HumidCity

Reuters AlertNet - Army leader who admitted New Orleans errors quits

WASHINGTON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - The head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who in June admitted that design flaws in the levees his agency built to protect New Orleans caused most of the flooding during Hurricane Katrina, has asked to retire, the Army said on Thursday.

Why is it that no one oputside of Louisiana seems to know about the admissions of failure made by these people? They did a “heckuva job!” on my city…

I wonder who the new idiot will be?

docbrite: Don’t Ever Do This

If it should ever occur to you to urge me to leave New Orleans because you saw the Al Gore movie or read the Mike Tidwell book or whatever, I have one word for you: Don’t.

I just received such an e-mail from someone who’d recently returned from Gore’s Aaaaaaaaa!!! The Planet Is Melting And We’re All Gonna Die or whatever the thing is called (and no, I’m not really making fun of the movie, though I have no interest in seeing it; while I’m not a Gore fan, I certainly believe that global warming exists and was a factor in last year’s storm, though not nearly as much of one as, oh, say, THE FAILURE OF THE FEDERAL LEVEE SYSTEM or the fact that WE NO LONGER HAVE ENOUGH COASTAL WETLANDS TO BUFFER US FROM EVEN A MEDIUM-SIZED STORM). The e-mail came from someone I like a lot, so I tried to be polite, but there is nothing that infuriates me more than a well-meaning person telling me to desert my home. If you want to help me, don’t tell me to run for the hills; write to the White House, Congress, the damn Army Corps of Engineers. Tell them to put money into wetlands restoration, give us the levees we were promised in the first place, and rebuild the homes and businesses that were destroyed by their lying negligence.

I agree with EVERY SINGLE WORD.

Lolis Elie over at the Times Picayune puts it forth in a straightforward fashion. The same thing that so many of us have seen as the rubble filled months wear on, short attention span theater. Here is a pertinent snip from his column:

Persistence is critical to survival

It seemed like a big story. It was, for a day.

The Army Corps of Engineers Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force acknowledged that the flood control system that was supposed to protect our city was “a system in name only.”

The report on which that finding was based took eight months, cost $20 million and has profound implications for every section of this country that relies on an Army Corps of Engineers structure to protect it.

“We say this was a system failure in that the system designed to protect New Orleans failed on many levels, but it also shows how the system — the business model — we use to build these things is so flawed,” said Ed Link, the University of Maryland professor who headed the task force. “The way we determine need, assess risk and go about funding and approving these things is based on a model that might have been appropriate for the way we lived 50 years ago, but is sorely outdated today.”

Often, when such a major report is issued, it discussed and dissected for days afterward. But, as with so much of the news from New Orleans, this story died a premature death.

It is as arrant a piece of knavery as can be offered yet the antics of Paris Hilton get more play in the national news. The Fourth Estate has been, as expected, more concerned with selling commercial time than responsible reporting, par for the course.

Am I just letting it get to me? Probably. Its not shocking or amazing, at least to my jaded perspective on mass media. It is simply disappointing, disheartening, and depressing. JUst like my daily drive through destroyed neighborhoods as I go from construction gig to construction gig. Its hard to forget when you spend every day seeing decimation like this all around you: