Vice President Dick Cheney came to town to collect campaign cash at a Republican National Committee fundraiser. But he first he attended a meeting with Recovery Czar Donald Powell, US Sen. David Vitter, R-Metairie, and Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, commander of the MS Valley division of the Corps of Engineers. The briefing was to discuss levees and flood control.

I was not invited to this meeting but if I had been I would have soundly corrected the Vice President for making this statement: “Clearly, that’s (focusing on levees) one of the most important parts of the recovery process, which is altogether fitting given that this was the worst natural disaster in American history.”

Wrong. This was the worst manmade engineering disaster in American history.

Cheney goes on to say, “We’ve got a lot of work to do yet, but it looks like the levees are back to pre-Katrina levels, and in some cases, better than that.”

How does Cheney know this? The only way to know whether the levees are back to pre-Katrina levels is to ask the Corps, and this is the very same Corps that brought us the Great Flood of 2005. This is the same Corps that told us that New Orleans was prepared for a Cat 3 storm (Katrina was a Cat 3 storm when it grazed New Orleans). While the Corps is employing a heightened sense of urgency and more transparency, there has been no wholesale renovation or reorganization of the Corps. And there is still absolutely no independent peer review of the Corps’ work.

Levees.Org does not condemn any individuals at the Corps. We know that there are many good people at the Corps working hard to rebuild our levees. Levees.Org is devoted to changing the Corps’ administrative culture and its dysfunctional relationship with Congress so that no more lives and livelihoods are lost due to fault federal flood protection.

To help, go to www.levees.org/join

Sandy Rosenthal
Founder, Levees.Org