The last time that New Orleans had a Republican mayor was in 1872 with Benjamin Flanders. It shows. From the UK Guardian:
New Orleans under water: 12 years after Katrina, officials can't get it right
It is true: New Orleans lives and dies by its water. We eat from the Gulf, lake and wetlands and we breathe deeply of a sweltering, airborne humidity. We get our drinking water from the muddy Mississippi river, which carries the effluvia of half the country. Thousands upon thousands of rainy years have amplified the continuing decay in wetlands surrounding the city, creating vast pockets of valuable petroleum and natural gas which generate a major portion of our economy. The same rainfall and river provide continual growth in one of the lushest plant environments in America.
But we occasionally have our homes ruined, and we occasionally drown, in water.
In the last big lesson, involving the loss of 134,000 homes and 1,500 lives in New Orleans, a hurricane overwhelmed the manmade walls meant to keep the water at bay. Since then, hundreds of miles of new and reinforced levees have been built, over the last dozen years, to make sure that a ruinous intrusion does not happen again. The army corps of engineers built three huge new multimillion-dollar pumps on the Lakefront, so that when the engineers close the floodgates to keep the lake waters out, the pumps can be activated to keep excessive water from overwhelming the system.
Now all the city needs to do is be able to remove water that falls from the sky throughout every single year. And in 2017, that rain has fallen almost every day since 1 April.
So what do they do with all this shiny new infrastructure?
The meteorological bottom line is that even if the entire pumping system had been operating at maximum capacity, as Grant and the S&WB general superintendent, Joseph Becker, had earlier claimed, the rain would still have overwhelmed the system.
However, when pressed by an angry public and a media swarm that sensed something amiss, Becker first admitted eight of the city’s pumps had been out of service before a drop of rain fell on Saturday.
Subsequent investigation found that of 67 pumps on the East Bank of the city, just 58 were “functional in some form”. But the board’s dedicated power system also failed, so that only 38 pumps could be used at one time. Half capacity. And according to the board’s own logs, one crucial pumping station, No 12 on the Lakefront, had not even been manned until four hours after the 3.30pm storm, and not actually turned on until 8.49pm. Which is exactly when residents say they first saw waters starting to recede.
Business as usual. Unelected bureaucrats with no accountability. If someone screws up enough to warrant an investigation, they will be quietly shifted to some other office - often with a raise in pay "for their troubles".
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