Sacramento is Next....

Now that New Orleans has almost been erased from the map everyone has discovered water politics, an issue that caught my interest over a decade ago when I began to visit the Owens valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. The incredible, unslakeable thirst of Los Angeles has drained the beautiful Mono Lake as well as the river that once flowed through the Owens valley. Its story, and that of water and the American west, is told beautifully in the pages of the Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.

A big part of this story surrounds two redundant government entities that both have never seen a dam they didn't want to build or a flood control project they didn't want attempt. The Army Corp. of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation have made a business, according to Reisner, of moving water where it presumably isn't needed to presumably where it is. The problem has been that mother nature, as usual, has a lot more power and imagination than we do.

It is pretty well known at this point that New Orleans, as a city, has no business being built where it is. Sitting below sea level, on the coast, it was already a disaster waiting to happen.

Along came the Army Corp., which drained the swampland surrounding the city, allowing massive building, and subsequently making it certain that the ability of the surrounding areas to absorb floodwaters would be limited. In short, New Orleans was born to die.

It was no secret that had a category four or five hurricane hit New Orleans directly the city would be wiped off the map. As it was, the hurricane missed New Orleans, and instead of flattening the city, the floods ensued. What happened in the city was not the worst-case scenario, not by any stretch of the imagination, and if the blame can be laid upon George Bush, even more of it can be laid on the doorstep of the officials of that state and city, despite the embarrassing ranting of Mayor Nagin (who must have made many New Yorkers say "thank God for Giuliani!").

Article Author: demabloggery

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