Newest RW "Blame Game" - Enviromentalists (debunked here)

This one is really a hoot. I don't have a link for the RW claim. Board freepers are siting "heard it on Fox". The claim is that Sierra Club lawsuits prevented ACOE upgrades to the levees.

Here's the real deal:
http://sierraclub.org/scoop/

"Washington Post writer Michael Grunwald files a scathing report on the US Army Corps of Engineers and its congressional sponsors. Here's the lead:

Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.

Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing.
Environmentalists and taxpayer advocates flagged the project as a major boondoggle and residents of a low-income black neighborhood in New Orleans even sued the Corps. Grunwald reports:
Pam Dashiell, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, remembers holding a protest against the lock four years ago -- right where the levee broke Aug. 30. Now she's holed up with her family in a St. Louis hotel, and her neighborhood is underwater. "Our politicians never cared half as much about protecting us as they cared about pork," Dashiell said."

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OK another one bites the dust - But let's not stop there since they brought up enviromentalists. Let's talk about the impact that Bush's reversal of wetlands protection had on New Orleans and the coast.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1561356,00.html
<snip>
The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly has contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands around New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush promised a "no net loss" wetland policy, which had been launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed the approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The army corps of engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a study that concluded in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary - much less a category four or five - hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's council on environmental quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable", and boasted: "Everybody loves what we're doing."
<snip>

had it's roots in a flood in the Netherlands in 1995. There, raising the dikes had been fought off succesfully by environmentalists as they felt it would spoil the look of the countryside if the dikes were higher.

When the waters came 1/2 million people had to be evacuated. Actually cows and other livestock were taken out as well.

Mind you the Dutch had a similar experience to Katrina in 1953.

This is about the Industrial Canal, not the 17th Street levee. it's a different neighborhood.

I think this is the area in question:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=New+Orleans&ll=29.973227,-90.023432&spn=0.017870,0.039710&t=e&hl=en

The breech can be seen on the east side of the canal. I also suspect that this is where the "turning barge" story originates.