The good, reality-based folks at factcheck.org have taken on the task of examining the history of the New Orleans levee concerns and the slashed funding that has been so widely reported. Administration officials can no longer deny (and that means you – Chertoff) that their failure to act to prevent this tragedy was anything less than callous disregard for public safety and the life and liberty of the grand citizens of that once vibrant city.
In an article titled “Is Bush to Blame For New Orleans Flooding”, factcheck.org uses a fact sheet that had been produced by the Army Corps of Engineers on May 23, 2005, to analyze the Lake Ponchartrain levee problems.

FY 2005 BUDGET/EFFORT. The President’s budget for fiscal year 2005 was $3.9 million.  Congress increased it to $5.5 million. This was insufficient to fund new construction contracts. Engineering design, and construction supervision and inspection efforts are also included. Seven contracts are being delayed due to lack funds.

…

FY 2006 BUDGET/EFFORT. The President’s budget for fiscal year 2005 is $3.0 million. This will be insufficient to fund new construction contracts.  We could spend $20 million if the funds were provided. These funds are necessary to maintain the project schedule and to meet our contractual and local sponsor commitments.

IMPACTS OF BUDGET SHORTFALL. In Orleans Parish, two major pump stations are threatened by hurricane storm surges. Major contracts need to be awarded to provide fronting protection for them. Also, several levees have settled and need to be raised to provide the design protection. The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs.

That’s straight from the horse’s mouth.

From factcheck.org:

The Corps has seen cutbacks beyond those affecting just the Lake Pontchartrain project. The Corps oversees SELA, or the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control project, which Congress authorized after six people died from flooding in May 1995. The Times-Picayune newspaper of New Orleans reported that, overall, the Corps had spent $430 million on flood control and hurricane prevention, with local governments offering more than $50 million toward the project. Nonetheless, “at least $250 million in crucial projects remained,” the newspaper said.

In the past five years, the amount of money spent on all Corps construction projects in the New Orleans district has declined  by 44 percent, according to the New Orleans CityBusiness newspaper, from $147 million in 2001 to $82 million in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

The Bush administration has been throwing out a lot of numbers at their press conferences this week: x number of National Guard troops, x number of MREs, x number of helicopters etc. Well, it’s time to start throwing these budget shortfall numbers back at them in a big way.

Officially, the Army Corps has taken on this stance:

The levee upgrade project around Lake Pontchartrain was only 60 to 90 percent complete across most areas of New Orleans as of the end of May, according to the Corps’ May 23 fact sheet. Still, even if it had been completed, the project’s goal was protecting New Orleans from storm surges up to “a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane,” according to the fact sheet.

We don’t know whether the levees would have done better had the work been completed. But the Corps says that even a completed levee project wasn’t designed for the storm that actually occurred.

Okay – then that begs the question: why wasn’t the planned upgrade aimed at dealing with a category 5 hurricane?

On the issue of whether Bush erred when he said that a breach had not been anticipated, you can mince words and employ semantics or you can look at this statement by Walter Maestri, the emergency coordinator of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans when he was interviewed by PBS’s Bill Moyers on the issue following a simulation of a category 5 hurricane in 2002:

Maestri, September 2002: Well, when the exercise was completed it was evidence that we were going to lose a lot of people. We changed the name of the [simulated] storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B… kiss your ass goodbye… because anybody who was here as that category five storm came across… was gone.

No one – not one person can deny that this event was not foreseen and could have been prepared for in a much more aggressive way. Anyone who does so is a bald-faced liar.

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