BASTARDS!
Corps caused disaster, report says
State inquiry finds decades of blunders
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
By Bob Marshall
Decades of incompetence and neglect by the Army Corps of Engineers allowed Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge to devastate New Orleans, according to a long-awaited report being released today, the state’s only official investigation into the causes of the disaster.
In a sweeping indictment of corps stewardship, the report alleges that agency supervisors ignored increases in the threat level for their project, knowingly built levees and floodwalls lower than congressionally mandated, failed to detect or ignored glaring errors during the review process, underestimated the impact of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet on the city’s defenses, and failed to properly maintain the system.
The report, conducted by Team Louisiana at the request of the Department of Transportation and Development, echoes many points made in other probes last year, including that of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, led by the University of California-Berkeley, and the interim report from the corps’ own Independent Performance and Evaluation Team. But while those efforts focused largely on technical aspects of the structural failures, the LSU-based Team Louisiana sought to pinpoint the decisions that caused those failures.
Story continued here:
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1174456253193610.xml&coll=1&thispage=1
Estimated weekly cost of war in Iraq: $2 billion
Estimated cost to build Cat 5 levees in NOLA: $2.5 billion
I guess we know our government’s priorities… BASTARDS!
