Landrieu: GAO probe found no fraud (New Orleans pumps)

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Landrieu: GAO probe found no fraud

By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 21 minutes ago

NEW ORLEANS - Congress's investigative arm found no evidence of fraud or
improper influence in the placing of faulty pumps along New Orleans' drainage
canals before the start of last year's hurricane season, Sen. Mary Landrieu
said Thursday.

Landrieu said the Government Accounting Office found that the Army Corps
of Engineers was in a rush to get pumps in place prior to the June 1 start
of the 2006 hurricane season. The 2005 season had produced Hurricane
Katrina, when failures in the city's flood protection led to inundation of 80
percent of New Orleans.

A May 2006 memo by a Corps inspector working on the pump project, provided
to The Associated Press earlier this year, warned that the pumps were faulty
and would not work if needed to remove water during a hurricane.

-snip-

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070517/ap_on_re_us/katrina_faulty_pumps

[BOSSHOG]

1. Earlier this year

The corps said the pumps worked fine last year. The pumps weren't needed last year.

[seafan]

2. As usual, the links to Jeb Bush are conveniently omitted in the article.

The May 2 letter came in response to a request last month from the Louisiana Republican senator that the corps look into how Moving Water Industries Corp. got the $32 million contract to install 34 drainage pumps at New Orleans canals before the start of the 2006 hurricane season.

Portions of the specifications were taken verbatim from the catalog of MWI, a Deerfield Beach, Fla., company whose top officials have been major contributors to the Republican Party. MWI employed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Bush's brother, to market its pumps during the 1980s.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/4793762.html



The press is a blackened, charred failure.

[Joe Chi Minh]

3. No amount of haste that left the pumps in a faulty condition could

possibly be justified.

Indeed, time and money would have been saved if the effort had not been made at all. Though, alas, not as much as if they had been installed properly.

[jus_the_facts]

4. She just keeps on votin' with the GOP....I don't believe a word she spews. n/t

[brentspeak]

5. What vote? There was no vote here.

She's reporting the GAO's findings. The GAO is one of the few things in the federal government that hasn't been manipulated by the Bush White House.

[jus_the_facts]

6. YESTERDAY she voted NAY to stop funding the war.

:eyes:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=900702

[Sadie5]

7. I'm with you jus_the_facts

Landrieu is a DLCer and ought to change her political party.

[jus_the_facts]

8. Her career should be over...she's stabbed us in the back for too long....

....I loathe her.

[MasonJar]

9. Excuse me, but the last I looked we had a bare one seat majority

in the Senate. Landrieu may be an exceedingly moderate dem, but she is a dem. We need every dem we can muster or else the leadership goes right back to the crooks from GOPer-land.

[BushOut06]

10. What fucking good is this "majority" doing us?

We might have a one-seat majority, but it's getting us absolutely nowhere. Especially with some of our own voting AGAINST us.

[funkybutt]

11. "Copy, Paste, Repeat"

This is a great post on a locan pump engineer's blog about how this happened. Maybe it's not illegal, but it should be.

http://fixthepumps.blogspot.com/2007/04/copy-paste-repeat.html

"I assumed that the personnel in the Corps' New Orleans District who crafted those specs did so based purely on the technical requirements for the job, and that a lot of work went in to them. I assumed they were working from a considerable base of knowledge about the specific equipment they were writing about. That's always been the case on my end, as well as for any other engineer I've ever known.

Well, that's apparently not what happened. As reported by the Associated Press, the Corps used MWI's spec to write the original bid solicitation from January, 2006. Well, that's understating it a bit. The Corps and its archtectural/engineering contractors (Linfield, Hunter & Junius and the local office of URS) copied and pasted MWI's catalog specification word for word, sent it out as a competitive bid solicitation, and then awarded the job to MWI. When he found out about it, Louisiana Senator Vitter asked the Corps what the heck was going on in this April 13, 2007 letter."