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Thursday, September 01, 2005
Hindsight to foresight
From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
June 3, 2005:
With the Louisiana National Guard heavily deployed in Iraq, are there enough soldiers at home to fulfill their traditional role of assisting in the aftermath of a damaging storm this hurricane season?
According to Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, Louisiana adjutant general, the answer is an unqualified yes.
"We have a little less than 3,000 deployed overseas right now, and we have about 11,000 members of the Guard, so we have 8,000 soldiers and airmen available to respond to our citizens in an emergency," Landreneau said.
May 28, 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.
The Army Corps of Engineers estimates it will take at least four years and more than $10 million just to evaluate four Category 5 protection alternatives, in hopes that one can pass environmental muster and the scrutiny of Congress.
The most unusual of the four would add a third bridge to I-10 between New Orleans and Slidell and equip it with huge side panels that could be raised and lowered to keep a potentially deadly storm surge out of Lake Pontchartrain.
"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.
...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.
January 6, 2003:
Democrat Mary Landrieu's re-election victory in the Louisiana Senate runoff kept the GOP majority to 51-48, with one independent who votes with the Democrats. But Republicans will control the agenda, which may enable them to push through an energy bill with tax breaks for drilling and with oil exploration rights in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which most Democrats oppose.
Republicans are considering attaching the energy bill to spending legislation, which would not be subject to a filibuster and therefore would need only a bare majority to adopt. They couldn't employ that strategy last year, when Democrats controlled the agenda.
Despite the potential of a costly military conflict with Iraq, a new $300 billion tax-cut proposal from the Bush administration and escalating deficits, Rep. David Vitter, R-Metairie, said he remains optimistic that key local highway, flood control and hurricane protection projects will win better financing than the Bush administration is offering. As Louisiana's only member of the House Appropriations Committee, Vitter said he's also trying to get financial help for the Nagin administration with its anticorruption effort.
September 8, 2002:
The House this week is expected to vote on an energy and water bill that would provide far more money for local flood control projects than recommended by President Bush. The bill, approved last week by the House Appropriations Committee, would provide $52 million for the Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project, more than twice as much as proposed by Bush. The bill also would appropriate $9 million for Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity hurricane protection, $13 million for the Industrial Canal Lock Project and $7.5 million for West Bank and vicinity hurricane protection. Rep. David Vitter, R-Metairie, a member of the appropriations committee, said he is pleased with the spending bill. "This is a great victory," he said. But Aileen Roder of Taxpayers for Common Sense said the bill spends too much money at a time of growing deficits and the high costs of waging the war on terrorism and potential war with Iraq. "Congress is still spending like a drunken sailor," Roder said. The Senate is scheduled to take up its energy and water bill shortly.
