KATRINA'S ROUGH RIDE

KATRINA'S ROUGH RIDE
Volume XII No. 22 - August 23, 2007

Without a doubt, Hurricane Katrina was the most devastating hurricane to ever hit U.S. shores. Hurricane Camille was stronger and the Galveston hurricane was more deadly, but Katrina did more than damage property and take lives. It shook the nation’s confidence in the state of our infrastructure and revealed a stunning incompetence in our disaster preparedness, recovery and reconstruction.

Now, with the two-year anniversary of this disaster just a few days away, the nation is again suffering the collective emotional hangover from yet another infrastructure tragedy – the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis. And once again, politicians have clamored for a clichéd response: more money will solve our problems. It is as if there is a sign in the Capitol: “In Case of Emergency Grab Cash.” But levees aren’t built with bags of money and you can’t construct a bridge with bricks of gold, as evidenced by the fact that much of the money initially provided after Katrina has not been spent. As we’ve learned time and again, getting the money is easy; rebuilding smarter and better is not.

Several factors have combined to reduce the effectiveness of the money spent rebuilding in the Gulf. One major problem is that reconstruction efforts have been sullied by too many examples of waste, fraud, and abuse to enumerate. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provided several of the most famous examples of these problems. In the days and weeks after Katrina, FEMA spent millions shipping thousands of pounds of excess ice back and forth across the nation, then stored it for nearly two years, before finally getting rid of it last month when it was determined the ice was contaminated and couldn’t be used again anyway. FEMA also purchased far too many travel trailers to use as temporary homes, some of which had to be left in storage in Arkansas because they weren’t suitable for use in the Gulf Coast environment. Some of the extra trailers are now being dumped on the market returning pennies on the dollar to taxpayers.

Federal efforts to benefit local economies by directing reconstruction contracts to local firms have also been undercut. National firms have used all kinds of tricks to pull down these lucrative contracts, sometimes turning to the local firms who lost out in the bidding to be subcontractors. In many instances, the federal government hires a large prime contractor who hires a subcontractor who in turn hires a subcontractor, with taxpayers losing money all the way down the line and the final subcontractor who actually hammers the nail receiving a pittance of what the initial contractor was paid for the job.

Cronyism has significantly impacted what and who benefits from Katrina aid. Just last week, a Bloomberg News investigation found that Governor Haley Barbour's (R-MS) family has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from Katrina-related work, including a nephew who made a pirate’s booty in lobbying fees after his uncle Governor appointed him to a Katrina reconstruction panel

Finally, Congress continues to have its own problems prioritizing how our nation’s infrastructure dollars should be spent. Twice since Katrina, lawmakers have rejected attempts to prioritize water infrastructure funding to ensure that the most critical projects—like increased flood and storm protection in populated areas—get to the front of the line. And earlier this year, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) attempted to add more than $600 million to the Iraq emergency spending bill to build a new boondoggle navigation lock on New Orleans’s Industrial Canal. This project was vehemently opposed by the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward because their homes were flooded when the levee lining the same Industrial Canal failed in the wake of Katrina.