Ken North wrote:
>>1.  The conditions of the levees and dikes are well-known in
>>emergency planning circles.  Requests for funding to repair
>>them have been routinely turned down.
> 
> Congress started funding the Southeast Louisiana (SELA) Urban Flood Control
> Project in 1995. SELA was a long-term capital works project. The U.S. Army Corp
> of Engineers spent more than $400 million on levees and pumps.

 From this morning's Washington Post 
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090702462.html):

"Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial 
Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million 
construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing 
to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the 
canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.

"Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing.
	
"In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have 
complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and 
Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President 
Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps 
civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; 
California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though 
its population is more than seven times as large."

So the problem wasn't lack of funding as such, it was which projects 
were funded. Not surprisingly, the politicians were more interested in 
funding those that would bring short-term political benefits rather than 
in protecting against a hurricane that might not come for 50 years.

Read the article--there's plenty of blame to go around, and no 
technological solutions evident.

Jim