Who’s to blame for the bad levees?
Posted by Moonage on 02 Sep 2005 | Tagged as: Katrina
Already people are lining up to cite the fact that Congress failed to fund the levee improvements the Corps of Engineers requested in 2001 and 2002. For those people, look at this for one second. Just one. OK? Here goes:
From Harper’s. It was originally published May 13, 1882. From the accompanyuing article:
The political wake of the 1882 flood flowed into a Congressional debate over the annual rivers and harbors bill. Little federal aid had been given to what were called the "internal improvements" of the nation’s rivers and harbors before the Civil War. In the post-war years, however, funding rose significantly to nearly $4,000,000 each year, 1866-1875. The annual rivers and harbors bill, however, became pork-barrel legislation in the House (where spending bills originate) as Congressmen tacked appropriations for their favorite projects onto the bill.
Despite calls for increased aid because of the recent flood, on August 1, 1882, President Chester Arthur vetoed the Rivers and Harbors Bill, explicitly labeling it pork-barrel legislation. Arthur did not oppose internal improvements on principle, and had endorsed the commission’s report calling for federal aid to repair and extend levees along the Mississippi. However, he concluded that the legislation as drafted only benefited select localities, was not in the national interest, and would set a bad precedent for the "extravagant expenditure of public money."
Led by a coalition of Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans from flood states, Congress overrode the president’s veto. The 1882 Rivers and Harbors Act included $5.4 million for the Mississippi River Commission. For the rest of the century, federal appropriations for rivers and harbors rose from $8,000,000 in 1880 to $29,000,000 in 1898. The levees rebuilt after the 1882 flood, relying on machine power rather than manpower, withstood flooding in 1884. A severe flood in 1927, however, was again disastrous for the lower Mississippi River Valley, and led to the federal Flood Control Act of 1927 (amended in 1936), the nation’s first law that addressed the problem in a comprehensive manner.
2 Comments »
on 02 Sep 2005 at 1:53 pm 1.Bryan Kerwick
said …
Mother Nature is a fickle woman to say the least. The more we try to tame the enviroment, the more we screw things up in ways we never imagined. Appears if the wetlands were not deprived of the overflow from the river for the last 25 years, this catastrophe would have been much less severe. The Discovery Channel illustrated this point very clearly and the Delta is dying as a result of depriving it its life blood of annual overflow which deposits an enourmous amount of silt creating new land. Now that all the water is funneled into the Gulf, we not only killed the wetlands that are the first defense against hurrucanes, but we are also killing the Gulf as well as it is now overloaded with silt and nitrates it was never able to absorb in the first place. Guess no one ever thought about that when the levee program was established. Like I said, unintentional consequences are worse than what we tried to prevent in the first place.
on 02 Sep 2005 at 4:00 pm 2.Zebrality.com said …
Who’s to blame for the bad levees?
Who’s to blame for the bad levees?