Because floods are caused by abortions.

Your Republican government at work... um.... at ... well, in the office ... kinda

 

Paul: No Flood Insurance Until Senate Votes On Life Beginning At Conception

Harry Reid earned gentle praise from his GOP counterpart Tuesday for running a good, bipartisan operation these past several weeks. But the Senate may not be able to clear its entire near-term agenda before the Independence day recess because Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) won’t allow a measure extending the FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program for five years to move forward until he gets a vote on legislation declaring that human life begins at conception.

We ALMOST got something passed in Congress! Wow. We should declare a holiday in celebration.

THIS is how you deal with a disaster, Georgie.

Not that you ever cared. President Obama didn't even tell us to go shopping....



Thank you, Mr. President.

What the end of the world could look like

If we aren't prepared.

Preparing for the worst

And thinking the unthinkable. Wow. A government that is proactive not reactive. Sounds like a meeting where FEMA should go and take notes:

The Netherlands' emergency preparedness personnel spent all of last week conducting an exercise dubbed "Ergst Denkbare Overstroming (EDO)," or worst possible flooding, a scenario in which they virtually placed one-third of the country underwater. In the computer models, the entire west and north coasts, as well as low-lying areas in the large Rhine River delta where two-thirds of the country's 17 million people live were submerged.

The Dutch have been through a horrible flood before where 1800 people lost their lives. And they haven't forgotten this lesson. What have the Bush administration and FEMA learned since Katrina and Ike? Don't bother answering that.

The article continues:

The flood became deeply embedded in the collective memory of the Dutch. The vulnerability of this prosperous nation, much of it located below sea level, depends on the technical skills of its hydraulic engineers, and their expertise will be in even greater demand in the future. "Back then the flood was two-and-a-half meters high," says Lucien van Hove, "today we assume it could be above five meters." Van Hove, the coordinator of the giant storm barriers in the delta region around Rotterdam, is standing on the first line of defense against the great storm surge, the barrier gates in the Hollandse Ijssel, a branch of the Rhine delta. Each of two enormous steel gates is 81 meters (265 feet) wide and almost 12 meters (39 feet) high. At this moment in the simulation, they are virtually closed.

The storm barrier is designed to withstand a 70-centimeter (2.3-foot) rise in sea level. But two months ago a commission concluded that a rise of 1.30 meters (4.3 feet) could be expected by the year 2100. "We must now invest a part of our gross national product each year so that we can keep our feet dry in the future," warns van Hove. New storm barriers are needed, he says, and the dikes must be raised and, more importantly, widened. In addition to the problems posed by climate change, the land is sinking by two centimeters (three-quarters of an inch) each year, for tectonic reasons and because the subsoil, which contains peat and clay, is drying out.

Because the Netherlands is sinking more and more each year, its people must begin to think differently, says van Hove. For decades, the Dutch resisted the water during floods. In the future, however, they will have to be willing to flood entire sections of the country when such disasters occur, van Hove adds. "There will simply be too much water pressure."

I hope every Dutch house has an inflatable raft, flotation vests, and a GPS locator. Because, you know, disasters happen whether you ignore the warnings or not.


(actual quote)

You have been a walking disaster yourself, Georgie. You don't just visit disaster areas, you know. You're supposed to actually DO something about it. That's what we hired you to do.

Just a question, Mrs. Bush

It's great you are taking on Myanmar and the horrible catastrophic cyclone that killed 20,000.... But why are you so silent about the wreckage from Katrina and repairing New Orleans?

Will it be Katrina all over again?

Or will the DHS actually step in to help a town BEFORE we have thousands of deaths? This is Leadville, Colorado.

Given the history of the Leadville Mine Drainage Tunnel, you have to wonder just how much "homeland security" the federal government really cares to provide. That tunnel was apparently blocked, which caused an estimated billion gallons of water to back up behind it and start seeping from hillsides.

This water was not pure mountain snowmelt, either. It's in a mining district that has sulfide ores. When water sits amid such rocks, it becomes acidic. The acidic water dissolves minerals and carries cadmium and zinc. There are legitimate fears that the toxic water could push past the blockage and surge out the portal, then down to the Arkansas River, sweeping away some homes as it destroyed aquatic life as far down as Pueblo Reservoir, more than 100 miles away.

What Leadville is doing to deal with this danger:

LEADVILLE, Colo. - Emergency sirens and loudspeakers have been tested and sensors installed. Bulldozers have cut an escape route. Townspeople have been warned to assemble "grab-it-and-go" kits with first aid supplies, water, flashlights and blankets.

A concealed threat is hanging over this old Wild West mining town: A billion gallons of toxic water is trapped in a collapsed drainage tunnel in the hills overlooking Leadville and could blow at any moment with devastating effect, sweeping away mobile homes in the town of 2,600.

[snip]

Between the mid-1800s and the 1990s, gold, silver, lead, zinc and finally molybdenum, a substance used to harden steel, were extracted from the ground around this 10,200-foot-high town 100 miles west of Denver.

In the 1940s and '50s, the federal government built a two-mile mine drainage tunnel to carry off contaminated rainwater and snowmelt into the Arkansas River. But a tunnel collapse that was detected in 1995 caused water to back up behind the rubble.

Because of years of bickering between the state and the federal government over what to do about the buildup and who would assume responsibility for it, nothing was done and the water kept rising, finally prompting nervous Lake County officials to declare a state of emergency on Feb. 13.

[snip]

On Wednesday, the EPA began pumping water out of a nearby shaft to try to relieve pressure on the tunnel. In about five weeks, the EPA will drill into the tunnel and pump water directly out of it.

"I'm angry. No, I'm damn angry," said county Commissioner Mike Hickman. "I have three heads of federal agencies here who I'd like to call The Three Stooges. Three years ago they knew what the problem was." Of the emergency declaration, he said: "It's a shame that we need to come to this sort of display to get the attention of these federal agencies."

Not everyone here was thrilled with the emergency declaration. The mayor said it came as a surprise to city officials, who later learned that the city's liability insurance carrier was canceling its policy.

Nice touch, that last sentence.

Update 3/11:

Bureau of Reclamation engineers Monday were able to treat 2,100 gallons per minute of contaminated water at the Leadville Mine Drainage site, a rate that gives them confidence that cleanup can be successful.

The Leadville Mine Drainage Tunnel is supposed to drain water from the mine but collapsed more than a decade ago, and water has built up ever since.

Officials fear that the pressurized water could burst through the tunnel or an earthen dam, sending zinc-, cadmium- and lead-laced water through a trailer park and into the Arkansas River.

Pumping the water out is complicated by the fact that the water is contaminated with heavy metals from Leadville's long mining history.

The risk caught the attention of federal lawmakers who last month pressured the bureau to take prompt action.
Monday, beginning at 8 in the morning, Reclamation engineers began increasing the amount of water being treated at the drainage tunnel's treatment plant, in 200-gallon-per- minute increments.

When the rate reached 2,100 gallons per minute, they kept it there for several hours, before easing back to 1,100 gallons per minute, said Peter Soeth, spokesman for the bureau.

The more metal in the water, the slower the treatment must go, so the fact that 2,100 gallons per minute could be sustained is satisfying.

The EPA should complete its well and the piping to Reclamation' s treatment plant by late May, Soeth said.
At a rate of 2,100 gallons per minute, it could take about a year to treat the 1 billion or so gallons of water trapped inside the mine.

Good job, guys. Nice to see that someone is actually caring about the environment and trailer parks.

If FEMA is going to be gutted

And have all its powers taken away, could we just hire a boyscout to give us the color coded terrorist warnings and have done with it?:

WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers and Bush administration officials are considering stripping the Federal Emergency Management Agency of its responsibility for long-term recovery efforts following a terrorist attack or natural disaster, the latest fallout from the agency's lackluster response to the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005.

Under a proposal by Senator Mary Landrieu, FEMA would still run the initial response to future catastrophes -- getting victims shelter, blankets, and food. But oversight of recovery efforts, which can go on for years, would become the responsibility of other federal agencies with expertise in specific areas: rebuilding housing, fixing roads, cleaning up hazardous spills, and supervising an area's economic revitalization.

"FEMA wasn't built to lead the recovery from a catastrophic disaster and it is a wholly inadequate tool for that kind of situation," said Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. "FEMA should stabilize the situation -- i.e., establish shelters and get people into them. But at some point, say 50 to 90 days after the disaster, [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] should take over housing. Why? Because they do housing."

Landrieu, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Disaster Recovery Subcommittee, has been conducting a series of hearings about problems in the recovery efforts from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the twin storms that devastated the Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans in 2005.

[snip]

Some allies of the Bush administration have publicly applauded the idea of handing off FEMA's long-term recovery duties to other agencies. James Carafano, a homeland security specialist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, urged Congress to extend Landrieu's proposal by removing FEMA from a disaster zone within weeks instead of months.

"There is all kind of expertise in the government on recovery issues," Carafano said. "It's redundant to have FEMA involved in it, and a distraction from their core mission."

But some skeptics doubt the proposal would make long-term disaster recovery more efficient. Drew Sachs, a crisis management and preparedness consultant who worked for FEMA from 1991 to 1999, said that such a handoff would be disruptive and confuse disaster victims, forcing them to navigate a new set of bureaucracies.

Sachs said that he agreed that specialists from other parts of the government should be more involved in disaster recovery efforts. But, he said, someone will still need to coordinate the effort -- a job FEMA already has experience doing. And regardless of who runs an emergency housing program, he warned, there will always be problems.

We've seen when FEMA was made a cabinet level position under Clinton. We've seen what FEMA could do in an emergency and how well it could be run. Bush is doing to FEMA what he has been so good at in everything else, take a functional business or system, run it into the ground and break it, then wait for somebody else to bail him out. You can just hear the guys at the Heritage Foundation salivating over privatizing disaster and emergency assistance.

Remember what Josh Marshall said way back in 2005:

Of all the sad tales of cronyism and ineptitude emerging out of the Katrina catastrophe, probably none is more telling than the history of FEMA under the oversight and management of President Bush.

So let’s review the outlines of the story, beginning with the president’s inauguration in January 2001. Like everything in the second Bush White House, the surest clue to how the administration would proceed was to find what the Clinton White House had done and then expect the opposite.

President Clinton had appointed the first FEMA director with actual emergency-management experience, James Lee Witt. And Witt had gone on to reshape the organization into what was considered a model government agency. Clinton even gave FEMA Cabinet-level status.

Bush demoted the agency’s status and put it in the hands of his chief political fixer, Joe Allbaugh, who went about dismantling much of what Witt had built. As he told Congress in May 2001: “Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management. Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.”

Uh huh. And we see what happens when you privatize disaster relief. Toxic trailers made by Bush cronies anyone?

Did Georgie just tell Kansas

That they're going to get FEMA'd?

US President George W Bush has declared parts of Kansas a disaster area and has pledged federal aid for reconstruction.

"I'm confident this community will be rebuilt, to the extent we can help, we will.

"The most important thing now is for our citizens to ask for the good Lord to comfort those who were hurt," the president said after attending church in Washington on Sunday.

So, it's not the Deciderer, nor the Commander Guy, but the Compassionator! No money, but here comes Georgie to lay some comfort on the unfortunate folks!