Weekly/biweekly Michigan legislative action thread
Posted on 02/15/2013 1:56:02 PM PST by cripplecreek
Michigan’s U.S. senators – Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow – are among those urging the Army Corps of Engineers to allocate money to help the Great Lakes recover from Hurricane Sandy damage.
“While the Great Lakes navigation system is threatened due to underfunding, which has been worsened due to lakes levels that have hit record lows, the system also was damaged by Hurricane Sandy,” a group of Midwest senators wrote in a letter Thursday to Assistant Secretary of the Army Jo-Ellen Darcy. “This storm covered 900 miles, and impacted 24 states, including states surrounding the Great Lakes. Across the Great Lakes, gale force winds caused damage to breakwaters and silted in harbors and channels. On Lake Huron, wave heights reached 23 feet, in Lake Michigan the waves peaked at 22 feet, and the storm caused waves of 14 feet in Lake Erie.”
The letter says that the Army Corp of Engineers estimates that Great Lakes federal navigation projects had damages of about $17.7 million. The letter asks for the money to be directed to Great Lakes projects “so that breakwaters and piers can be repaired, and harbors and channels can be dredged to restore functionality.”
Levin and Stabenow are both Democrats. Other senators to sign the letter include Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) Al Franken (D-Minnesota), Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio).
The late October storm was one of the costliest in U.S. history. While there was some damage in the Midwest, damage was significantly worse in some northeast states, particularly New Jersey and New York.
Congress approved about $50.5 billion in supplemental appropriations related to Hurricane Sandy, the letter sent by senators notes. That included $821 million for the Army Corp of Engineers.
Sandy is the greatest excuse for pork barrel spending since Katrina. And Sandy wasn’t even a friggin’ hurricane.
These jack-wagon senators keep calling TROPICAL STORM SANDY a hurricane! I guess it makes the begging a little easier.
While the pigs are at the trough, might want to put lipstick on them!
Mo Money Mo Money Mo Money
If my math is right, the Federal Gubmint spent $3.76 trillion last year, or $1.1 million per person, or $3,200 per person every day.
How could we possibly have underfunded ANYTHING.
And that's how they get re-elected..........
I don’t have a problem of paying for the things we actually need but this crap of taking other people’s money to do it disgusts me.
Let us produce the revenue to pay our own damn way.
We need to retire the democrat spendthrift senators from Michigan.
Did Sandy do much damage on the Great Lakes?
She blew through Pittsburgh, but the damage seemed no greater than that done by a typical line of heavy thunderstorms. Most of that cleaned up at the local level within a week or so.
It’s more like $11K per person ... still outrageous :-). You had too many zeroes for trillion I suppose. $3,760,000,000,000 / 330,000,000 people. = $11393.
I can’t imagine it did any more damage than any other storm to roll through. We had gusts near 60mph just the other day and we sure as hell didn’t get anything like that from Sandy.
I'm here right smack dab between lakes Erie and Michigan and don't recall getting much in the way of wind.
Notice on this map a little dark area on the south shore of Lake Erie. This worst of this is just west of Cleveland where winds close to the lake were over 75 mi/h. That's where I live.
We got 8" of rain in our yard, even though the state-wide maps only show a couple. The yard was a pond, but we had no water in the house. There were some low lying roads that flooded.
There were many large trees taken down, cars houses and garages smashed, and the few boats still in the water were thrown around. I only had one large spruce blown over but in my neighborhood and several miles south there were hundreds. I got a couple come-alongs and cranked it back upright. We'll see if it survives. Several individual owners right near me lost 10-12 trees. They were on north-south roads where the wind came south off the lake with nothing to stop it. The saturated soil made it easier for trees to be blown over.
About two blocks away several huge trees took out a major electric line Monday, October 29th. Many schools, libraries, and companies were shut down for two days to almost a week.
So many of our electric linemen and tree companies were already on their way to the East coast that they had to bring in people from the west. There were ten (actual count) trucks from Missouri working on that mess down the street from us for several days, in addition to tree company trucks. The last trucks were still there on Saturday and the road was finally opened by Sunday.
I know this nowhere near matches the damage done in the East or the damage done in a summer hurricane, but it certainly came as a surprise to us.
People on the far east side of town thought I was crazy when I told them what it was like on our side. The nice thing is that our street is served by a major electric line that serves a nearby shopping area and we never lost electricity for an extended time. We had dozens of irritating dropouts and finally gave up on our clocks for a couple days.
We didn't see the sunset or the sun for a few days. ;-)
We aren't begging for funds that I know of. It doesn't look as if anywhere else in the midwest got the wind we did. Maybe it was flooding.
A few boats still docked in Lake Erie got smashed and sunk. If this had hit us in the summer when all the boats were in the lakes, it would have been messy due to extended 15-25 foot waves. See my post #14 for what happened near me on land.
http://photos.cleveland.com/plain-dealer/2012/10/30cstorm5jpg.html
Here's a little slide show of some local damage. Click "Next" to see more pics.
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