Feds bailing out red state Mississippi again

Wow, this sounds more like New Orleans than Mississippi. You Dems remember that one right? The one where the Feds had actually already given money to the city to shore up levees and pumps, but the democrats in control didn’t do it.

I can see how many of you would forget that as your friends in the media were quite successful in making it about/blaming it on Bush.

 

Try again.
All the burbs surrounding Jackson are red. Those with money moved to the burbs long ago and left poverty behind. Jackson is the friggin capital of a state that has been run forever by the good old boys. Spin away, but this is an embarrassing level of buck passing incompetence even for Mississippi.

 

That isn't how funding works for the levees. The project you are discussing started in the 60s, had stretched for decades (due to issues with the project in court), was controlled by the feds, not the locals, and the breaches did not occur in the areas that were still to be completed.

https://levees.org/2/wp-content/upl...n-Appropriations-House-of-Representatives.pdf

 

Actually a blue city needed a red state bailout which didn't come ( they didn't give a damn I guess or maybe gave all their $$ to Brett favre), so the feds had to step in and help the citizens. Foreign concept to the state it seems.

 

Cut funding to the blue area and then blame them for the outcome.

 

So the leadership and infrastructure in MS don't suck? Maybe they are Dems. That doesn't mean they can't suck too.

 

So you’re gonna excuse the actual people running the city who have been responsible for the issue for decades and blame people who don’t run the city or have any control because as you posted above they are white and left because their racist.
Funny

 

Well since it wasn’t a predominantly white Republican city who couldn’t figure out how to or chose not to deal with the issue we won’t know what the state would have done.

 

We aren’t talking about that.

We are talking about a Democrat run city (by a giant margin) who has had decades to fix an issue and either was incompetent or chose not to do it.

 

And wasn’t the former Mayor brought up on corruption charges for mismanaging federal aid?

 

Even more sad that the Dems who have been running it for over 40 years couldn’t figure out how to fix the issue.
I guess it’s the small percentage of the Pubs there who are at fault.

 

They tried to pass a sales tax, which would have allowed them to directly improve water infrastructure and indirectly do so through increased collection due to an updated meter system. The state legislature turned it down.

 

Even if it does end up in his bank account, Republicans will defend it or just pretend it didn't happen. As they usually do with corruption.

 

No, I’m not. You’re just letting your politics make you ignorant again, and md is using misleading “government” reports without any knowledge of the situation on the ground.

Where do you think these “delays”. Do you think that these levees and pumps were waiting on some technology breakthrough or development. Much of the delay was driven by local politics. Levees are not technical masterpieces. Pumps aren’t either. The technology was there in the 60’s along with the funding. The only thing the Corps of engineers needed to build it was a little cooperation from local politicians.

You have a very large bay opening to the gulf (Lake Ponchatrain is really not a lake) that would rise with gulf water. Because of the relative size of the inlet the lake would retain water a bit longer than gulf level while it drained back. You had a city built on land that is almost below the normal level of Ponchatrain sitting to the south between it and a large river that would take that water out to sea.

All that was necessary was pumps and pipes to drain the rain water out to the river. That system was strained but functioning until power failed and the city had not adequately maintained the back up power supply. (Power failures in a hurricane, hey that’s something new). With functioning generators the city would have drained the rain water fairly well. So all that was necessary was levees and canals to hold the water in Lake Ponchatrain for a couple of days while the water in it drained back into the gulf. When the old levees failed, there was no way to stop the lake water from draining into the city and no way to pump the water down into the river. The USG had provided the funding and the technical expertise to do just that. The city had failed to make a few tough decisions on where and sometimes how that construction would take place.

So yes, this was not an issue of Army Corps of Engineers incompetence, it was a failure of city officials to not do their jobs and make some tough decisions. This was a major problem waiting to happen as it was identified decades before. The smart people told the city what was going to eventually happen and offered resources to solution it, but the city was too stupid to listen and take advantage of the opportunity.

 

I live here and my first next door neighbor was Army Corps of Engineers. The government report stated facts. The Army Corps runs construction on the levees. Been that way for decades.

As stated in the report if you read it, most of the delay was due to court cases in which the federal government had to fight out a variety of issues. Again, the city has nothing to do with the construction of levees, they simply maintain them.

Again, you clearly don't know how the levees actually work in New Orleans. Weirdly, the delays actually did make them more effective as there was technological and civil engineering improvements over those years.

This is all factual.

The pumps had nothing to do with the catastrophic flood's start. Neither did old levees. The major breaches were the Industrial Canal, which has already been updated towards the beginning of the project, the 17th Street canal, which also had been upgraded later in the project (1999, I believe), and the London Avenue canal, also redone in 1999.

Frankly, this is just false. The Army Corps is in charge of construction, the city is in charge of maintenance. The budget for the Army Corps was cut during the Bush administration, which is why the last major upgrades all started in 1999.

 

My uncle worked for Corps of Engineers and on that project for almost 30 years . He and my father are from NO so I am well aware of the legal and political situation regarding the legal cases, as well as how the levee and pump systems are supposed to work. Many of the lawsuits were brought on or had involvement by the usual political “advocates” that always seem to show up to obstruct public projects. I am not debating that the corps is in charge of construction. The problem here is that due to local politics (including lawsuits) the corps was not allowed to do their jobs.

I did not and do not contend that the levees had anything to do with the flood start(I don’t know where you got that from), but they had EVERYTHING to do with evacuating that flood water and again, due to the locals, not the corp, they were not in an operating mode to do so when needed.

And please don’t go to the tired old Bush arguments. What happened in Katrina was decades in the making and any alleged funding cuts would have not made any difference. If I remember correctly funding from year over year wasn’t cut. They just didn’t give them everything they asked for. That is not a cut.

 

But, again, the levees that broke were the ones that they had reconstructed.

Levees don't get rid of the flood water already in the city (I mean, technically, they pump the water down canals, but they can't do that when the levee has already failed). The levees breaking ARE what caused the flood. The pumps are about getting rid of the water, and those have notoriously failed for decades (SWB are the worst, none of this is an argument in favor of them, just properly assigning the blame that the feds have as well). It just wasn't the old levees. It was the updated ones that failed.

It was cut. They couldn't start any of their new projects while they had started several massive projects in 1999, under Clinton. However, those projects were 2 of the major failures. Regardless, the locals were not responsible for the failure of the levees and the subsequent flood. That was on the feds. After those flooded, the locals were responsible for the failure of the pumps, which extended the flood.