When the levee breaks (4)

Please, G-d, let this not be true:

Death toll in Louisiana could be above 10,000: US Senator

Meanwhile, Army Corps of Engineers: Funding levels not to blame (hat tip: lgf):

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday that a lack of funding for hurricane-protection projects around New Orleans did not contribute to the disastrous flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina.
In a telephone interview with reporters, corps officials said that although portions of the flood-protection levees remain incomplete, the levees near Lake Pontchartrain that gave way—inundating much of the city—were completed and in good condition before the hurricane.
However, they noted that the levees were designed for a Category 3 hurricane and couldn’t handle the ferocious winds and raging waters from Hurricane Katrina, which was a Category 4 storm when it hit the coastline. The decision to build levees for a Category 3 hurricane was made decades ago based on a cost-benefit analysis.
“I don’t see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case,” said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the corps. “Had this project been fully complete, it is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm that the flooding of the business district and the French Quarter would have still taken place.”
Strock also denied that escalating costs from the war in Iraq contributed to reductions in funding for hurricane projects in Louisiana, as some critics have suggested. Records show that corps funding for the Louisiana projects has generally decreased in recent years.

Sadly, human nature being what it is, it takes major disasters like this to get people really off their toches, as we learn from the history of the history of the Delta Project in The Netherlands:

In the North Sea Flood of 1953 a break in the dikes and seawalls in the Netherlands killed 1,835 people and forced the evacuation of 70,000 more. Ten thousand animals drowned, and 4,500 buildings were destroyed. To prevent such a tragedy from happening again, an ambitious flood defense system was conceived and deployed, called the Delta Works (Dutch: Deltawerken).