Leaky Poplar Bluff levee highlights national problem...PORK !

[SoCalDem]

Leaky Poplar Bluff levee highlights national problem

http://www.semissourian.com/story/1722440.html

Thursday, April 28, 2011
By ALAN SCHER ZAGIER and JIM SALTER ~ The Associated Press
POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. -- Floodwaters leaking past an old earthen levee in Poplar Bluff highlight a larger problem threatening much of rural America: Scores of flood walls built decades ago by farmers are increasingly susceptible to failure. Many of the barriers are little more than piles of compacted dirt that were constructed without help from engineers, mainly to protect crops. Now they shield entire communities, and they are managed by local authorities who have little to no money for repairs.

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The levee is one of more than 100 across the country considered by the federal government to be unfit for use. The failing levees are in 16 states, including five in Ohio, five in Louisiana and 16 in Washington. The Reorganized Butler County No. 7 levee at Poplar Bluff failed a federal inspection in 2008 after the Army Corps of Engineers found a host of problems.

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Because those problems were never addressed, the levee no longer qualifies for a corps program that provides money for flood-related repairs.

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"It was dropped from the program," said Tony Hill, chief of the emergency management office for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office in Little Rock, Ark. "They were given a period of time, given a year to get things right. They are inactive in the program. They aren't eligible for federal dollars to fix the levee."

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A 2009 Corps of Engineers survey identified 114 levees nationwide that were "unacceptable for operations and maintenance," including three others in Butler County, 30 in Arkansas and 27 in California. The survey lists structure from Alamosa, Colo., on the Rio Grande, to the Bethlehem levee in the Pennsylvania town of the same name. Two years earlier, the federal agency found 122 levees in similar condition. After Hurricane Katrina, Congress in 2006 gave money to the corps to update its inventory of the federally maintained levees, which make up 14,000 miles of flood barrier across the nation. But there's no systematic oversight -- or even a complete inventory -- of the nearly 100,000 miles' worth of private levees. Congress passed the National Levee Safety Act in 2007 and directed the Army engineers to account for all private levees, but no money was provided for the task. "You can't really generate any interest until right after a disaster," said Stephen Verigin, a civil engineer in Sacramento, Calif., and member of the National Committee on Levee Safety. "If you don't have an immediate failure in the recent past, it's very difficult to get support." The levee safety committee made 20 specific recommendations, including creation of a National Levee Safety Commission that would help create and enforce uniform engineering standards and work with states to bolster local efforts. So far, no one has acted on those suggestions.

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Rural areas aren't the only places wrestling with flood protection. In Dallas, city leaders have spent the past two decades struggling to agree on plans to strengthen two earthen levees on the Trinity River that broke in 1990.

The levee improvement plan grew to include a $1 billion toll road, new city parks, among other things.

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[hobbit709]

1. A toll road? That will really fix the flooding problem.

[sinkingfeeling]

2. You know that levee did fail last week. I understand that we're allowing our infrastructure to rot.