How Many More Lessons Will It Take?


Sorry to keep using such a cliche of an image, but it fits. The Bush administration has had three years since the New Orleans flood, but instead of doing something, they've pissed away unfathomable amounts of money on their pipedream in Mesopotamia while utterly ignoring the possibility of additional disasters right here in the US...a direct result of ignoring crumbling infrastructure:

The sprawling network of levees -- built over many years to protect the Upper Mississippi basin from the sort of disastrous flooding that has claimed homes, lives, and millions of acres of farmland this past week -- was never designed to withstand the magnitude of a 500-year flood.

And so towns like Gulfport, Ill., and La Grange, Mo., have watched as waters spilled over the tops of levees that were supposed to keep them dry.

The flooding has raised questions about the adequacy of the patchwork system -- in which little information is known about where levees exist, who maintains them, and what their condition is -- even as towns downstream hurry to fortify their own levees in preparation for the cresting floodwaters still moving south...

Already, the flood seems likely to equal or exceed the 1993 floods that wreaked havoc in these states, taking 48 lives and causing more than $20 billion in damage. On Thursday, President Bush was expected to tour flooded Iowa counties.

The news of so many levees overtopping or breaching can come as a shock to residents who felt safe behind their walls.

But experts say it's hardly surprising, especially given the low standards to which most levees are built.

To qualify for the National Flood Insurance Program, structures simply need to be behind a levee built to a so-called 100-year standard, meaning there is a 1 percent chance in any given year that a flood will rise above the levee. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, levees for ocean flooding are built to a 10,000-year standard, and inland levees are designed at least to a 250-year standard and usually in excess of 1,250 years.

"Around the world, the 100-year standard is a joke," says John Barry, author of "Rising Tide," his book about the Mississippi River flood of 1927, and a member of a flood control authority that oversees six levee districts in metropolitan New Orleans. "We invest on the cheap."

The wealthiest country in recorded history, but "we invest on the cheap." Speaks volumes, and not in a good way.

At the center of the debate is whether we want the government to work for us...or for a bunch of crass greedmongers. You know, this shouldn't be much of a newsflash, but it's not like government will magically go away, no matter what sort of ludicrous fantasy wingnuts conjure.