CLASS 3 LEVEES - AR15.COM

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:08:04 AM EDT

Can someone tell me why NO all these years built levees to possibly withstand a Class 3 hurricane but no maximum category class 5?

Did they not learn from Camille in 1969?

What was done under the Klinton Administration?

CRC

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:09:47 AM EDT

[#1]

Quoted:

Can someone tell me why NO all these years built levees to possibly withstand a Class 3 hurricane but no maximum category class 5?
CRC

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:10:37 AM EDT

[#2]

Quoted:
Quoted:

Can someone tell me why NO all these years built levees to possibly withstand a Class 3 hurricane but no maximum category class 5?
CRC

www.bay13.net/pics/desktop/morepictures/money.jpg

You sir, hit the nail right on the head.

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:12:45 AM EDT

[#3]

Quoted:
Quoted:

Can someone tell me why NO all these years built levees to possibly withstand a Class 3 hurricane but no maximum category class 5?
CRC

that looks like the trunks the guy from nigeria sent me last month

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:13:18 AM EDT

[#4]

In a press conference yesterday, Clinton claimed that at the end of his second term he budgeted the funds to build stronger levees. He said, "I don't know what happened to the funding once I left office."

I don't believe it, but that is what he said yesterday.

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:20:38 AM EDT

[#5]

Quoted:
In a press conference yesterday, Clinton claimed that at the end of his second term he budgeted the funds to build stronger levees. He said, "I don't know what happened to the funding once I left office."

I don't believe it, but that is what he said yesterday.

Seems like I heard the Levee Commission of NO bought a plane, a marina and a casino. Hmmm--where did all that money come from?

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:23:27 AM EDT

[#6]

Quoted:
Quoted:
In a press conference yesterday, Clinton claimed that at the end of his second term he budgeted the funds to build stronger levees. He said, "I don't know what happened to the funding once I left office."

I don't believe it, but that is what he said yesterday.

Seems like I heard the Levee Commission of NO bought a plane, a marina and a casino. Hmmm--where did all that money come from?

Corruption and graft were the FOUNDATIONS of Louisiana politics. We'll see if that changes. I doubt it.

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:27:01 AM EDT

[#7]

Sent the 'An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State' article to my favorite lib friend. He responded with this & the following article:

Absolutely amazing leap to logical fallacy. The writer cites his wife as the source for tying the events of Katrina's aftermath to his disdain for social welfare. Utterly ridiculous.

Read on for more informed commentary.

A.

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

By Sidney Blumenthal

(Reuters) 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.

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."

"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.

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:29:23 AM EDT

[#8]

is 3 more than five

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:31:38 AM EDT

[#9]

Uh Hurricane Camille was the most powerful hurricane ever to hit the US by far and that was in 1969.

And again what was done under the Klinton Administration?

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:34:19 AM EDT

[#10]

Quoted:
Uh Hurricane Camille was the most powerful hurricane ever to hit the US by far and that was in 1969.

And again what was done under the Klinton Administration?

Klinton didn't do much.

Reagan didn't do much.

Bush 41 didn't do much.

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:35:46 AM EDT

[#11]

Ahh.

For a minute there I thought they had done a lot and then GWB came in and stopped it.

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:40:25 AM EDT

[#12]

I was watching FNC last night and they were lampooning the NY Post about the articles that they had run in the past which bashed the various administrations for budgeting more money for flood control, including an article this year which actually acknowledged the budget cuts for flood control as a good thing.

Posted: 9/6/2005 7:57:33 AM EDT

[#13]

I'm wondering how the casino and marina they built did? Will our tax dollars go to fix these places that our tax money went to build, even though it wasn't supposed to?

Posted: 9/6/2005 8:28:53 AM EDT

[#14]

Who Is Responsible?

This guy attempts to get documents and facts on Louisiana's plans for the emergency. Without trying too hard he is concluding most of the blame is on the Mayor of NO and the Gov. of LA.

The 1965 effort (after Hurricane Betsy) to strengthen the levee system was to be finished in 10 years and never got finished. In light of this, the timeline of the proposal of the present idea to strengthen the levees was just another proposal that was treated pretty much the same by successive administrations. We haven't built a dam in this country since 1976 because they CAN FAIL and have disastrous aftermaths. The overtopping of the levees undermined their integrity and caused them to fail just like a dam fails.

Posted: 9/6/2005 8:41:53 AM EDT

[#15]

The levees might not have survived a Class 2 hurricane if it had hit on the west side of the city. Also it seems like the weathermen are consistently under-predicting the magnitude of storm surges.

GunLvr

Posted: 9/6/2005 8:49:25 AM EDT

[#16]

I thought a Class 3 levee required a $200 tax stamp?

Posted: 9/6/2005 9:01:42 AM EDT

[#17]

Catagory is what they class hurricanes as.............

Posted: 9/6/2005 9:05:10 AM EDT

[#18]

Quoted:
Quoted:

Can someone tell me why NO all these years built levees to possibly withstand a Class 3 hurricane but no maximum category class 5?
CRC

www.insolitology.com/images/btd3.jpg

Actually, they took the money intended for the levees and spent it on a private jet and one or more casinos.

Posted: 9/6/2005 9:23:54 AM EDT

[#19]

I have to find the article the NYTimes ran about a year ago about the federal budget. Money was cut from funding flood and energy projects because it was looked at as Republican pork by the libs running the paper. They PRAISED congress for cutting money to the Army Corpts of Engineers; praised!

Don't forget that there hasn't been a huge influx of money into some of these levees for many years.

If libs want to say their hero Clinton didn't eff it up they are dead wrong. Clinton actually told FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers to withhold reports regarding the vunerablitliy of the levees in the NO area. I have to dig to find this stuff, its been years.

Posted: 9/6/2005 9:49:00 AM EDT

[#20]

How much can a pile of dirt cost? Seriously, what makes a levee work? No internal moving parts, no rebar, no poured concrete. No serious foundation work, no plumbing, no electricity... just the proper mix of inert stuff: rocks, gravel, dirt. Top soil. Piled up at proper angle.

How much per yard? If your city's survival depended on a levee 25 feet high but you only had them 12 feet high, wouldn't you be seeking volunteers? HOAs, local donations, freebies... etc to bolster them?

Is it American to wait like bumps on a log until the Feds do something and pay for it? Is this how cities are built in the first place? Nooooooooo.

Sure, monday morning quarterbacking. But come on. A levee isn't a lock or complex tool. It's a pile of dirt & rocks.

Posted: 9/6/2005 10:00:03 AM EDT

[#21]

Quoted:
How much can a pile of dirt cost? Seriously, what makes a levee work? No internal moving parts, no rebar, no poured concrete. No serious foundation work, no plumbing, no electricity... just the proper mix of inert stuff: rocks, gravel, dirt. Top soil. Piled up at proper angle.

How much per yard? If your city's survival depended on a levee 25 feet high but you only had them 12 feet high, wouldn't you be seeking volunteers? HOAs, local donations, freebies... etc to bolster them?

Is it American to wait like bumps on a log until the Feds do something and pay for it? Is this how cities are built in the first place? Nooooooooo.

Sure, monday morning quarterbacking. But come on. A levee isn't a lock or complex tool. It's a pile of dirt & rocks.

The levee system in New Orleans is actually quite complex, and incorporates much of the roadwork along the river. It is not just a pile of rocks, althoogh something as simple as that can generally be effective in the short term. The subgrade in the region is SO soft, that in may places piling is required just to hold the weight of the levee up. Add to that the surcharge load of traffic on the levee and the dynamic effects of passing river traffic, and you actually have a very complex set of design criteria. The effects of erosion, settlement, lateral displacement must also be considered. It would seem to me that a goodly portion of the federal funds that would be required for levee improvements would go toward purchasing the additional land that will be required when the base of the levee grows wider and the height of the levee is raised.

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - CLASS 3 LEVEES

General » General Discussion

Warning

Confirm Action

About AR15.COM

Stay Connected

Newsletter

Contact Us