Project Katrina

This from story from the Air Force Times.

The report said the Pentagon had ample warning since 1992

I have lived on the Mississippi River (St. Louis and Baton Rouge) for much of my 36 years. For those of you that don’t live on the Mississippi or near swamps in Florida, you might not know that much about the Army Corps of Engineers. Well they have always be a fairly disfunctional organization. Case in point is this story in the Washington Post. Keep in mind this is the organization that is supposed to protect New Orleans.

In 2000, when I was writing a 50,000-word Washington Post series about dysfunction at the Army Corps of Engineers, I highlighted a $65 million flood-control project in Missouri as Exhibit A. Corps documents showed that the project would drain more acres of wetlands than all U.S. developers do in a typical year, but wouldn’t stop flooding in the town it was meant to protect. FEMA’s director called it “a crazy idea”; the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional director called it “absolutely ridiculous.”

Six years later, the project hasn’t changed — except for its cost, which has soared to $112 million. Larry Prather, chief of legislative management for the Corps, privately described it in a 2002 e-mail as an “economic dud with huge environmental consequences.” Another Corps official called it “a bad project. Period.” But the Corps still wants to build it.

The rest of the story is worth a read, but keep in mind that last month, the Corps commander acknowledged that his agency’s “design failure” led to the floodwall collapses that swamped New Orleans. So my question is, why isn’t everyone asking questions about the
Corps?

Through a joint partnership with a smaller, minority-owned company, a huge multinational firm whose federal contract for trailers was up for rebidding has landed several new contracts that could be total more than $400 million.

Del-Jen Industries, a wholly owned subsidiary of construction, procurement, and disaster relief giant Fluor Corp., is involved in a venture with PRI Inc., an Asian-American owned San Diego company, that qualifies as disadvantaged business under Federal procurement regulations. Fluor is a massive services corporation based in Aliso Viejo, California that has handled extensive disaster relief work in the past for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Fluor’s campaign contributions, the lion’s share of which have gone to Republican committees and candidates, top $930,000 since 2000, according to a post-Katrina contracting Web page maintained by Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Fluor’s stock has risen more than 60 percent since Hurricane Katrina hit had held a huge, nationwide contract with FEMA as the prime contractor for relief work. That contract came up for rebidding last summer, so FEMA simply broke it up and awarded four, $500 million deals for temporary housing work.

This stinks to high-heaven. More info about this in the coming week as I have time to gather much more background research.

This may be one of the most important stories I’ve read recently. And of course, it isn’t get any play in the "Main Stream Media." Our National Guard is under equipped by up to 75% of their needs. And this isn’t a new problem. Post 9/11 they were 30 percent under-equipped. And this doesn’t even take into account how many thousands of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas National Guard members were in Iraq, and therefore not available to help.

In Louisiana, about 100 of the Guard’s high-water vehicles remain abroad—even as the state continues to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina. Coastal North Carolina is missing nearly half its Humvee fleet, and Guard officials there said shortages have forced the state to pool equipment from different units into one pot of hurricane supplies. Vehicles are particularly crucial to hurricane response because they are often the only way to ferry ice and water through devastated areas.

"I think everyone this season is concerned about the capability of the National Guard and what we have," said Capt. Matt Handley, a spokesman for the National Guard of North Carolina. "We’ll be ready, but hopefully we’ll have a slow (hurricane) season."

The lack of equipment is not a new phenomenon, said Jack Harrison, spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, the administrative arm of the service. Even before the terrorist attacks of 2001, non-deployed Guard units had only about 70 percent of the equipment they needed, he said.

But fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has taken an even greater toll. Last year, Guard units not on active duty had only about 34 percent of their equipment. That number has since fallen to about 26 percent, although much of the shortages have been in equipment better-suited for combat, rather than hurricane response, Harrison said.

While more equipment is staying behind, more guardsmen are coming home. As of March, there were 55,000 guardsmen in Iraq and Afghanistan, down from 80,000 a year before.

A report from the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) last year shows major gaps in equipment that could be used to respond to a hurricane or other disasters. In May 2005, Guard units here had only about 8 percent of the tractor trailers they were allotted and none of the Humvees with added armor, according to the GAO report.

Do you feel safer? I sure don’t. I also suggest you click here and read the 38-page GAO report on this topic. Maybe we should be taking some of the revenue lost from tax cuts to the richest 1 percent and buy our men and women tasked with protecting us the equipment they need.

It is a great service that MSNBC is telecasting the debates in New Orleans. This one, as with the others, got pretty heated. Focusing on New Orleans’ slow recovery from Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu repeatedly went after Mayor C. Ray Nagin Monday night in a series of sharp, pointed exchanges. This was the first debate after the primary election before the May 20 mayoral runoff.

Landrieu, who finished second in the primary vote, criticized Mr. Nagin for failing to remove trash and flooded cars from the streets of the city. He also said New Orleans had been "crippled nationally" because Nagin’s outbursts had lost him "credibility" in the eyes of decision-makers throughout the United States. Nagin portrayed his opponent as too tied to his famous political family—Landrieu’s sister is a United States senator and his father was the last white mayor of New Orleans—and to what he called "the politics of the past." Can’t we all just get a long?