Found this over at Humid City (a fave NOLA site), here's a snip.Commentary by M. Styborski, you'll find the rest HERE.Whore of Engineers
Levees.org has uncovered an interesting item in the Army Corps of Engineers ledger: $1,000,000 for public relations.
It seems that instead of fixing the levees in New Orleans, the ACE thinks it’s easier to fix their image. And apparently it is. The PR firm hired by the Corps, Outreach Process Partners, touted their fantastic work on their website with a nifty graphic taking credit for reducing negative articles about the Corps. The graphic showed that between Oct ‘06 and Jun ‘07 the Corps racked up over 13,000 negative articles in the media. That same stretch from ‘07 to ‘08 lists only 305 negative articles with OPP’s help.
Really? From 13,000 to just 300 in one year? Those guys are good. Or they’re lying. Clearly they do not count the blogosphere as media.
Less than 24 hours after the Levees.org released this news, OPP pulled the page from their website, but Levees.org cached it and it can be viewed here. You can view the “edited” page here for a comparison.
Now ask yourself, how much flood protection would one million dollars buy? How many homes could be raised? How much higher could the levees be raised with a million dollars of dirt? How much more of Plaquemines Parish could be brought into the flood protection area? How much drainage work or infrastructure repair could be done? Congress has repeatedly refused to allocate funding for an independent investigation into the levee failures, relying on in-house investigations which have been tame at best, but they clearly have no problem rubber-stamping an assload of cash to hide bad press.
More later.
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It is obvious that they are more concerned about cya than truly helping people.
ReplyDeleteWhy does the local New Orleans District of the US Army Corps of engineers need a large in house PR staff and also need a PR contractor providing an extra six strategists? How many PR people does it take to truthfully relate to the public, honestly? Are they trying to trick us again?
ReplyDeleteHave you ever heard of a Federal Agency's local district office having a PR staff of more than about two?
They want respect and confidence from the public and decided spending $5M on propaganda would be a lot cheaper than building reliable engineering structures.
Our next Corps sponsored flood is premeditated.