Just In Time!

What the hell is up with this headline?

"Levees Rebuilt Just in Time, but Doubts Remain"

Rebuilt just in time? Does that mean there was a guy nailing in the last board to the flood wall with a hammer just as the storm surge reached the edifice, it held and everyone hugged each other like at the end of "WarGames" and went to have a beer? Give me a break! Look at this idiotic opening paragraph:

In a breathless finale that has been called one of this generation's greatest adventures in civil engineering, the Army Corps of Engineers has all but completed its repairs to this city's ruined levee system.

Like it was the end of a montage building scene from McGyver.

The story goes on to say that the Army Corps of Engineers "even improved" the levee system in many ways! Whoopee! I mean, considering the last one failed completely, one would hope they improved it!

New Orleans' levee system was routinely underfunded and therefore inadequate to protect against hurricanes, according to an independent report released Monday [...]

The study released Monday said floods overwhelmed levees and flood walls, both on the fringes and inside the city. Breaches were caused by weak soil in the levees, poor engineering and breakdowns in sections where different types of flood protection meet.

Don't worry guys, they made it a little bit better in some places this time! And not quite as designed to fail!

It's nearly offensive to characterize levee protection as "a race against time" that the diligent corps "just managed to complete." This isn't a sporting event, people's lives are at stake, and to give them this false sense of hope that we won "the amazing race" to protect New Orleans is completely disingenuous. There's a long way to go, and even in the article experts openly hope that nothing as big as Katrina hits the city this year. This will be a decades-long effort.

And anyway, considering the construction WITHIN the city has been so negligible, the real questions with building levees has to be "what exactly are you protecting?"