When interpreting levee funding issues, it is important to understand that the levees have been considered underfunded for decades
[16] Most experts agree that a levee project capable of preventing the recent flooding in New Orleans would have had to have been started during the Clinton Administration in order to be completed by the time Katrina hit. This has not stopped political opponents of the Bush administration from claiming that the failure of the levee system may have been the result of federal funding cuts for hurricane and flood control projects due to the cost of the Iraq war. Others believe this view may not be accurate as there were no plans or proposals in the near term to redesign the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control ProjectÂ’s levees to withstand a category 4 or greater hurricane like Katrina.
In Feb. of 2004 Al Naomi, the Army Corps of Engineers senior project manager in New Orleans stated that "I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest
[17]." A copy of the most recent comprehensive formal evaluation by the Army Corps of Engineers of the state of the levees has yet to be made public.
[18]. However, no evidence has come forward that these previously identified, inadequate levee areas were the source of the breaches.
In October of 2004 Naomi was reported by the
New Orleans Inquirer as saying, "It's possible to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane.... we've got to start. To do nothing is tantamount to negligence
[19]." Exactly why NaomiÂ’s plea for increased funding for levee augmentation was ignored by both congress and by the Bush administration has yet to be determined. Also, whether or not such increased funding would have been likely to have prevented the Katrina disaster, remains to be determined. Perhaps such things will be made more clear by a future
Katrina Commission, as recently proposed by former
President Clinton. However, the currently proposed category 5 levee system will take at least $2.5 billion and two decades to complete
[20][21]. Therefore, it is not possible to pinpoint blame to any single presidential administration.
Starting in 2003, federal spending on the SELA was substantially reduced. At least nine pre-Katrina articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
[22] Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers at the Corps of Engineers, said that “at the time that these levees were designed and constructed, it was felt that that was an adequate level given the probability of an event like this occurring". Strock also said that he did not believed that funding levels contributed to the disaster, commenting that "[t]he intensity of this storm simply exceeded the design capacity of this levee." Strock also told reporters that the Corps of Engineers "had a 200- or 300-year level of protection. That means that an event that we were protecting from might be exceeded every 200 or 300 years"
[23].
Strock's 200 - 300 year estimate appears to be inconsistent with two other facts. First, the Army Corps of Engineers stated design capacity of the levees was only for a level three hurricane. Second, during the 41 years prior to Katrina, no less than three
category 4+ hurricanes had passed within ten miles of New Orleans:
Hilda,
Betsy and
Camille.
In early 2004, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness. On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the
Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us." Later in June, 2004, Naomi requested $2 million for urgent work repairing levees from a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority. Naomi needed to request the funds locally because the federal government had cut back on funding for needed projects. According to the Times-Picayune on June 18, 2004, Naomi said, "The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement...The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them." Construction work was underway on the Hammond Highway bridge near the 17th Street Canal breach. [
[24]] However, it should be noted that aerial photographs place this breach in a part of the canal levee that is wholly separate from the construction area.
[25]
