Wet Bank Guide

Everyone in New Orleans, everone inthe entire United States and all the world who knows the true story of how the substandard levees built by the Corps of Engineers drowned New Orleans, needs to see this photo. Quality, the signs reads, means doing it right the first time. (Go ahead, click the link. I'm not, Mr. Barry, making this up).

No doubt it was placed there by some contractor and not by a Corps official. At least, one hopes that after their international and very public huminitation as incompetents that they would cringe at the thought that this sign appears on their repair sight for work on the 17th Street Canal. Then again, we have all had to lower our expectations.

My impression is that the Corps has more sense than this. The organization was smart enough not to publicize the awarding of a medal to the man who's overseen the levee restoration since 8-28, the man who only changed the composition of the St. Bernard levees from substandard, sandy soil to proper materials when outed by visiting engineers, who has consistently over promised and misrepresented the gating system at the drainage canals at which the above sign appears.

The Corps certainly managed to keep a lid on the retirement of the man who oversaw the catastrophe of New Orleans. The Reuter's story Army leader who admitted New Orleans errors quits didn't appear in the Times-Picayune. Google News doesn't find any mention of it anywhere outside of the original Reuters wire story. It was picked up by the Gulf News of Qatar, which I have noticed in the past takes a greater interest in these events than our own domestic media. I think I'll have to find out which big oil companies they own, and make a point of buying my gas there.

That leaves us with the latest Corps story on NOLA.Com:

Six months after the Army Corps of Engineers was given about a billion dollars
to raise sinking levees and rush unfinished hurricane protection and flood
prevention projects to completion by September 2007, none of that construction
has started anywhere in the metropolitan New Orleans area.

As the story points out, this was emergency work. There are lives at stake, and the Corps is busy tidying up its acquisition procedures. I wonder what all America would think if they Army were still studying how to speed up armoring Humvees in Iraq? I am confused at why some people from Crawford, Texas think that it's important to federalize disaster response and turn it over to the military, when six months after the Army Corps of Engineers given money for emergency work in a matter of life and death, they are still stuck on paperwork?

Katrina NOLA New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Think New Orleans Louisiana FEMA levees flooding Corps of Engineers We Are Not OK