Quote from tradermaji:
Orleans Parish Levee Board owns an airport, a marina with a casino and a lot of other income producing real estate. Portions of the New Orleans lakefront area have been converted into recreational areas with fountains, picnic areas etc. A lot of these areas are also rented out for weddings, reunions and other activities that generate income for the board.
Go to their website and check it out. Click on the link on departments and then on business entities, where you will see the various businesses that are owned by them. These entities not only build fountains but build a lot of other stuff required to carry out their business obligations.
http://www.orleanslevee.com/
By the way, Orleans Parish Levee Board and a bunch of other local levee boards have been disbanded and are now part of a regional levee board. By the way, the feds never gave the monies to build a Cat 5 system. Even today, all the billions of dollars going to rebuild a devastated system is still being done for a Cat 3 hurricane. The US Corps of Engineers is still studying the feasibility of a Cat 5 protection system.
You are woefully uneducated and ill-informed about the mechanics of the hurricane protection system design, construction and maintenance for the South East Louisiana area. Please do not base your judgement on what you read sensational journalistic articles. Do yourself a favor and go to the USACE's website and do your research there.
The questions I am asking of the government still remain:
Does it not make more sense to prevent problems than deal with
bigger problems later? (responsibility of fed and local) Do you want FEMA to have more responsibility?
I asked why the various governments, fed and local, over the last 100+ years have not built cat 5 levees in N O where it's most needed, but spent billions elsewhere. Were they thinking no hurricane of that magnitude could happen? Katrina was only a 3 or 4.
They're still doing feasibility studies for cat 5 levees after all these years, but they plan on rebuilding N O anyway.
I'm more interested in the various governments preventing problems instead of the clowns at FEMA and their so called disaster response. Everyone bashes FEMA and protects those responsible for the levees. If all those responsible for the levees had done their job, N O would not have flooded saving about 1000 lives.
From Wikipedia:
The Orleans Levee Board is the body in charge of supervising the levee and floodwall system in Orleans Parish, Louisiana which is intended to protect New Orleans from flooding.
(Apparently the OLB has failed.)
Some critics of the board have charged its members with being more concerned with such lucrative subsidiary activities than with their primary assigned task. As of December 2005, legal investigations of possible criminal negligence are ongoing.
