Once, a long time ago, during an extended drought in the South East, I met the Corps's commander general. I asked him if they could use their vast water reservoirs to help alleviate the problem. He explained how this would adversely affect their Byzantine obligations to the power grid, which apparently had a higher priority.
I'm not informed or smart enough to criticize his position. But it did shift my perspective on what counts as "a higher priority" for the Corps. And I suspect this is the sort of thing that is at the core of their failures when dealing with the levees.
Then again maybe $14 billion dollars just ain't enough.
Harry Shearer has been pointing out the problem for years on his podcast "Le Show", the movie "The Big Uneasy", and other sites. He calls out the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for incompetence, making past and future disasters inevitable:
"Those bad floodwalls, of course, are the ones that failed so catastrophically in 2005. The Corps’ plan calls for keeping rainfall outflow in those canals at a set level, above which, the agency believes, the walls might fail. Again. The Corps should know. It designed and supervised the construction of those floodwalls."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ill-consider-it-criminal_b_17...
Once, a long time ago, during an extended drought in the South East, I met the Corps's commander general. I asked him if they could use their vast water reservoirs to help alleviate the problem. He explained how this would adversely affect their Byzantine obligations to the power grid, which apparently had a higher priority.
I'm not informed or smart enough to criticize his position. But it did shift my perspective on what counts as "a higher priority" for the Corps. And I suspect this is the sort of thing that is at the core of their failures when dealing with the levees.
Then again maybe $14 billion dollars just ain't enough.