The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday that a lack of funding for hurricane-protection projects around New Orleans did not contribute to the disastrous flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina.

In a telephone interview with reporters, corps officials said that although portions of the flood-protection levees remain incomplete, the levees near Lake Pontchartrain that gave way–inundating much of the city–were completed and in good condition before the hurricane.

However, they noted that the levees were designed for a Category 3 hurricane and couldn’t handle the ferocious winds and raging waters from Hurricane Katrina, which was a Category 4 storm when it hit the coastline. The decision to build levees for a Category 3 hurricane was made decades ago based on a cost-benefit analysis.

“I don’t see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case,” said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the corps. “Had this project been fully complete, it is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm that the flooding of the business district and the French Quarter would have still taken place.”

Strock also denied that escalating costs from the war in Iraq contributed to reductions in funding for hurricane projects in Louisiana, as some critics have suggested. Records show that corps funding for the Louisiana projects has generally decreased in recent years.

Several critics, including a former head of the Corps of Engineers, suggested in a Tribune story Thursday that the flooding in New Orleans could have been less severe had the federal government fully funded projects to improve the levees and drainage in the city.

Congress in 1999 authorized the corps to conduct a $12 million study to determine how much it would cost to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane, but the study isn’t scheduled to get under way until 2006. It was not clear why the study has taken so long to begin, though Congress has only provided in the range of $100,000 or $200,000 a year so far.

Al Naomi, senior project manager in the corps’ New Orleans District, said it would cost as much as $2.5 billion to build such a system, which would likely include gates to block the Gulf of Mexico from Lake Pontchartrain and additional levees. If the project were fully funded and started immediately, Naomi said it could be completed in three to five years.

A project to build up the levees to withstand a Category 3 hurricane was launched in 1965 after Hurricane Betsy and was supposed to be completed in 10 years, but it remains incomplete because of a lack of funding.

End quote.

With the project overdue by 30 years already, I seriously doubt that 3 years of reduced funding was the sole obstacle in the project, and even if it were completed on schedule, a category 4 hurricane lay outside its tolerance parameters. Ultimately, the problem wasn’t that the levees were underfunded; the problem was that they were underengineered, and the project to upgrade them to category-5 resistance wasn’t even planned to begin until next year.

Also, remember that we as people have choices:
-we choose to live near the forest, yet scream for help when the wildfire strikes…
-we choose to live on the faultline, yet scream for help when the big one hits…..
-we choose to live near the riverfront, yet scream for help when the flood hits….

A wise man once told me that when you point your finger at somebody or something else, there are three more fingers pointing back at you.

There’s a lesson for you in the fine art of reading an organizational chart. From the beginning, when DHS was pulled together, FEMA was in the department. That’s all you needed to know about who got the disaster mission in the federal government.

Other changes form that same period of history are that all the National Guards in all the states now have interlocking support agreements, which means that people from almost every state will be going to the region, attached in as members of those states’ Guard, with whatever police powers the states’ constitutions grant.