Who: Lower 9th Ward residents, New Orleans residents and
environmental leaders
When: 12 November
When: 6:00 p.m.
Where: In front of Martin Luther King Jr. School (Claiborne Ave and Caffin Ave)
What: Press conference demanding that the Corps of Engineers ‘stop the lock’
“At a time when the Lower 9th Ward is starting to recover from the failed levee
built by the Corps which caused the total flooding of the Lower 9th Ward during
Katrina, we do not need a 10 to 15 year period of construction on a this lock
which will limit our access to the rest of New Orleans and impede the recovery
progress of our community,” stated Pam Dashiell, Holy Cross Neighborhood
Association.
In the Citizens Against Widen Industrial Canal (CAWIC) report Failure to Hold
Water, December 2007, the some of the major conclusions were:
- The decline in traffic and the limited delays that have been observed are so significant that even the best project [1] (the shallow draft lock) can not be justified.
- These conclusions are valid even when the benefits are compared to the remaining costs of the project. Resuming construction of the lock would be throwing good money after bad. [2]
“This new Corps Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) does not
answer our questions about the basic economics of this project. We are
therefore asking for an ‘independent review’ of the SEIS since the project at
$700 million did not make sense. Its new $ 1.3 billion price is a clearly a
“boondoggle,” stated John Koeferl, President, CAWIC.
“The environmental justice impacts of this Corps lock project are massive and
the Corps’ analysis of these impacts is inadequate. An independent review of
the whole SEIS is needed to address the environmental justice and environmental
impacts,” said Darryl Malek-Wiley, Environmental Justice Organizer, Sierra
Club.
[1] This term “best project” is a Corps Of Engineers term. We do not view this as a good outcome for the Lower 9th Ward residents and American Taxpayers.
[2] Executive Summary, Failure to Hold Water, page 3
