911review/new orleans

From the page: "Levees.org on Friday reposted to YouTube a satirical video filmed by high school students that is critical of the relationship between the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Army Corps of Engineers, after the group was promised free representation by two local law firms in the event it is sued.

"We have something to say today to the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers," said Levees.org President Sandy Rosenthal during a news conference in a restored Lakeview home a few blocks from the 17th Street Canal. "We reject your threats and we will not stop publicizing our video."

In a letter to ASCE general Counsel Thomas Smith III, one of the attorneys for Levees.org warned that any lawsuit against the organization might trigger Louisiana's "Anti-SLAPP" statute, which allows courts to weed out lawsuits designed to chill public participation on matters of public significance.

SLAPP stands for "Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation."

"While this may not be a criticism the ASCE enjoys, it is nonetheless a fully protected exercise of free speech on the part of Levees.org," wrote Samantha Everett, an attorney with Cooley Godward Kronish.

The announcement came three weeks after Rosenthal announced that she had taken the video off YouTube because of the threat of a cease-and-desist lawsuit from the ASCE. At the time, she said she was taking that action only because her organization could not afford the legal costs if the ASCE were to file a lawsuit.

The video was produced by her son, Sanford, who is a student at Isidore Newman School. The ASCE had sent a copy of their cease-and-desist letter to the school's principal, too.

The Levees.org announcement comes only a few days after ASCE officials announced that they were creating an independent task force to review the way the organization participates in national disaster investigations like the corps-sponsored review of the levee and wall failures during Hurricane Katrina.

The ASCE also has begun an internal ethics investigation in response to a 42-page complaint filed by University of California-Berkeley Engineering Professor Raymond Seed, in which he said senior ASCE and corps staffers conspired to obstruct him and other independent investigators looking into the Katrina disaster."

From the page: "The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe.

They should. Two years after Katrina, the effort to protect coastal Louisiana from storms and restore its vanishing wetlands has become one of the biggest government extravaganzas since the moon missionâ€"and the Army Corps is running the show, with more money and power than ever. Many of the same coastal scientists and engineers who sounded alarms about the vulnerability of New Orleans long before Katrina are warning that the Army Corps is poised to repeat its mistakesâ€"and extend them along the entire Louisiana coast. If you liked Katrina, they say, you'll love what's coming next."
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From the page: "Bush to shift $1.3 Billion of levee funds in NOLA....Vitter: 'We will not recover if this happens'

You may remember when we sent Mardi Gras Beads to Bush to call for full funding of levee construction in NOLA. Well it never ends. Now Bush plans to shift $1.3 Billion of the already inadequate funding for levee protection of New Orleans....

WASHINGTON â€" President Bush is expected to shift $1.3 billion away from raising and armoring levees, installing flood gates and building permanent pumping in Southeast Louisiana to plug long-anticipated funding shortfalls in other hurricane-protection projects, a move Sen. David Vitter describes as a retreat from the presidentâ€s commitment to protect the whole New Orleans area.

Vitter, R-La., who unveiled Bushâ€s plans Thursday, condemned the move in a strongly worded letter to the president and called on him to ask Congress for more money to complete work that he promised would be done - and Congress financed - in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

â€oeI believe your fiscal 2008 budget proposal would be a step back from that commitment, however unintended,â€oe Vitter wrote. â€oeI am deathly afraid that this vital emergency post-Katrina work is now being treated like typical (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) projects that take decades to complete. We will not recover if this happens.â€oe"

From the page: "Big, Easy Iraqi-Style Contracts Flood New Orleans
by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch
September 20th, 2005

cartoon by Khalil Bendib

The day Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, Robert Boh watched the dramatic pictures of the unfolding disaster on television at his in-law's house in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where his family had taken shelter. As president of the biggest construction company in New Orleans, he was confident that the hundreds of miles of levees that he and his rivals have built over the decades would hold. "It never occurred to me," he said, that the 17th street canal would gave way. "I was shocked."

The next day the phones started ringing off the hook. One of the calls was offering work to repair the levees and drain the city from the Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency run by the US military. Unable to access his New Orleans offices, which had six feet of water on the first floor, Boh drove down to work in nearby Baton Rouge, to help save the city where his grandfather had founded a construction business 96 years before.

Military Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters dropped sandbags into the breached levees in New Orleans, as Boh Brothers crews worked around the clock for a week. The work was a financial boost for the civil engineering company that had been $2 million in debt just over a year prior, because the Army Corps of Engineers had no money to pay them for installing floodgates for New Orleans†Harvey Canal.

Before Katrina struck, Boh was starting to question if he really wanted to apply for more work from the Corps, which oversees the levees. "In 2004 and 2005, funding for our work has been cut," he told CorpWatch. Indeed, earlier this year, New Orleans district projected that it would get just $82 million in flood and hurricane protection projects, a 44.2 percent drop from the $147 million spent in 2001.

Today state and federal money and contracts are flowing into the stricken area and Boh Brothers is one of the key local beneficiaries. Right after completing the emergency repairs, Boh was sub-contracted to help pump water from the flooded city by the Shaw Group, a politically well-connected contractor that had worked on reconstruction in Iraq. Then the state of Louisiana awarded the company a new $30.9 million contract to fix the hurricane-damaged twin-span bridge that carries Interstate 10 traffic over Lake Pontchartrain.

Bohâ€s contract is tiny compared to the billions that will flow to the giants of the industry: Halliburton , Bechtel and Flour. "The construction industry has stood up and is saying we are standing ready for your call," Lieutenant General Carl Strock told a September 2 Defense Department briefing. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army have budgeted at least $62.5 billion in emergency aid for Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, (not including rebuilding the levees), creating a boom for construction companies.

"They are throwing money out, they are shoveling it out the door," said James Albertine, a Washington lobbyist and past president of the American League of Lobbyists, told the New York Times. "I'm sure every lobbyist's phone in Washington is ringing off the hook from his clients. Sixty-two billion dollars is a lot of money -- and it's only a down payment."

"You are likely to see the equivalent of war profiteering -- disaster profiteering," said Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit government spending watchdog group. She notes that Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of FEMA is now a lobbyist and consultant to both the Shaw Group and Halliburton . (Melissa Norcross, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said Allbaugh has not, since he was hired, "consulted on any specific contracts that the company is considering pursuing, nor has he been tasked by the company with any lobbying responsibilities.")

Many, including Senator Richard Durbin, "are worried because we hear about no-bid contracts in the Katrina areas going to the same companies that they went to in Iraq without the kind of accountability that we have to demand," the Illinois Democrat told National Public Radio, a public radio network in the US. " "

Engineer society accused of cover-ups

By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer Tue Mar 25, 4:48 PM ET

NEW ORLEANS - The professional organization for engineers who build the nation's roads, dams and bridges has been accused by fellow engineers of covering up catastrophic design flaws while investigating national disasters.
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After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the levee failures caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the federal government paid the American Society of Civil Engineers to investigate what went wrong.

Critics now accuse the group of covering up engineering mistakes, downplaying the need to alter building standards, and using the investigations to protect engineers and government agencies from lawsuits.

Similar accusations arose after both disasters, but the most recent allegations have pressured the organization to convene an independent panel to investigate.

"They want to make sure that they do things the right way and that they learn lessons from the studies they do," said Sherwood Boelhert, a retired Republican congressman from New York who heads the panel. He led the House Science Committee for six years.

The panel is expected to issue a report by the end of April and may recommend that the society stop taking money from government agencies for disaster investigations.

The engineering group says it takes the allegations seriously, but it has declined to comment until completion of the panel's report and an internal ethics review.

In the World Trade Center case, critics contend the engineering society wrongly concluded skyscrapers cannot withstand getting hit by airplanes. In the hurricane investigation, it was accused of suggesting that the power of the storm was as big a problem as the poorly designed levees.

The group has about 140,000 members and is based in Reston, Va. It sets engineering standards and codes and publishes technical books and a glossy magazine. Members testify regularly before Congress and issue an annual report on the state of the nation's public-works projects.

The society got a $1.1 million grant from the Army Corps of Engineers to study the levee failures. Similarly, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid the group about $257,000 to investigate the World Trade Center collapse.

The engineers were not involved in investigating last year's bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

The society issued a report last year that blamed the levee failures on poor design and the Corps' use of incorrect engineering data.

Raymond Seed, a levee expert at the University of California, Berkeley, was among the first to question the society's involvement. He was on a team funded by the National Science Foundation to study the New Orleans flood.

Seed accused the engineering society and the Army Corps of collusion, writing an Oct. 20 letter alleging that the two organizations worked together "to promulgate misleading studies and statements, to subvert appropriate independent investigations ... to literally attempt to change some of the critical apparent answers regarding lessons to be learned."

Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the corps' director of civil works, disputed Seed's allegations at a December meeting in New Orleans.

"He talks about the supposed cover-up," Riley said. "Well, our people live here in New Orleans ... We don't stand behind our work. We live behind our work."

In 2002, the society's report on the World Trade Center praised the buildings for remaining standing long enough to allow tens thousands of people to flee.

But, the report said, skyscrapers are not typically designed to withstand airplane impacts. Instead of hardening buildings against such impacts, it recommended improving aviation security and fire protection.

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineer and forensics expert, contends his computer simulations disprove the society's findings that skyscrapers could not be designed to withstand the impact of a jetliner.

Astaneh-Asl, who received m

Red tape ties N.O. nonprofit for homeless
New Orleans CityBusiness, Oct 31, 2005 by Richard A. Webster

HUD officials tried to pull off an $11.4 million money grab from humanitarian New Orleans operations after Hurricane Katrina.Before floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina had been drained from New Orleans and much of southeast Louisiana, Martha Kegel, executive director of nonprofit Unity for the Homeless, tried to assist hundreds of thousands of newly homeless people.She knew $11.4 million in grants had already been approved for use in New Orleans by the U.S.