Yep, they're now trying to claim that we can't possibly place blame on Bush because even with funding, the levees would've broken anyway. How?
They cite this CBS 60 Minutes interview with Al Naomi, who's been quoted a countless number of times this past week in many, many other diaries dealing with the levee funding issue.
More below the fold...
Al Naomi is the man who manages them for the Army Corps of Engineers. He was probably the first to understand what was about to happen to New Orleans.
"Flood walls are unforgiving. They're either there or they're not," Naomi says.
The walls were designed in 1965 to withstand a Category 3 storm. Category 4 Katrina pushed her surge over the top.
"It just was overtopped and the water started pouring over the support for the flood wall, failed and it just pushed out and toppled over and that was it," Naomi explains.
Naomi was at a loss when asked how this engineering disaster could have been prevented.
"You see there was not sufficient money or time to do anything about this," Naomi says. "If someone had said, 'O.K. here is a billion dollars, stop this failure from happening for a Category 4,' it couldn't have been done in time. I'd of had to start 20 years ago to where I feel today I would've been safe from a Category 4 storm like Katrina.
"Sure it should have been done 20 years ago but what can we do about that? You have to recognize before we had Category 3 protection we didn't have anything."
Then I had this guy respond to me based on the 60 Minutes interview:
I wonder, should Bush have pursued the development of a time machine or research the arcane and uncanny to prevent the flood walls from breaking?
And then he cited that 13-point piece by Ben Stein. Bleh.
But here's the problem. A big part of the argument coming from many liberal blogs about the disaster prevention cited the lack of funds to complete the project. But if you're going to have Naomi and Lt. Col. Strack saying that the breach was inevitable regardless of funding, we cannot use the funding issue solely. We need something stronger.
Sure, the funding in no way could have been a negative, but is there a stronger point in there other than solely the funding part of it when it comes to disaster prevention?
Another person went off on a tangent, albeit an important one, asking how much the federal government should contribute to the cause of disaster prevention, and to what level of disaster. Sinkholes can cause a major traffic accident, but nobody's clamoring for federal funding to fix them.
I guess it becomes a matter of states' rights, as to how much should be done by the state, and how much should be done by the federal government.
But first, going back to the original point of this diary, what else can be said about preventing a disaster of Katrina's magnitude, aside from the funding issue?