Happy Hurricane Season!
Well, today is June 1, the official beginning of the 2006 hurricane season. To celebrate this festive occasion, you can find many New Orleans residents in dark rooms curled up in the fetal position, burbling things like “no levees,” “unforeseen failures,” and “heckuva job.” The levees comment has special poignancy this week as the tragically incompetent Army Corps of Engineers has been forced to come clean about their consistent failures. They’ve built floodgates at the 17th street and London canals, but the pumping system that would allow the water from the city that accumulates in the canals to get out of the city will not be fully operational until – get this – November. That’s the last month of hurricane season. We could get our pumping capacity precisely when we don’t need it. And given that the levees on the side of the 17th canal that I live on already started to buckle during Katrina before the other side gave way, I can look forward to the possibility of seeing my neighborhood wiped out by rainwater during a mere tropical storm. These are also the engineering geniuses who cannot successfully build a pile of dirt without it falling down. Heckuva job, guys.
I highly recommend the Times-Pic’s inimitable (and normally upbeat) Chris Rose as a guide to the mood of the city. It's a little eerie, even though the real threat is a few months away.
With your scathing indictments of USACE performance over the last 30 years or so I would look forward to a dialog between you and Greg Anrig. In this post
http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/29669
last month he went on and on about the superior performance of government agencies run by career civil servants, just the sort of agency that the USACE is.
June 1, 2006 11:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
I work for a state agency in Alabama- all over the halls today could be heard the ironic greeting "Happy Hurricane Season!" As a matter of fact, our staff meeting was opened with that comment today. Sort of a if you don't laugh about it, you'll break down thing.
June 1, 2006 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink