Word: pump
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...pump, designed to move as much as 6 million gallons of water per minute, "would impact aquatic ecosystems on a massive scale," the EPA's Lawrence Starfield wrote in the letter. The Army Corps acknowledges that it would damage 67,000 acres of wetlands; the twelve Corps projects the EPA has vetoed in its history would have damaged a total of less than 8,000 acres. And scientists say the pump's actual devastation would be more like 200,000 acres, which is why 541 of them signed a letter calling for a veto. The Clinton Administration dismissed what then...
...pump is officially a flood-control project for poor Delta communities, but more than four-fifths of the economic benefits calculated by the Corps would go to flood-prone farmers who already collect gigantic subsidies to grow soybeans on marginal land. And the federal government is on the hook for the entire $220 million bill, because Mississippi Republican Senators Thad Cochran and Trent Lott slipped through a provision waiving local cost-sharing rules for the project...
...laudable one; the jetties would have ravaged the Outer Banks at a cost of more than $500,000 per boat. In fact, Bush's Office of Management and Budget has consistently proposed zero funding for the agency's most environmentally disastrous and economically ludicrous pork - the Yazoo pump, a $300 million irrigation project for a few Arkansas rice farmers, a $300 million deepening of the Delaware River that was exposed as a boondoggle by the Government Accountability Office, an unnecessary $750 million navigation just a stone's throw from the flimsy Corps floodwalls that drowned New Orleans - but Congress...
...also no coincidence that Bush's former number-two budget official, Marcus Peacock, is now Bush's number-two EPA official. The Corps claimed in its analysis that the pump will ultimately benefit the environment, because the agency will mitigate the damage after it's built. But as Peacock knows all too well, a slew of independent investigations have exposed Corps analyses as shams designed to justify big projects that keep the agency's employees busy and its congressional patrons happy. The investigations have also documented how the Corps rarely follows up on its mitigation promises. And this pump would...
...Army Corps makework has become a kind of inside-the-Beltway joke; when I first interviewed Lott's spokesman about the Yazoo pump, he mock-squealed: "Oh, no! You can't tell people about all this pork for Mississippi! Not in an election year! Please, don't throw us into that briar patch!" But it's all seemed less funny since Hurricane Katrina, when Corps failures ruined a great American city. The Corps was wasting money and destroying wetlands with mockeries like the Yazoo pump when it should have been building decent levees and restoring the wetlands that used...