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http://www.maroonspoon.com/wx/gustav.html Live coverage...levee is failing 350 feet of wall falling apart as we speak...

What residents were hoping they could avoid has happened in St. Charles. As feared, part of the Elm Point Levee has burst and water is rushing through right now at a rapid pace. Authorities say that the levee burst in two spots around 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday. One of those holes is reportedly the size of a football field. Several homes and businesses in the area are now flooded. Officials say that residents in that area voluntarily evacuated before the breach.    Google map link

(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama took his campaign to Miami, Florida, on Saturday with a message to the nation's mayors: I'll be your ally in Washington, Sen. John McCain will not. (snip) "Both Sen. McCain and I have traveled recently to the areas that have been devastated by floods. And I know that Sen. McCain felt as strongly as I did feeling enormous sympathy for the victims of the recent flooding. ... And I'm sure they appreciated the sentiment, but they probably would have appreciated it even more if Sen. McCain hadn't opposed legislation to fund levees and flood control...

Des Moines, IA (AHN) - The flooding of the Mississippi River has brought out to the open the fact that half of 31 levees between southern Iowa and St. Louis are dated and could no longer withstand the river's rampaging waters.According to the Army Corps of Engineers the majority of the levees were build three decades ago, while some were as old as 6 decades. With a National Weather Service forecast of more rains and higher waters on the river, the army engineers fear at least 18 of the levees would give way and this would result to worst flooding...

LAKE DELTON, Wis. - Storms overnight added to swollen rivers and caused new levee breaks that swamped Illinois farms and homes — part of a week of severe weather that's claimed 15 lives and is expected to continue in the nation's heartland, impacting food prices across the country. Three levee breaks along the Embarras and Wabash rivers in Illinois were causing widespread flash flooding of nearby areas — including Lawrenceville, a town of 5,000, and several smaller communities. About 200 homes are in the immediately affected area, with water up to the roofs of some of them. Between 50 to...

Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city's flood defenses. Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so far of the...

4 Investigates: Floodwalls stuffed with newspaper? 11:54 PM CDT on Thursday, April 24, 2008 Lee Zurik / WWL-TV News Anchor "It blows my mind." Those are the words St. Bernard parish president Craig Taffaro used to watch videotape Eyewitness News showed him, of floodwalls built to protect his parish. "That should be criminal," Taffaro continues. What he's talking about was witnessed by a St. Bernard Parish resident whodidn't want to be identified, but did have sharp criticism of the work done by a contractor hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "It's like putting a Band-Aid on the hole...

I've been hearing rumors for a couple of weeks now that New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin is considering running for Governor. I finally found a news outlet that confirms this rumor, thanks to freelance journalist Jason Berry, who appeared on Informed Sources last night to predict that Nagin will run for Governor. Hat tip to Library Chronicles. As an aside, is this Jason Berry the author of Amazing Grace, an account of Charles Evers' run for Governor in Mississippi back in 1972? But back to the issue at hand - Ray Nagin running for Governor of Louisiana. This makes...

One hundred twenty-two levees from Maryland to California are at risk of failing, according to a list released Thursday by the Army Corps of Engineers. There could be danger to people who live in communities near some of the levees as well as a chance that they will have to pay more for insurance, said Butch Kinerney of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's national flood insurance program. The list was released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by news organizations, including The Associated Press. If the Corps of Engineers determines a levee to be at risk of...

California should create a long-term plan to spend the nearly $5 billion in flood-control bonds approved in November so it doesn't squander the money, Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow said Tuesday. "The point is, we can waste this money," Snow said during the first in a series of meetings designed to determine how best to spend the voter-approved windfall. "We need to implement programs right now, but we need to be mindful of developing a long-term plan." The money comes from two water bonds on the Nov. 7 ballot. Proposition 1E was sponsored by the Legislature and governor...

The Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans was a wake-up call for California, whose capital city of Sacramento faces a similar calamity should its aging and deteriorating river levees be breached by storm surges. To his credit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger acknowledged the potential danger, declared a state of emergency, obtained a half-billion-dollar emergency appropriation to repair the most critical spots along the Sacramento River and its tributaries, persuaded federal authorities to speed up work and then won legislative approval of a $4 billion levee repair bond issue. Rock-filled barges, cranes and other heavy equipment have been working night and day...

Scientists have long said the only way to restore Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands is to undo the elaborate levee system that controls the Mississippi River, not with the small projects that have been tried here and there, but with a massive diversion that would send the muddy river flooding wholesale into the state’s sediment-starved marshes. And most of them have long dismissed the idea as impractical, unaffordable and lethal to the region’s economy. Now, they are reconsidering. In fact, when a group of researchers convened last April to consider the fate of the Louisiana coast, their recommendation was unanimous: divert the...

Forget F911, the left's hypocrisy can be found in HBO's "When the Levees Broke"

Kevin Aylward: Katrina: Forget everything you thought you knew Kevin Aylward, The Examiner Aug 31, 2006 WASHINGTON - If you’ve only gotten your news about Hurricane Katrina from the mainstream media, everything you think you know about Katrina flooding New Orleans is probably wrong. On this first anniversary of the tragedy, while the networks congratulate themselves on their often wildly inaccurate reporting in the days following Katrina, there’s a far more important story not being told. We’ve all heard the story: In the early morning hours of Aug 29, 2005, the Category 4 Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, overwhelming the New...

Officials who OK'd Delta homes illegally failed to consider sea level rise, groups say. Environmental groups plan to file a lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court today claiming that flood-control officials violated state law by allowing major levee modifications in San Joaquin County without considering the effect of global warming. The groups, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, assert that the sea level rise associated with climate change could eventually overtop those levees, putting thousands of people at risk. The suit targets a permit approved June 26 by the state Reclamation Board that cleared the way for the River Islands...

SACRAMENTO State lawmakers are betting that voters eager to avoid a Katrina-style disaster in California will rally behind a $4.1 billion bond on the November ballot to shore up the state's fragile levees. While few experts disagree that California needs to rebuild its aging levee system, an Associated Press review of the bond has found the measure requires voters to take a leap of faith that the state will spend the money the way lawmakers have promised. An extensive examination of the measure, reviews of state and federal studies, and interviews with two dozen water experts, lawmakers and environmentalists have...

California voters will be asked to approve a $4.1 billion levee bond in November. The figure represents a compromise between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had sought about $6.5 billion, and Democratic lawmakers, who had wanted to spend about half that. THE PROBLEM: _ Levee system: A fragile network of 2,300 miles of levees in the state's Central Valley and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is in need of major repairs. The system includes 1,600 miles of levees that were reinforced in the 1960s and 1970s and 700 miles that amount to little more than grassy berms. It was built more than...

Sacramento and New Orleans are 2,000 miles apart. But when the Crescent City was submerged in what the media insisted on calling "toxic gumbo" following Hurricane Katrina, it brought overdue attention to the neglected levees of California's Delta. That's the good news. The bad news is that estimates for the amount of money needed to completely fix the Delta levees could range up to $1.5 trillion, according to Ron Ott, deputy director of the California Bay-Delta Authority. Ott came up with that shocking figure by comparing the Delta system to Holland; that country is in the midst of investing $2.5...

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Opponents of a plan to consolidate the levee boards of southeast Louisiana on Tuesday relaunched their efforts to postpone the plan, four months after the Legislature approved it in the name of ridding the New Orleans area of cronyism and patronage. The levee boards, often blamed for poor upkeep of the levees surrounding New Orleans, were the subject of scrutiny in two special legislative sessions since Hurricane Katrina, with business and community groups calling for their dissolution. The issue became the subject of bitter fights during a special legislative session in February, as Gov. Kathleen...

Corps Takes Blame for Katrina Flooding By CAIN BURDEAU ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW ORLEANS (AP) - 0602dvs-blanco-fp A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data. "This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, `We've had a catastrophic failure,'" Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season. The Corps said...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data. "This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, `We've had a catastrophic failure,'" Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season. The Corps said it will use the lessons it has learned to build better flood...

On Tuesday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the 2006 hurricane season was expected to produce 13 to 16 named storms, including four to six "major" hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher. No leading forecasters came close to predicting what happened in 2005, when 28 tropical storms spawned a record 15 hurricanes. The 2006 forecast for News Orleans was worse than Watson's prediction for the city last year, he said. But for now, he considers the 2005 season an aberration rather than a trend or a definitive sign of effects from global warming. "If it happens again...

Big Questions About the Big Easy Hughes Joseph Hughes chairs the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech and serves on the EPA's environmental engineering advisory committee. He toured the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast with President Wayne Clough in November, spoke to former Alumni Association trustees in January and recently sat down with the ALUMNI MAGAZINE. Hughes now is helping coordinate a conference that will address the future of New Orleans.What is Georgia Tech's role in the rebuilding of New Orleans? We're at the stage right now in the discussion where there are real questions whether we should rebuild...

In just eight months, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has done years of work on the Katrina-battered ramparts around New Orleans. The Corps has repaired 169 miles of damaged levee. Replaced long stretches of inadequate concrete floodwall with a much sturdier design. Installed 70-ton gates at the mouths of ruptured drainage canals. But it isn't good enough. Even the man who has led the monumental effort to bring the Big Easy's hurricane protection infrastructure back to pre-Katrina standards says so. The defenses are "better, stronger and more resilient" than ever, said Col. Lewis Setliff. "But I'm only fixing about...

With the May revision of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget for 2006-2007 due out in just days, he is facing a new issue: What to do with the surplus of tax revenues currently flowing into the state treasury? With history as his guide, he must focus some of that revenue on essential one-time projects that do not plunge California into ongoing commitments that could jeopardize California's current fiscal stability. The governor could hit another home run for Californians by allocating a portion of the state revenue increase to levee repair -- something we have all become too aware is a...

The Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations have reached agreement on accelerating environmental reviews that state officials say will allow critical levee repairs to start in July and end by November first. On April 21st, President Bush directed several federal agencies to speed up their reviews under the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Protection Act and other federal laws. It sets out what is called a "critical path timeline" meant to "ensure completion of all regulatory processes" by June 21st. State officials said today that without the agreement, it could have taken a year, or up to four...

NEW ORLEANS (UPI) -- New Orleans levees completed in the 1980s and 1990s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were not designed for a sinking city, a report says. The design decision was made in 1985 by Frederick Chatry, then the head of engineering for the New Orleans district, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. The corps was in the midst of a massive project building levees and flood walls that had been authorized by Congress in 1965. In 1985, the U.S. Geodetic Survey released a new map that put the baseline elevation of New Orleans as much as a...

Interview with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on ABC This Week with George Stephanopoulos, April 23, 2006 Transcript below. Video available at ABC website: STEPHANOPOULOS: (intro): Our next guest California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He marked Earth Day this weekend with a beach clean up in San Pedro, a day after meeting up with President Bush in San Jose. As they both try to recover from record low approval ratings, Schwarzenegger and Bush are locked in an uneasy embrace. When I sat down with the Governor in Sacramento before his summit with the president, it was clear that Schwarzenegger thinks the key to...

SACRAMENTO – Federal officials still are not taking seriously the threat of a failure in California's aging levee system and are risking another New Orleans-style disaster by failing to provide funding for repairs, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Tuesday. During a visit to California last week, President Bush turned down the governor's request for a pre-emptive federal disaster declaration. Instead, he issued a rare directive letting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers help with badly needed levee repairs. Schwarzenegger also met privately with Bush, but he said Tuesday that the message isn't resonating with the administration. He did not mention the...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sharply criticized the Bush administration Saturday for refusing his request to declare a pre-emptive federal disaster for California's fragile levees. President Bush offered California some aid Friday, issuing a rare directive letting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers help with badly needed levee repairs. "I think the response that the federal government has given us is unacceptable," the governor told reporters at an Earth Day event on a San Pedro beach. "We need the federal government to come in and help us so we can build the levees as quickly as possible." Schwarzenegger said the state would...

SAN FRANCISCO — President Bush does not plan to declare the pre-emptive federal disaster Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sought for California's fragile levees, but he issued an unusual directive letting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers help with urgently needed repairs. "This is an emergency situation," James Connaughton, chief environmental adviser to the president, said today. He spoke hours before Bush was to meet with Schwarzenegger in San Jose to discuss the issue. Bush's move allows the Corps of Engineers -- a branch of the U.S. military -- to accept $23 million in California money for repair work on 29 critically...

President Bush has issued an unusual waiver that will allow the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to accept state money for critical levee repairs, a senior Bush administration official said Friday. In a meeting planned Friday afternoon in San Jose with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bush did not plan to grant the federal disaster declaration the governor sought as heavy rains strained the fragile levee system. The waiver, plus help with expediting permits and the possibility of future federal funds, were likely in lieu of the declaration, the Bush administration official said. The kind of pre-emptive disaster declaration Schwarzenegger sought in...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Rain was falling again Tuesday in northern and central California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in seven counties that have been battered by storms and flooding. In his emergency declaration Monday, Schwarzenegger warned that levees in the region had been seriously weakened by the storms and were in danger of breaking. The National Weather Service forecast rain through the weekend. "There's great vulnerability in the San Joaquin Valley and the Central Valley," Schwarzenegger said after touring the state's flood operations center. "We want to do everything we can to make sure that we...

Everyone knows that it's risky to build large tracts of homes beside flood-prone rivers but developers and local governments, especially in the fast-growing Sacramento area, are continuing to do it with little regard for the potential consequences--because financially and legally, they are protected from the consequences. As long as the subdivisions comply with very outdated federal floodplain maps, or the promoters have obtained some sort of exemption from the Army Corps of Engineers, there are no restrictions or flood insurance requirements. And under a recent state appellate court decision, if a levee fails and nearby homes are flooded, the State...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Frustrated by a lack of progress in rebuilding the state's levees, a Louisiana Democrat threatened Wednesday to block President Bush's appointments requiring Senate confirmation until "significant progress" is made toward restoring the flood protection damaged by Hurricane Katrina in August. Saying coastal residents "cannot wait much longer," Sen. Mary Landrieu blamed the loss of 1,200 lives in her home state "to the loss of wetlands as a protection and a lack of levees that held." She is demanding that the Bush administration develop a comprehensive levee, flood control and coastal restoration program, and dole out the funds...

SACRAMENTO Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Governor Schwarzenegger toured the Northern California Levee system Friday. The governor and a federal team flew over in a convoy of Blackhawk helicopters to assess the need for federal help to strengthen the system. Chertoff made the commitment to come to California during a meeting last month in which the governor pressed him to support a federal disaster declaration for the fragile levee system. Last month, Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for the river and delta levees to try to get quick funding to repair them. "It's always easier if you see...

NEW ORLEANS - A foundation problem — although not the one targeted by earlier studies — caused the 450-foot-long break in a floodwall and levee on New Orleans' western edge when Hurricane Katrina hit, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Friday. A naturally occurring, 20-foot-thick layer of clay that helped support the floodwall was too weak for the job, according to a report by a Corps task force set up to find out why the levees broke. Had the floodwall and levee held, much of the western half of the city would have escaped flooding. Previous analyses by other...

WASHINGTON -- A key House committee turned down a request Wednesday for more than $41 million in emergency funding for Sacramento and Delta levee repairs, saying California's request would have to await later action on a measure to fund the work in 2007. The decision by the House Appropriations Committee doesn't necessarily mean the push to fund levee work on an emergency 2006 spending bill is dead. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is on the Senate spending panel and she has vowed to try to get the money there. But the committee's decision means that the hope of congressional members and...

WASHINGTON, March 7, 2006 – Restoration of the flood protection system in New Orleans is on track and by June 1 will be equal to or better than it was before Hurricane Katrina, the Army general in charge of the program said here yesterday. To date, 100 of the 169 damaged miles of levee have been repaired, and 85 percent of pumping capacity is restored, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander and chief of engineers, Army Corps of Engineers, said at a White House news conference. In meeting President Bush's June 1 commitment, the Corps of Engineers will restore all damaged...

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert wondered aloud whether the Federal Government should help rebuild a city much of which lies below sea level. The most tough-minded answer to that question demonstrates that rebuilding and protecting New Orleans is in the national interest. Reason: The very same geological forces that created that port are what make it vulnerable to Category 5 hurricanes and also what make it indispensable. One such force is the Mississippi River. Once, the Gulf of Mexico extended north to Cape Girardeau, Mo., but the river gradually deposited enough sediment...

Quote from Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security chief, August 31, 2005 to the AP: "It's a very slow rise, and it will remain so until we plug that breach. I think we can get [the breach] stabilized in a few hours"

This was in this morning's St. Pete Times. I can't find it on their website, as their corrections run a day behind. Using their search, the last correction was 3/3/06. The lower right hand corner of page 1, Section A reads as follows: CLARIFICATION, SECTION A A March 1 Asssociated Press story reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than about the...

Clarification: Katrina-Video story ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials. The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking. The day before the storm hit, Bush was...

The videotape of Governor Kathleen Blanco telling White House staffers the New Orleans levee had not breached was the talk of the Capitol on Friday. The videotaped, obtained by the Associated Press, was taken hours after the White House received confirmation from the National Weather Service that the levees had breached. At noon on August 29th, Blanco's voice is heard on the tape telling staffers, "I think we've heard that we have not breached the levees. We have not breached the levees at this point in time." That was the same time Hurricane Katrina was flooding New Orleans East and...

Friday, March 3, 2006 11:54 a.m. EST Bush Didn’t Lie About Levee Breaching News sources have reported that President Bush lied when he said he wasn’t warned that the levees in New Orleans could be breached during Hurricane Katrina. But a videotape of a key meeting between Bush and hurricane officials supports the president’s contention that the breaching of the levees was unanticipated. On September 1, four days after Katrina struck, Bush said: "I don’t think anybody anticipated a breach of the levees.” The Associated Press on Wednesday claimed that "federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security...

MSNBC versus NBC News. MSNBC's David Shuster, at the top of Thursday's Hardball, and NBC's Lisa Myers at the start of the NBC Nightly News, played the identical soundbites from Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center warning, on Sunday August 28, about his “grave concern” the levees in New Orleans could be “topped,” and a clip of President Bush four days later maintaining that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." But they used the soundbites to prove opposite assessments. Shuster contended that Mayfield's video “seems to contradict what President Bush said about Katrina” since Mayfield's...

The Associated Press is running a piece of video on which they're claiming exclusivity, of some of the FEMA preparation meetings prior to the landfall of Hurrican Katrina. They've also got video of the President speaking to FEMA, and then, later, speaking to ABC in the aftermath. They've chosen to portray the President as oblivious to what happened in New Orleans. President Bush (speaking to ABC news): I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. Voiceover: A seemingly direct contradiction to what is said at the briefing. Max Mayfield (director, National Hurricane Center): I don't think anyone can...

WASHINGTON - After more than two years as California's governor, including a disastrous 2005 that pummeled his bipartisan image and approval ratings, Arnold Schwarzenegger's novelty and luster on the national political stage is wearing off. With it, he also may be losing some of his clout. Treated like a rock star when he traveled to Washington and New York during his first year and a half in office, Schwarzenegger seemed to have lost some of his glitz this week at a gathering of America's governors. The battalions of reporters and photographers that used to track Schwarzenegger's every move dwindled to...

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will visit California to tour Sacramento's levees and assess the need for federal help, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday after meeting with the secretary. Schwarzenegger said Chertoff made the commitment during a meeting in which the governor pressed him to support a federal disaster declaration for the fragile levee system. Schwarzenegger on Friday declared a state of emergency for the river and delta levees to try to get quick funding to repair them. "He said that he will help, that he will look into it," Schwarzenegger said in an interview with The Associated Press. "He...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Sacramento could suffer catastrophic flooding unless the river levees in the region are repaired quickly, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other officials warned Wednesday after a helicopter tour. "We are literally today one storm or one big earthquake away from a major disaster," Schwarzenegger said at a news conference atop a levee separating the Sacramento River from a neighborhood just yards away. "Now we have seen what happened with Katrina - I think that woke everyone up." Sacramento has less than 100-year flood protection, the lowest of any large urban area in the nation, according...