Bush "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"

[usregimechange]

News of the day. :mad:

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three
most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack
on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane
strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The
Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of
all." NYT Krugman

[tocqueville]

1. he doesn't know what a levee is

[Erika]

2. BS

Salon news is out there as is reports from the Corps of Engineers. Bush is lucky if he doesn't get charged with ethnic cleansing.

[tmooses]

3. It's the same 9/11 copout. The same bullshit we heard from Rice and Bush .

They will continue to deny the truth at all costs.

[Carla in Ca]

5. Bingo

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."
--Bush, to the knee-padded Dianne Sawyer on ABC’s Good Morning America, this morning.



Steve, I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.
--Condi Rice press briefing, May 16, 2002

[petronius]

4. Well, not this exact levee on this exact day...

but no one who has had even the slightest exposure to a) New Orleans, b) gravity, and c) water could possibly be surprised...

[delen]

6. How could the supposed experts

not have "anicipated" the levees being breached? Katrina was a cat5 while out in the gulf and made land at cat4. The levees could only withstand a cat3.

[FrenchieCat]

7. I don't why he didn't anticipated it....

From Editor & Publisher
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001051313

Instead of following the plan, Bush gutted the budget over the last few years that was supposed to be going to strengthen the levees. In 2003 and 2004, New Orleans did not get the funding that it was supposed to get.

"Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."
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Bush took New Orleans disaster funds and used them for the Iraq war and for his tax cuts
by John in DC - 8/30/2005 09:57:00 PM

An amazing late-breaking article from Editor & Publisher
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001051313

Bottom line: Experts knew this was coming, and all the preparations ground to a halt because Bush stole New Orleans' disaster preparation money so he could use it for his Iraq debacle:

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

...after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle.The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain.

At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/08/bush-took-new-orleans-disaster-funds.html
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"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
— Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.
http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/002331.html

also check out this thread....
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2050029

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http://www.ieminc.com/Whats_New/Press_Releases/pressrelease052604_Manscen.htm
Bush has slashed Clinton's Disaster Mitigation Program.
"...Among emergency specialists, 'mitigation' -- the measures taken in advance to minimize the damage caused by natural disasters -- is a crucial part of the strategy to save lives and cut recovery costs. But since 2001, key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed and tossed aside. FEMA's Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, has been canceled outright.

Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half. Communities across the country must now compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars.

As a result, some state and local emergency managers say, it's become more difficult to get the equipment and funds they need to most effectively deal with disasters. In Louisiana, requests for flood mitigation funds were rejected by FEMA this summer. (See sidebar.) In North Carolina, a state also regularly threatened by hurricanes and floods, FEMA recently refused the state's request to buy backup generators for emergency support facilities.
And the budget cuts have halved the funding for a mitigation program that saved an estimated $8.8 million in recovery costs in three eastern North Carolina communities alone after 1999's Hurricane Floyd.

Consequently, the residents of these and other disaster-prone states will find the government less able to help them when help is needed most, and both states and the federal government will be forced to shoulder more recovery costs after disasters strike.
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Disaster in the Making
As FEMA Weathers a Storm of Bush Administration Policy and Budget Changes, Protection From Natural Hazards May be Trumped by "Homeland Security"
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=9166
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New Orleans CityBusiness, Jun 6, 2005, by Deon Roberts
New Orleans district, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Cut by Bush

In fiscal year 2006, the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps ofEngineers is bracing for a record $71.2 million reduction in federal funding.

It would be the largest single-year funding loss ever for the New Orleans district, Corps officials said.

I've been here over 30 years and I've never seen this level of reduction,said Al Naomi, project manager for the New Orleans district. I think part of the problem is it's not so much the reduction, it's the drastic reduction in one fiscal year.It’s the immediacy of the reduction that I think is the hardest thing to adapt to.

There is an economic ripple effect, too.The cuts mean major hurricane and flood protection projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms.

Also, a study to determineways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4200/is_20050606/ai_n14657367
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2004 levee projects Underfunded in hardest hit areas of NO...

"The water's rising pretty fast," eastern New Orleans resident Chris
Robinson told The Associated Press in a cell phone interview at the height of the storm. "I got a hammer and an ax and a crowbar, but I'm holding off on breaking through the roof until the last minute. Tell someone to come get me, please. I want to live."

I can only imagine the horror this must be like and when I read it could have been avoided but wasn't because of a "funding" issue when we are spending billions on a bullshit war, it sort of makes me angry. Here's the snippets...

"Especially hard hit was the Lower Ninth Ward, a poor neighborhood squeezed between a marsh on the north, the river on the south and a shipping canal on the west. In adjoining St. Bernard Parish, local officials estimated that 40,000 homes had flooded. In Jefferson Parish, another county contiguous toNew Orleans, authorities had received calls from residents stranded on roofs. Blanco said her office had reports of 20 building collapses in New Orleans.
http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/nation/ny-usnola304403795aug30,0,117411.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-print

[Canuckistanian]

8. Should have read this, Georgie....

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however--the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level--more than eight feet below in places--so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't--yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City.

- National Geographic, October, 2004