Local celebrity Rudy Vorkapic (creator of The Levee), Stuart Lob (local engineer) and founder Sandy Rosenthal discuss the resignation of four East Levee Authority members upon the governor’s selection of its president and what this could mean for New Orleans’ levees and the people who live behind them.
The podcast can be found here.
The unedited video version can be seen here.
Immediately after the Hurricane Katrina flooding in New Orleans, pre-Katrina local levee board members were scapegoated for the catastrophe. One member who served from 1997 to 2001 was a Catholic nun, but they were all wrongly portrayed as corrupt.
It was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that flooded New Orleans with its inferior design and construction.
This is back in the news because Louisiana’s governor wants the job of selecting New Orleans’ levee board members to be returned to the governor.
Hear about it from an expert – civil engineer Stephen Estopinal who served on the post-Katrina East Levee Authority for eight years, with two of them as its elected president.
Check out episode 122 of Beat the Big Guys podcast.
Four members of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East (SLFPA-E) have resigned in protest over Governor Jeff Landry’s appointment of a levee commissioner.
The appointment openly disregards the levee board laws passed after Hurricane Katrina.
While the leadership at Levees.org disagrees with the Governor’s decision to flout the law, the leadership also insists it ‘just doesn’t matter.’
Because the SLFPA-E, even one populated with experts, cannot tell the Army Corps of Engineers what to do.
This is stated plainly by respected civil engineer Stephen Estopinal who served on the East Levee Authority for eight years (two as president) from 2008 – 2016, the most important years while the new system was being built.
