post incorrectly cited IPET as the reference document from which the following info was drawn. It was actually drawn from the ILIT report. Associated hyperlinks have also been corrected.]

Our collective sin is our repeated failure to learn from the sins of our fathers and from our own disaster ridden history. The Independent Levee Investigation Team (ILIT) issued a report on July 31, 2006, did a very good job of retelling this history as part of a nearly 700-page report on the failure of our flood protection system:

Floods Inundating "Backatown" via Lake Pontchartrain
(the following lifted directly from the ILIT report [except for my commentary in brackets; bold emphases are mine]

Hurricanes strike the Louisiana Coast with a mean frequency of two every three years (Kolb and Saucier, 1982). Since 1759, 172 hurricanes have struck southern Louisiana (Shallat, 2000). Of these, 38 have caused flooding in New Orleans, usually via Lake Pontchartrain. Some of the more notable events have included: 1812, 1831, 1860, 1893, 1915, 1940, 1947, 1965, 1969, and 2005. [ILIT report, pp. 4-9 to 4-11]

1. "The Great Louisiana Hurricane" of August 9, 1812. It rolled over the barrier islands and drowned Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes and the area around Barataria Bay [pay attention too, Westbankers] under 15 feet of water. The parade ground at Fort St. Phillip was inundated by 8 feet of water and the shoreline along Lake Pontchartrain was similarly inundated, though this was far enough below the French Quarter to spare any flooding of the City.
2. In June 1821 easterly winds surged off Lake Pontchartrain and pushed up Bayou St. John, flooding fishing villages and spilling into North Rampart Street until the winds abated and allowed the water to drain back into the lake. It was an ominous portent of things to come.
3. On August 16, 1831 "The Great Barbados Hurricane" careened across the Caribbean, striking the Louisiana coast west of New Orleans. The area south of town was again inundated by storm surge, while a three foot surge entered the city from Lake Pontchartrain.
4. Southeastern Louisiana suffered through three hurricanes during the summer and fall of 1860. On August 8th a fast moving hurricane swept 20 feet of water into Plaquemines Parish. The third hurricane struck on October 2nd making landfall west of New Orleans. It inundated Plaquemines, St. Bernard, and Barataria, causing a significant storm surge in Lake Pontchartrain which destroyed 20 lakeside settlements, washing out a portion of the New Orleans and Jackson Great Northern Railroad. Surge from this storm overtopped the banks along the Old and New Basin drainage canals and a levee along Bayou St. John gave way, allowing the onrushing water to flood a broad area extending across the back side of New Orleans.
   
5. In 1871 three hurricanes caused localized flooding, which proved difficult to drain. Flooding emanating from storm surges on Lake Pontchartrain during these storms overtopped the Hagen Avenue drainage canal between Bayou St. John and New Basin Canal [present day Lafitte Avenue] spilling flood waters into the Mid-City area. City Engineer W. H. Bell warned the city officials about the potential dangers posed by the drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain, because the Mid-City area lay slightly below sea level.
6. The record hurricane of October 2, 1893 passed south of New Orleans and generated winds of 100 mph and a storm surge of 13 feet, which drowned more than 2,000 people in Jefferson Parish, completely destroying the settlements on the barrier island of Cheniere Caminada. This represented the greatest loss of life ascribable to any natural disaster in the United States up until that time.
7. In August 1900, a hurricane passed directly over Galveston, TX, demolishing that city and killing between 6,000 and 8,000 people, which remains the deadliest natural disaster in American history. Prior to impacting Galveston, that hurricane tracked westerly parallel to the Gulf Coast about 150 miles south of New Orleans. Its flood surges were noted along the Gulf Coast, including Lake Pontchartrain's south shore (Cline, 1926) [sounds kinda like Rita and Ike, don't it? We're vulnerable even if a storm just passes south of us on the way to Texas! Still hard for me to wrap my mind around this phenomenon.]
8. Prior to Katrina's landfall in 2005, the most damaging hurricane to impact New Orleans was the Grand Isle Hurricane of September 29, 1915, a Category 4 event which produced winds as great as 140 miles per hour at Grand Isle. It slowed as it made landfall and eventually passed over Audubon Park, seriously damaging structures across New Orleans. Electrical power was knocked out, preventing the City's new pumps from functioning [sound familiar?]. The wave crest height on Lake Pontchartrain rose to 13 ft, easily overtopping 6-foot high shoreline levee, destroying the lakefront villages of Bucktown (at the end of 17th Street Canal), West End, Spanish Fort, and Lakeview (these lakeside settlements were swallowed up by the infilling of the Lake Pontchartrain shoreline in 1928-31). The drainage canals were also overtopped, flooding the city behind Claiborne, leaving Mid-City and Canal Street under several feet of water. This storm overwhelmed the City's defenses so quickly that 275 people were killed, mostly in the Lake Pontchartrain shoreline zone.
9. On September 19, 1947 an unnamed hurricane made landfall near the Chandeleur Islands [remember those?]
   A storm surge of 9.8ft reached Shell Beach on Lake Borgne. The runways at Moisant Airport were covered by 2 ft of water while Jefferson Parish was flooded to depths of 3+ ft. Sewage from an overwhelmed S&WB treatment plant stagnated in some of the drainage canals, producing sulfuric acid fumes that caused staining of lead-based paint on some of the homes in the Lakeview area, leaving them with unsightly black blotches [I've never heard this before]. 51 people drowned and New Orleans suffered more than $100 million in damages. City officials were unable to clear floodwaters through the drainage canals in the Lakeview, Gentilly, and Metairie neighborhoods for nearly two weeks. [hmm, I have this strange feeling of deja vu, like this has happened before]. This was the first significant hurricane to strike New Orleans which generated a large body of reliable storm surge data, which was subsequently used in design of flood protection works by the Corps of Engineers. The New Orleans Times-Picayune prepared a map that showed reported depths and locations of flooding in the 1947 hurricane.

A couple more important nuggets of history which some of us seem hellbent on repeating:

[In the 1870s!] New Orleans City Surveyor W.H. Bell warned of the potential dangers posed by the big outfall drainage canals. He told city officials to place pumping stations on the lakeshore, otherwise “heavy storms would result in water backup within the canals, culminating in overflow into the city.” This prophetic warning was ignored with catastrophic results during Hurricane Katrina. (p. 4-16)

By the time the Corps got involved [between 1955 & 1960], a dense network of single family residences abutted the drainage canals along their entire courses (the canals are 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 miles long). The encroachment of these homes adjacent to the canal embankments circumvented any possibility of using conventional methods to heighten the levees, which is usually accomplished by adding compacted earth on the land-side of the levees (Figure 4.23, which would require the condemnation and removal of hundreds of residences, which would be costly and time-consuming (not to mention unprecedented). (p. 4-22)

As far as I'm concerned, the previous point merits the most reflection. The feds and Corps did not build our homes right alongside outfall drainage canals. Those drained marshland pioneers may not have comprehended fully the implication of building their homes where they did. But now, we do. And we have to really think about what it means, not just to us personally but to the rest of the citizens who will be flooded from a breach of the floodwall in our backyards, when we object to the Corps appropriating 6 feet of our backyards to widen levee foundations or secure them from tree roots and whatnots that compromise the levees. WE are the ones with the power to tell the Corps how much land we are willing to cede to protect this great City, just like WE were the ones who limited the scope of the first round of levees which failed so catastrophically -- under the force of the Category 5 storm surge of a naturally occurring hurricane.

Let the hate mail begin!!

WHAT THE FAYk? (Part I)

So, as they have done pretty much everyday since Fay existed, the prediction-powers-that-be have again inched Fay's track ever so slightly southward (as of the 5AM advisory). Which is not surprising given that track forecast errors for Fay have averaged about 350-450 miles 4 to 5 days out. I like to read NHC's official discussion for "the real scoop"; here's what they scooped up for me this morning:

A MID-LEVEL RIDGE TO
THE NORTH OF FAY...WHICH IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CYCLONE'S CURRENT
STALL...IS FORECAST BY THE GLOBAL MODELS TO STRENGTHEN AND BUILD
WESTWARD AS A MID- TO UPPER-LEVEL TROUGH IN THE SOUTHERN PLAINS
LIFTS OUT OVER THE NEXT TWO TO THREE DAYS.  THIS PATTERN IS
EXPECTED TO TURN FAY SLOWLY TO THE WEST-NORTHWEST ALONG THE
SOUTHERN PERIPHERY OF THE BUILDING RIDGE.  THERE HAS NOT BEEN A
GREAT DEAL OF CHANGE IN THE MODEL GUIDANCE DURING THIS FORECAST
CYCLE...ALTHOUGH THE GFS HAS SHIFTED SOUTHWARD AND NOW SHOWS A
TRACK VERY CLOSE TO THE GULF COAST OF NORTHERN FLORIDA.  THE
OFFICIAL FORECAST IS IN BEST AGREEMENT WITH THE GFS AND UKMET
GUIDANCE AND IS JUST A LITTLE BIT SOUTH OF THE PREVIOUS ADVISORY
TRACK.

THE UPPER-LEVEL
ENVIRONMENT IS EXPECTED TO REMAIN FAVORABLE FOR REDEVELOPMENT...
HOWEVER...SHOULD FAY GO SOUTH OF THE FORECAST TRACK INTO THE GULF
OF MEXICO.

Followed by the 11am scoop:

FAY SHOULD
BEGIN TO WEAKEN BUT A TRACK FATHER SOUTH THAN INDICATED COULD BRING
THE CENTER OVER THE NORTHEAST GULF OF MEXICO. IN THIS CASE...FAY
SHOULD NOT WEAKEN AS MUCH AS FORECAST...AND DO NOT RULE OUT THE
POSSIBILITY OF SLIGHT STRENGTHENING IF THE CENTER OF FAY REMAINS
OVER WATER LONGER THAN ANTICIPATED.

STEERING CURRENTS HAVE REMAINED VERY LIGHT...CONSEQUENTLY FAY HAS
BARELY MOVED SINCE YESTERDAY. GLOBAL MODELS INSIST ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF A HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM NORTH OF FAY. THIS PATTERN
SHOULD FORCE THE CYCLONE TO MOVE SLOWLY TOWARD THE WEST-NORTHWEST
OR WEST...A MOTION WE HAVE BEEN FORECASTING BUT HAS NOT MATERIALIZED
YET. NEVERTHELESS...THE DEVELOPING STEERING PATTERN GIVES ME NO
OPTION BUT TO FORECAST A TURN TO THE LEFT WHICH SHOULD BEGIN SOON.
THIS IS CONSISTENT WITH ALL GLOBAL MODELS AND TRACK GUIDANCE.

Perhaps it's insomnia, or the weird collective indescribable, slightly off-kilter way many of us seem to feel and behave as "you know what day" approaches; but despite the slowly shifting cone southward, I'm still not all freaked out...

...about Ms. What the FAYk, that is. I am, however, perturbed by the Corps insistence on freaking us the hell out every August since 2005.

(Remember 2006? "Oh we didn't test the temporary pumps in water and so we just realized this vibration thing we gotta fix but the pumps will work. We are ready." 'Member 2007? "Umm, yeah, funniest thing, y'all; them temporary pumps might have not worked but it's all good cuz we didn't have to use them anyway!")

This year, in a broadway revue-like tribute to the feds' performance during Katrina ("there was only overtopping, not any breaching"), today they introduce the clear (TO THEM) distinction between protecting us from surge as opposed to from rainwater. Because apparently rainfall is not a key element of hurricane protection. I have a crazy hunch that a former insurance executive is now sewing his engineering oats in a new job over on Leake Ave. at CORPS HQ.

But life goes on, and I must get back to mine until I have time to tell you why I must give props to the new local levee authority for wasting no time telling the Corps that they are full of B.S. Stay tuned for the next episode of WHAT THE FAYk?!...

I Move That the Corps Hire a New PR Consultant

Here's today's hysterical laugh...Last night on the news, the Corps said that they are willing to have outside experts analyze the situation (how nice of them); however, they are not alarmed because "seepage" is normal. They said if the floodwall were "leaking," they'd be alarmed. There's a big difference, they said, between "seepage" and "leaking."

You got to see this
http://www.wwltv.com/video/news-index.html?nvid=250060


(A bit of history: Several months before Katrina, residents along this floodwall where it failed, reported water in their backyards coming from underneath the floodwall; but the levee board failed to respond.)

UPDATE
A bit of perspective from my wise Uncle Phil: "Let’s put this in human terms. If some part of your anatomy was seeping vs leaking – would there be a difference to you? I think not..."

Welcome to the Jungle

(Much love to Gentilly Girl for the heads up on this one.)


Hey America,

Sorry. This couldn't have happened to nicer people. Like most of you, I thought all 146 were in the New Orleans area. Only 6 are in Louisiana.

I know! It's a horrible way to find out, but at least you guys got some warning. It pains me to welcome you to our reality, although honestly, those of you who insisted we were entirely to blame for being stupid enough to live here needed the wake-up call. As did those of you who said "well they knew it was going to happen!" So, when are you moving?


146 Levees May Fail in Flood (USA Today)
"Spokesman Pete Pierce says the corps does not want to release the list of the 146 places where levees have been identified as inadequate until all levees are inspected and all communities with faulty levees are notified."


Allow me to explain / translate for my fellow Americans who are not used to dealing with FEMA and the Corps of Engineers: He's not kidding. He actually meant what he said.

And no, they do not let the mentally retarded serve as spokespersons!