say one thing, do another: the Bush NOLA plan

from the Washington Post:

The Bush administration said yesterday that the cost of rebuilding New Orleans’s levees to federal standards has nearly tripled to $10 billion and that there may not be enough money to fully protect the entire region…The news represents a shift for the administration; President Bush had pledged in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina to rebuild New Orleans “higher and better.”

That’s odd…there seems to be plenty of money for tax cuts and the continuing debacle in Iraq. If we could only somehow extract oil from the poor and black population of New Orleans, I bet the levees would already be rebuilt, 100 feet tall, and capable of withstanding a Category 14.

The loss of coastal wetlands protecting New Orleans from storms, as well as the lowering of the ground level in the area, have reduced the city’s natural safeguards from flooding — and altered assumptions.

Alas, wetlands, where did you go? You are “lost” and we cannot find you. Nobody knows what happened to you; you just disappeared. Well, maybe the developers who purposely destroyed them and the government that permitted it could clue us in.

Donald E. Powell, the administration’s rebuilding coordinator, said some areas may be left without the protection of levees strong enough to meet requirements of the national flood insurance program. Those areas probably would face enormous obstacles in attracting home buyers and investors willing to build there.

In the conference call yesterday, Powell reiterated the promise that the levees will be at least as strong as they were designed to be before Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29.

“If a hurricane such as Katrina hit the area, there would not be catastrophic flooding,” he said. But, he said, there might be some “manageable” flooding.

See, it will be ok. Since they’ll be at least as strong as they were designed to be before Katrina, we’ll only have that bothersome “manageable” flooding, like we had in August of 2005. Ah, those were the days, eh?

those poor, poor pharmaceutical companies

my prediction

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Flying Without Wings