Combing the Past for News in the Present

We all show outrage when some horrific problem that costs billions to deal with, often entails a massive loss of human life and/or some other form of deep human suffering, was presented as just such looming problem long before the problem arose. We scream and cry that since authorities were on notice, they absolutely had an obligation to do something about the problem. But almost every governmental agency is overwhelmed with complaints, and to pursue them all in a universe of oversaturated communications is clearly impossible; how to find a balance is always the conundrum… and 20-20 hindsight has derailed more than one political career. With a mass of Wikileaks documentation, you can be sure that each new crisis will result in such historical analysis. Today, I will bring you a pile of such complaints (not just Wikileaks) where the evil in the complaints may actually have had serious credibility.

Bernie Madoff’s mega-billion dollar fraud: “[Harry] Markopolos began contacting the SEC at the beginning of the decade to warn that Madoff was a fraud. He sent detailed memos, listing dozens of red flags, laying out a road map of instructions for SEC investigators to follow, even listing contacts and phone numbers of Wall Street experts whom he said would confirm his findings. But, Markopolos' whistle-blowing effort got nowhere.” Money.CNN.com, February 4, 2009.

Levee failure from Hurricane Katrina: “[P]rior to the 9/11 attacks, a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report ‘detailed the three most likely catastrophic disasters that could happen in the United States: a terrorist attack in New York, a strong earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane strike in New Orleans.’ It was because of this assessment that a hurricane simulation was held in 2002 to determine what ‘would happen if a category 5 storm [struck, and] when the exercise was completed it was evidence that we were going to lose a lot of people. We changed the name of the [simulated] storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B... kiss your ass goodbye... because anybody who was here as that category five storm came across... was gone, ‘ Walter Maestri, the emergency coordinator of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans recounted.” Katrina: The Warnings Were There by William Sutherland, EZineArticles.com, a report which focuses on pre-and post-Katrina litigation and actions against the Army Corps of Engineers charged with building and maintaining the levees (even a federal judge, in 2009, found the Corps’ maintenance of the levees to be subpar).

Meltdown at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan (pictured above): A Wikileaks cable exposed in UK’s Daily Telegraph indicated that Japan was warned by the UN atomic regulatory agency that their reactors were well below par: “An unnamed official from the International Atomic Energy Agency is quoted in a [December] 2008 cable from the American embassy in Tokyo as saying that a strong earthquake would pose a ‘serious problem’ for Japan's nuclear power stations. The official added that the country's nuclear safety guidelines were dangerously out of date, as they had only been ‘revised three times in the last 35 years.’” AOLNews.com (March 16^th). Fukushima Daiichi was built to withstand a 7.0 Richter Scale quake; it was hit with a 9.0, followed by a crushing tsunami.

Lax safety standards at California’s Diablo Canyon coastal nuclear power plant, which sits about a mile from a serious off-shore fault line: The plant “was not required to include earthquakes in its emergency response plan as a condition of being granted its license more than a quarter of a century ago. Though experts warned from the beginning that the plant would be vulnerable to an earthquake, asserting 25 years ago that it required an emergency plan as a condition of its license, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission fought against making such a provision mandatory as it allowed the facility to be built... Back when the California plant was being finalized in the mid-1980s, local activists and environmental lawyers sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in an effort to slow the project, arguing that the clear risks from earthquakes nearby required additional planning... The case made its way to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., where a 5-4 majority -- including current Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former Clinton independent counsel Kenneth Starr -- ruled that earthquakes did not have to be included in the plant's emergency response plans.... The underlying theory was that the plant's design, which came after years of planning and geological studies, could withstand any foreseeable earthquake in the area -- the same assumption that guided thinking in Japan.” HuffingtonPost.com, March 17^th.

You will note that three of the above reports are about past warnings and resulting failures. One is not. 20-20 hints sometimes need to be followed. Sleep tight!

I’m Peter Dekom, and nobody ever said running a government is easy, but sometimes... you gotta take responsibility.