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The problem is you can't say what the funding would be if
it were targeted to flood control. The politics for Federal
funding aren't that simple. The concerted effort from the
Beltway to shift blame to the locals and from Congress to
FEMA and vice versa is pretty dismal to watch and perfectly
predictable. Sometimes I think if America had less money
to throw around, it might do it smarter, but that's speculation.
What is not speculation is that given the rising oil prices,
the hit to the refineries and the pumping stations, the hit
to the ports, and so on, there will be less money to throw
around. Europeans already paying high prices can laugh
without fear of retribution. If by that you mean no levees
will ever stop a Cat 5, you are probably right. I was asked
at a party what I would do. I said as an engineer, I recommend
bulldozing New Orleans and rebuilding in Arizona. As a musician, I
recommend rebuilding the Big Easy and getting gigs there. Priorities
by role are in conflict. It's a tough problem in multiple inheritance.
Here in XML land there are different issues that we can discuss
as part of the response.
Technical question: can XML Schema declare an object-oriented
database in fact, or only by implication? This links to the
Names As Types permathread.
len
From: Jim Ancona [mailto:jim@anconafamily.com]
Ken North wrote:
>>1. The conditions of the levees and dikes are well-known in
>>emergency planning circles. Requests for funding to repair
>>them have been routinely turned down.
>
> Congress started funding the Southeast Louisiana (SELA) Urban Flood
Control
> Project in 1995. SELA was a long-term capital works project. The U.S. Army
Corp
> of Engineers spent more than $400 million on levees and pumps.
From this morning's Washington Post
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR200509070
2462.html):
"Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial
Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million
construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing
to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the
canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.
"Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing.
"In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have
complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and
Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President
Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps
civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion;
California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though
its population is more than seven times as large."
So the problem wasn't lack of funding as such, it was which projects
were funded. Not surprisingly, the politicians were more interested in
funding those that would bring short-term political benefits rather than
in protecting against a hurricane that might not come for 50 years.
Read the article--there's plenty of blame to go around, and no
technological solutions evident.
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