....When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain...
Read the article for the whole story. Let us remind ourselves that bush gave tax cuts to the wealthy and all our money to his folly in Iraq at the expense of the safety of American citizens. And people say liberals are anti-American? What could be more anti-American than cutting funds for disaster management?
According to news I heard on the radio, in 2001 FEMA conducted a study to determine worst case scenarios that could happen. One was the levees breaking in LA, one was a terror attack in NY and the other was an earthquake in San Francisco. Bush cut funding for the FEMA research as well. Why do they even bother to have FEMA when our leader is more interested in his oil cronie's concerns?
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