Stephen Spruiell: The Army Corps of Bad Engineering
In the first year of his presidency, Jimmy Carter went to war with Congress over $239 million worth of funding for 19 public-works projects — most of them involving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Carter rarely found himself on the right side of a policy issue, but as a trained engineer he could see through the Corps’ specious methods of analysis. The waste and fraud angered him. Once, as governor of Georgia, he had described a Corps study as follows: “It became obvious to me that none of the [Corps’] claims was true. The report was primarily promotional literature supporting construction.”
All of the various dams and water projects on Carter’s “hit list” drained taxpayers in exchange for scant economic benefits, but some invited catastrophe as well. One project, the Auburn Dam, was to be constructed near a fault line in California. A Bureau of Reclamation study had predicted that in the event of an earthquake, dam failure would flood 750,000 people, the state capital, and five military bases.
Though he successfully stymied that project, Carter lost the larger effort to end Congress’s use of the Corps as an opportunity for pork-barrel spending. Congress defeated Carter’s efforts to block Mo Udall’s crusade to irrigate Arizona, Sen. John Stennis’s Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway boondoggle, and Sen. J. Bennett Johnston’s traffic-free Red River project. Though Carter set ambitious goals for curbing the excess, most of his attempts ended in failure.
The misuse of the Corps for pork projects continues to this day and has left less money available for more important Corps functions. After the Katrina disaster, many in the press criticized the Bush administration for underfunding the Army Corps of Engineers. These critics missed the point: The problem is not underfunding but the total lack of prioritization that characterizes the Corps’ activities. ...
For years, hurricane experts have warned that the confluence of canals east of New Orleans could amplify storm surges by 20 to 40 percent. The LSU Hurricane Center’s Hassan Mashriqui told Michael Grunwald of the Washington Post that he had warned emergency planners of this “critical and fundamental flaw” as recently as this past May. “But nobody did anything,” he said.
Shortly after the Corps completed MRGO [Mississippi River Gulf Outlet] in 1965, Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans and sent a storm surge up the channel into St. Bernard’s Parish, resulting in massive flooding. Betsy killed more than 70 people and caused over $1 billion worth of damage. Since then, MRGO has eroded over 20,000 acres of wetlands, which left New Orleans even more exposed when Katrina’s storm surge hit. Residents of New Orleans have long opposed the channel. Polled in 2004, a majority of St. Bernard’s Parish voters said they’d like to see MRGO closed down, but support from Congress, the Corps, and such special interests as the Port of New Orleans have kept MRGO open. An LSU study estimated that despite steadily declining traffic (now down to 3 percent of all the port’s cargo), the cost of maintaining MRGO increased 52 percent from 1995 to 2005. Last year, the Corps spent $13 million dredging MRGO.
Read entire article at National Review
All of the various dams and water projects on Carter’s “hit list” drained taxpayers in exchange for scant economic benefits, but some invited catastrophe as well. One project, the Auburn Dam, was to be constructed near a fault line in California. A Bureau of Reclamation study had predicted that in the event of an earthquake, dam failure would flood 750,000 people, the state capital, and five military bases.
Though he successfully stymied that project, Carter lost the larger effort to end Congress’s use of the Corps as an opportunity for pork-barrel spending. Congress defeated Carter’s efforts to block Mo Udall’s crusade to irrigate Arizona, Sen. John Stennis’s Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway boondoggle, and Sen. J. Bennett Johnston’s traffic-free Red River project. Though Carter set ambitious goals for curbing the excess, most of his attempts ended in failure.
The misuse of the Corps for pork projects continues to this day and has left less money available for more important Corps functions. After the Katrina disaster, many in the press criticized the Bush administration for underfunding the Army Corps of Engineers. These critics missed the point: The problem is not underfunding but the total lack of prioritization that characterizes the Corps’ activities. ...
For years, hurricane experts have warned that the confluence of canals east of New Orleans could amplify storm surges by 20 to 40 percent. The LSU Hurricane Center’s Hassan Mashriqui told Michael Grunwald of the Washington Post that he had warned emergency planners of this “critical and fundamental flaw” as recently as this past May. “But nobody did anything,” he said.
Shortly after the Corps completed MRGO [Mississippi River Gulf Outlet] in 1965, Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans and sent a storm surge up the channel into St. Bernard’s Parish, resulting in massive flooding. Betsy killed more than 70 people and caused over $1 billion worth of damage. Since then, MRGO has eroded over 20,000 acres of wetlands, which left New Orleans even more exposed when Katrina’s storm surge hit. Residents of New Orleans have long opposed the channel. Polled in 2004, a majority of St. Bernard’s Parish voters said they’d like to see MRGO closed down, but support from Congress, the Corps, and such special interests as the Port of New Orleans have kept MRGO open. An LSU study estimated that despite steadily declining traffic (now down to 3 percent of all the port’s cargo), the cost of maintaining MRGO increased 52 percent from 1995 to 2005. Last year, the Corps spent $13 million dredging MRGO.