TIME Preview: New Orleans Still In Grave Danger As Hurricane Season Arrives

[babylonsister]

TIME Preview: New Orleans Still In Grave Danger As Hurricane Season Arrives

By E&P Staff

Published: August 02, 2007 11:20 AM ET

NEW YORK In this week’s cover story coming in Time magazine tomorrow, Michael Grunwald finds in New Orleans a "pathetic" situation: Many of the same coastal scientists and engineers who sounded alarms about the dangers to that city before Hurricane Katrina are warning that the Army Corps of Engineers is “poised to repeat its mistakes—and extend them along the entire Louisiana coast …

"If you liked Katrina, they say, you’ll love what’s coming next … As the disaster’s Aug. 29 anniversary approaches, there will be plenty of talk about the future of New Orleans … But in the long run, recovery plans won’t matter much if investors, insurers and homesick evacuees can’t trust the Corps to prevent the city from drowning again."

The cover shows a floodwall and the heading, "Special Report: Why New Orleans Still Isn't Safe." The deck reads: "Two years after Katrina, this floodwall is all that stands between New Orleans and the next hurricane. It's pathetic. How a perfect storm of big-money politics, shoddy engineering and environmental ignorance is setting up the city for another catastrophe."

The 12-page story is followed by gallery of photos of "The Displaced."

The Corps has announced “12 actions for change,” Grunwald writes, but “it’s hard to find outsiders who believe that it has moved beyond its teach-Mother Nature-a-lesson roots. It’s still not a Corps of ecologists. And its projects are still a popular form of political swag for its enablers on Capitol Hill....

more...

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003620509