President Bush: Commit to Cat 5 storm protection and coastal restoration!

President Bush,

On your visit to New Orleans today, note that a full year and a half has passed since the federal levee system failed, and you still haven’t committed to preventing such a disaster from occurring again. If you aren’t already aware that it was the levees, not the hurricane, that destroyed New Orleans, go visit Leake Avenue where people with flood-damaged homes have lined up outside the Corps of Engineers’ building to file their Form 95 claims against the Corps.

You, Mr. President, have a responsibility to commit adequate resources to compensate victims, to rebuild this city, to repair the institutional morass that created the disaster in the first place, and to protect America’s most unique cultural city from future disasters.

Your six-month hiatus from New Orleans, and your failure to mention New Orleans in your State of the Union address, are totally unacceptable. You can start to make up for those failures by committing today to a plan, to funding, and to targeted completion dates, for true Category 5 storm protection and coastal restoration.

So little has happened in the last year and a half, that I don’t even have to restate the arguments for Cat 5 storm protection and coastal restoration. I’ll just refer you to the post I wrote six months ago, and these letters which reflect the sentiment of all New Orleanians …

T-P letters:

President Bush has proposed allocating another $1 billion to “create jobs and help reconstruction in neighborhoods. . . . to help rebuild from the bottom up, from schools to local government to political interest groups.”

The president was speaking, of course, not about New Orleans, but about Iraq.

As I witness the destruction of my city on a daily basis and hear the continued pain of its citizens, it is surreal that my tax dollars continue to flow to the rebuilding of Iraq.

Kathy Meunier
New Orleans

 

The solution to our crime problem was just answered by President Bush in his address to the country the other day.

From now on, murderers, thugs, drug dealers, etc. will be called insurgents by the New Orleans media and all government officials.

Once we have established to the rest of the country that New Orleans is under attack by these insurgents, President Bush will go to Congress to plead for billions of dollars in aid and to send additional troops to the epicenter of insurgency in the United States: New Orleans.

Lee Scherman
New Orleans

Out of Iraq into New Orleans!