Horrifying, yes. Surprising? Not really. We know that Bush-Cheney never even tried to salvage the city of New Orleans. Everything they have done has been cosmetic, a stunt for the cameras, like today's photo ops in the Gulf.
http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/wwl042408tpleveepaper.98095b74.html “It blows my mind.”
“That should be criminal,” Taffaro continues.
What he's talking about was witnessed by a St. Bernard Parish resident who didn't want to be identified, but did have sharp criticism of the work done by a contractor hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“It's like putting a Band-Aid on the hole of a gas tank of an airplane,” the resident said.
Back in 2006, the company hired by the Army Corp of Engineers to rebuild the levees around New Orleans decided to skimp on a crucial step. They used newspapers to build one of the layers instead of the sponge rubber that was specified.
As Hurricane Gustav, a category 3 storm, seems prepared to hit the Louisiana coast sometime tomorrow, the Bush administration must be gnawing their fingernails. In their zeal to award as much money to as many of their friends as possible for doing as little work as they could get away with, they contrived to have New Orleans’ levees rebuilt with
newspaper . Now, paper mache is all that stands between another category 3 storm and another flood.
When asked if the absence of material behind the waterstop was what was called for in the contract, Corps spokesman Kevin Wagner called the project an emergency repair.
“If we would have built a new floodwall that would not have been the case. We would have the waterstop, some joint filler material in between and then we would put an elastic sealer over the top of it,” Wagner said. “In this case we tried to do the repairs as quick as possible to protect the water stop before the start of hurricane season.”
But according to the contract obtained by Eyewitness News, that may not be the case. The contract calls for Ercon Corporation, based in Lafayette, Louisiana, to do the almost $2 million of work to raise and repair the floodwall under the Paris Road bridge.
In the contract, WWL found at least four mentions of field molded sealants. Kulkarni says that is the sponge rubber material to fill the cavity in the expansion joint. And he says the contract shows the rubber material was contractually required to be installed.
“I would say they have not met their obligation to install the joint correctly. They haven't installed it at all,” Kulkarni said.
Either way you read this, the Army Corp of Engineers has a lot of explaining to do. Are they covering up for the criminal activity of a VIP subcontractor? Or, did they really intend a single emergency stopgap repair to NOLA’s flooding problems
with newspaper that was supposed to last until 2010 or 2011? Was the plan to pass the Gulf Coast’s flooding problem on to the next administration while crossing fingers and hoping that nothing bad happened in the meantime? If so, the city of New Orleans and the Bush administration’s luck may have just run out.
Ercon is in full self defense mode now that Hurricane Gustav heading onto shore with this absolutely shocking webpage.
http://www.erconcorp.com/Note that they now claim that the Army Corp of Engineers stuffed the levees with newspapers.
A few years ago, in a business write up, they were more proud of their work, vowing that their mottoes included
Do it right; Do it once. and
Stand behind your work.. I guess they meant “Stand behind your work unless it is a levee stuffed with newspaper in the path of a category 3 hurricane.”
http://www.allbusiness.com/mining/support-activities-mining-support-oil/226746-1.htmlOn the other hand, maybe Ercon was told “This is a rush job, and it does not have to last forever.” Maybe it never occurred to them that the Army Corp of Engineers would let the paper mache levee sit there for two or three or six more hurricane seasons. However, it should have, since according to the next article I link, the definitive levee repairs in NOLA were not scheduled to be completed until 2010. (Note that the date has been moved to 2011. If history is anything to go by, we can expect that year to keep getting moved forward and the bill to keep rising and the levees to keep leaking)
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-6/115674455612300.xml&coll=1&thispage=1This
Times-Picayune article discusses how the Bush administration decided to do a quick fix, bringing the levees back to the state they were before Katrina, so that they could then take their time planning a more definitive repair. The article points out several problems with this plan, including the likelihood that global warming will increase the strength of hurricanes and the risk that Katrina may have damaged the existing levees which did not fail last time making them prone to failure in the future. Never mind the fact that while Bush was taking his sweet time, millions of people who used to call the city home had no homes to which to return.
As we now know, the repairs themselves were substandard, since they did not use the required materials. So, they never even got the levees back up to pre-Katrina standards, since I doubt that they were built of newspapers before 2006.
It gets worse. A month after the citizens of NOLA discovered that they were protected by paper mache, they learned that their levees were leaking.
http://www.first-draft.com/2008/05/nola-levee-leak.html NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city's flood defenses.
Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm.
The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so far of the $14 billion set aside by Congress to repair and upgrade the metropolitan area's hundreds of miles of levees by 2011. Some outside experts said the leak could mean that billions more will be needed and that some of the work already completed may need to be redone.
"It is all based on a 30-year-old defunct model of thinking, and it means that when they wake up to this one -- really -- our cost is going to increase significantly," said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California at Berkeley.
SNIP
Over the past few months, however, the corps found evidence that canal water is seeping through the joints in the sheet metal and then rising to the surface on the other side of the levee, forming puddles and other wet spots.
Engineers said the boggy ground is a more serious problem than the corps realizes. Bea said there is a roughly 40 percent chance of the 17th Street Canal levee collapsing if water rises higher than 6 feet above sea level. During Katrina, the water reached 7 feet in the canal.
Then there is this scandal, which only adds to people’s worries and suspicions, because if you can not trust an engineer, whom can you trust?
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/03/27/america/NA-GEN-US-Katrina-Embattled-Engineers.php Accusations that America's foremost civil engineering society covered up catastrophic design flaws in national disasters has reinvigorated calls for Congress to set up a 9/11-style commission to investigate what caused the flooding of New Orleans.
The American Society of Civil Engineers was paid by the federal government to investigate the collapse of the World Trade Center and the levee failures caused by Hurricane Katrina. After both disasters, the society issued reports that allegedly downplayed the fault of engineers.
If we were not bogged down in Iraq, spending $10 billion a month in that conflict alone, we could have already made a lot of progress in rebuilding the levees in NOLA. However, just as the city was never given the protection it was promised after Hurricane Betsy in large part because of the enormous cost of the Vietnam War, so Bush-Cheney have been able to use their war for oil in Iraq to deny Louisiana the help it deserves.
Worries of disaster have almost certainly contributed to the scuttling of the Republican Convention.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-CVN-Convention-Rdp.html?_r=1&oref=slogin President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney scrapped plans to address the convention Monday night, and McCain's aides chartered a jet to fly delegates back to their hurricane-threatened states along the Gulf Coast.
The sight of all those Republicans streaming into the Gulf as the residents leave must be reassuring. Maybe if they send enough delegates to the levees, they can plug the leaks like the Little Dutch Boy and save the administration from having to answer the question of how they could allow a contractor to cut corners by stuffing a levee with newspaper.
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