Louisiana isn’t the only state in the union with levees; Washington State has its fair share.
Not only does Washington have its fair share of levees, we’re second in the nation for levees that are at high risk of failure per the Army Corps of Engineers (thanks for stealing our thunder again, California!).
The Corps has been gathering up information on all the nation’s levees since the failure of the ones in NOLA, and has them set up in a database. Washington State has 19 of the worst ones in the nation.
And here is the problem: After the CoE builds them, it turns their maintenance over to the local governments and gets the fed to give them big buckaroos to maintain them. Unfortunately for local residents, the local governments have been pissing the money away on other things.
I’m sure you’ll be completely shocked to hear that all of these “high risk” levees are in King County, who is now screaming that they need more money to do the repairs and maintenance that they should have been doing all along.
Levee sponsors have been given a year to correct deficiencies, Leyde said. If they fail to meet the government’s maintenance criteria, they risk losing eligibility for federal money to help pay for damage in a disaster.
The levees targeted in Washington state fall under the responsibility of King County Water and Land Resources, said Mark Isaacson, director of the county agency.
The department is aware of a number of structural and maintenance issues concerning all 500 of its levees, including some identified by the corps, he said.
“We’ve already identified a plan to fix them. What we need now is the money,” Isaacson said, adding that between $179 million and $335 million would be needed over the next 10 years to cover necessary repairs and maintenance.
The word “Incompetence†doesn’t even begin to cover how badly King County has screwed this pooch. If I wasn’t such a nice guy, I’d wish failure on every single one of these levees before the end of next winter, so that when they fail, the residents will learn that it was the Democrat leadership of King County that cost them their homes by taking the levee maintenance money and spending it on carpool lanes.
The word “Incompetence†doesn’t even begin to cover how badly King County has screwed this pooch.
That’s one way to look at it. Another way would be to see it from their point of view. They’ve been getting federal money that they have been able to spend on whatever they wanted. Now that the Army Corps of Engineers has identified the maintenance that needs to be done, they can scream and yell and will inevitably get more money from the Fedgov to do what they have already be paid to do but didn’t.
Getting paid by residents of other states TWICE for the same task isn’t incompetence. It would be called “fraud” if anyone but the government did it, but in the government’s case, it’s called “politics as usual”.