FEMA: Helping us to get back on our knees

WDSU is reporting that FEMA has agreed to help repair the New Orleans sewer system, sort of. The city's pipes were overwhelmed by the water running through them and crushing them from above after the federally-designed levee system collapsed. Post-levee-collapse, 100 million gallons a day were pouring out of our destroyed system. But FEMA refused to help, claiming that the damage wasn't hurricane related. So out of our own overly taxed budgets, the local Sewerage and Water Board has worked to repair the system and it now leaks just 50 million gallons a day.

Now FEMA has changed its mind, but only a bit. FEMA is not going to repair what the government destroyed. Instead they've agreed to get us back to the crappy system we used to have, which used to leak 36 million gallons a day. Even if this were fair, how do you do this? Repair just a certain percent of the pipes? Repair just certain parts of the city? Repair at random until we reach the 36 million gallons figure? We await their Solominic wisdom.

UPDATE: The Times-Picayune has a fuller analysis of the issue. If only FEMA had come to its senses earlier, we might have been able to make greater progress on infrastructure by now.