[eDebate] Cite for the third most likely catastrophe prediction

[scottelliott at grandecom.net]

No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"

By Sidney Blumenthal

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three
most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans
flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.



REUTERS
An aerial view of the New Orleans airport underwater.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions
of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands
reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans
has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane
may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans
could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration
ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in
1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in
which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping
stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a
report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most
likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City.
But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried
up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut
funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80
percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction
in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the
Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing
New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on
the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported
online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of
the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of
preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost
certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990,
a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans.
Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a
surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy
launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But
he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of
Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no
longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate
commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups
conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands
protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category
4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is
when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The
chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the
study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're
doing."


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"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President
Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection
Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its
expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and
excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next
year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment,"
stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the
environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all
similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush
successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists,
meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising
temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel
laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in
Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in
the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most
powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ...
Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and
administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The
administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ...
The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease."
Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by
ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug
Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after
contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and
its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special
envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility
for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's
evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of
Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to
delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to
racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was
forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting
oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in
Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO),
she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park
Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional
background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and
prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials
through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado
comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt:
"And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was
by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named
Desire."

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton
and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the
Guardian of London.