Potemkin Flood Walls


Heckuva job:

The Army Corps of Engineers seems likely to fulfill a promise by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans's toppled flood walls to their original, pre-Katrina height by June 1, but two teams of independent experts monitoring the $1.6 billion reconstruction project say large sections of the rebuilt levee system will be substantially weaker than before the hurricane hit.

These experts say the Corps, racing to rebuild 169 miles of levees destroyed or damaged by Katrina, is taking shortcuts to compress what is usually a years-long construction process into a few weeks. They say that weak, substandard materials are being used in some levee walls, citing lab tests as evidence. And they say the Corps is deferring repairs to flood walls that survived Katrina but suffered structural damage that could cause them to topple in a future storm.

I'm not all that surprised. The administration is presently juggling a Potemkin economy, a Potemkin occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, they've got Potemkin research institutes...so why not Potemkin floodwalls?

A more significant line of defense--the natural ecosystem of barrier islands, marshes and wetlands--took a, no pun intended, heckuva hit:

Rita and Katrina washed away or flooded about 118 square miles of wetlands, or about 75,500 acres.

And, as expected, sadly, bodies are still being recovered:

Three days after firefighters inspected a storm-damaged home spray-painted with "0" -- indicating no bodies inside -- cadaver dogs led searchers to a victim of Hurricane Katrina in the attic.

Before dying, the man apparently was trying to crawl out of an air-conditioning vent to escape rising floodwaters, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana's medical examiner.

Cataldie said searchers expect to find up to 400 more bodies of storm victims still hidden inside New Orleans homes six months after the storm.

Today's check of the White House website shows no change from Friday, when they went into full, also no pun intended, stonewall mode (if only we could use them in New Orleans). I guess that'll change come Wednesday--Shrub's scheduled to visit the region for another set of photo-ops...the political equivalent of just more empty calories.

You know, that's an insult...to empty calories.