Why does none of this surprise me?
AP reports today:
The Army Corps of Engineers, rushing to meet
President Bush's promise to protect New Orleans by the start of the 2006 hurricane season, installed defective flood-control pumps last year despite warnings from its own expert that the equipment would fail during a storm, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
This time, NOLA got lucky, as the season was mild and the city wasn't threatened. The Corps says that they decided to install the pumps - even though they knew that they wouldn't work properly - because "some protection is better than none."
In other words, the Corps decided to dress the windows and pretend that everything was okay and hoped that noone would ever find out. They put public relations ahead of people. How Republican of them.
Speaking of Republicans, who did we buy the pumps from?
The drainage-canal pumps were custom-designed and built under a $26.6 million contract awarded after competitive bidding to Moving Water Industries Corp. of Deerfield Beach, Fla. It was founded in 1926 and supplies flood-control and irrigation pumps all over the world.
MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov.
Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps. And Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians, the vast majority of it to the Republican Party, since 1996, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Granted, it wasn't a no-bid job, but just how fair was the process? I'd be interested to see if one of the other bidders proposed something that would actually have worked.