Today is the 4-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and while there are a number of stories marking it, few cover the huge news that 1) the hydraulic pumps don't work, 2) hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted, 3) and the Army Corps of Engineers is deliberately telling people the pumps work and the people are safe. I represent the whistleblower, Maria Garzino, who bravely and heroically brought all of this to light and has been vindicated twice by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. While USA Today did a story on this Tuesday, http://www.usatoday.com/..., and NPR affiliate Molly Peterson of KPCC has done a years-in-the-making 4-part series, http://www.scpr.org/..., it has gone largely unnoticed by the MSM. NPR was going to run it nationally on Monday, but killed the story.
It's a David vs. Goliath struggle to get this news out there because the Army Corps has hired a great P.R. agency. But I believe that Daily Kos can level the playing field, and get this information to the 311,000 people of New Orleans.
Today is the 4-year anniversary of deadly Hurricane Katrina and there are a lot of puff pieces out there about the recovery, or slowness thereof, but hardly a thing about the blockbuster revelation that the Army Corps has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on junk pumps--made by MWI (a David Eller/Jeb Bush creature). Even worse, the Army Corps is out there telling everyone that the pumps have been "battle-tested" and work just fine.
Brigadier General Michael J. Walsh, commander of the Mississippi Valley Division of the Corps, is claiming that today’s pumps were only meant to be "temporary." The Corps' new assertion that pump replacement is required was never part of the original protection plan. Walsh’s assertion that the pumps were built to last just five to seven years, http://blog.nola.com/..., is repeated by Corps officials as if it were gospel, when in reality, a 50-year lifespan is what the Corps had always contemplated and what Congress approved. Think about it. Would Congress really have spent over a half billion dollars on something with only a five year lifespan? This would have a benefit-cost ratio in the negative double digits.
Three official Project Information Reports that the Corps submitted to Congress to obtain authorization and funding for New Orleans hurricane protection repeatedly presented the economic lifespan analysis of water pumps using a 50-year period. Col. Jeff Bedey, commander of the Corps' Hurricane Protection Office in New Orleans, told the public a year and a half ago that the current pumps "have something around a 50-year lifespan. These were designed to be there for 50 years."
Moreover, as Karen Durham-Aguilera, director of the Corps' Task Force Hope in Louisiana, explained, the interim closure structures with installed pumps were supposed to be incorporated into the permanent hurricane protection solution, not scrapped.
The proposed abandonment of the existing gated closure structures with installed pumps was never part of the original plan submitted to Congress. This newest plan by the Corps involves rebuilding the same gated structure with installed pumps a few hundred yards further downstream, except this time with "direct drive" pumps instead of the defective hydraulic pumps that will likely fail in the event of a hurricane. Instead of paying the estimated $275 million to correct the problems with the hydraulic pumps and roughly $200 million to increase the needed pumping capacity, the Army Corps is proposing to abandon the project they have already spent half a billion dollars on, destroy and haul away the "temporary" gated closure structure with installed pumps, and then spend almost $700 million to rebuild everything from scratch.
At the same time, and contradicted by its urgent push for replacement pumps, the Corps is making deceptive and dangerous public pronouncements that the present pumps have been battle-tested by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel hired an independent expert to evaluate the pumping system, and the expert criticized this very assertion because it fails to mention that the pumps were run at low operating speeds and pressures, intermittently, and for short periods during the hurricanes. The Special Counsel’s report and the "black box" information (known technically as "SCADA data") prove the hydraulic pumps were not utilized when canal water levels were highest at the beginning of each storm, not allowed to run at full operating speeds and pressures, and not allowed to run for extended periods of time. Instead, they were relegated to an "also pumped" status that was then turned into a straw man for hydraulic pump performance that was offered up to the highest levels of the Army Corps. The recorded storm SCADA data shows clearly that the hydraulic pump runs were not examples of pumping performance that replicate what is seen in a real-life hurricane event, but rather examples of what can charitably be called "demonstration" runs.
The smoking gun documents are buried many clicks deep on the U.S. Office of Special Counsel website, http://(the fifth report from the bottom).