Months after Hurricane Katrina broke levees, leading to the inundation of New Orleans, news-media stories about government ineptitude continue. What's remarkable is not that government officials couldn't handle the emergency. There was no will to do so.
No, what's remarkable is that the press has ignored the real story here, which is that for years the Army Corps of Engineers, who have the task of maintaining the levees in question, had budgets for construction in southern Lousiana and Mississippi woefully inadequate to the task. It was foreseen, for years, that a hurricane could destroy the levees and flood the region, causing billions of dollars in damage, to say nothing of the toll in death, destitution, and homelessness. But the money wasn't spent in a critical area.
Priorities, it would seem, lie elsewhere.
What's really remarkable, and I mean that in the most literal sense, is that what the Army Corpse of Engineers did was to study structures that had been sound for years, determine how best to imporve them, halve the budgeted amount of work for said improvements, determine that the halved measures would be catastrophic failures and destroy the environment, and then proceeded to build them.
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