Now why doesn’t this surprise me? The protection of a valuable portion of the U.S. is subject to policy neoconservative desires over science?
Folks down here have lived in the wetlands for centuries. They produced products for the Nation, doing little to harm the environment. Then comes along the oil companies, digging thousands of mile of canals in order to drill exploratory wells which allowed the Gulf waters to enter the wetlands, killing aquatic and plant life… allowing storm surges to eat away at what the River took 1,000 years to build up… endangering all who live here in SE Louisiana. Most of the drillings were complete failures, and the oil types weren’t required to repair their damages to the area or give money to the State to do so. This was all under Federal oversight.
Now the Senate gets to vote over giving us the oil revenues that we deserved in order to rebuild the wetlands, and the Adminstration is rewriting the Corps report concerning the Deluge and it’s causes. Fuck Neocons!
Sinn Fein!
“State leaders used a congressional field briefing Thursday to air their dismay with White House editing of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report on how to protect south Louisiana from a Category 5 hurricane.
State officials expressed concerns with the delay of the report, which was due to Congress June 30 but now is expected to be submitted Monday.
After Hurricane Katrina, Congress directed the corps to work with Louisiana to develop a plan to develop Category 5 hurricane protection across the state.
The state has been working with the corps for the past six months to prepare the preliminary report. The final version is due in December 2007.
However, the White House edited the preliminary report before it could be submitted to Congress, rewriting much of the document to focus more on federal policy than science when determining how to best protect the state, said Sidney Coffee, executive assistant to the governor for coastal activities.
Coffee spoke Thursday before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science during a hearing in New Orleans on Louisiana’s hurricane-recovery efforts. The state has not seen the version of the report to actually be submitted to Congress, said Coffee.”
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