New York Times: Uncovering Iraq's Horrors in Desert Graves

By John F. Burns

 ON THE EDGE OF THE ASH SHAM DESERT, Iraq, June 3 — Among experts on the American-led team investigating Iraq's mass graves, the skeletal remains lying face-up at the rear of the tangled grave here have been given a name — the Blue Man — that speaks for a sorrowful familiarity developed by some of those who work with victims of mass murder.

But more than his blue shirt, and his blue-striped trousers, what distinguishes the remains is the way they speak for the terror of death under Saddam Hussein. The man was thrown backward by automatic weapons fire, his eyes blindfolded and his arms tied behind his back, his skull jerked upward at the neck, his fleshless mouth gaping, his two rows of teeth stretched apart, as though in a primal scream.

Together, in the late winter of 1991, at least 28 men were executed here, crowded together in a pit their killers scraped with a backhoe from the desert floor. Rounded up along the alleyways of their native city, they were forced aboard a bus or truck and driven out along an isolated highway.

Los Angeles Times: Swift, Seductive -- and Deadly

One of the fastest-flowing rivers in the West, the Kern has been a lethal attraction for decades. The especially high water level now is renewing alarms about safety.

By Steve Chawkins, Times Staff Writer

KERNVILLE, Calif. — Erected only two weeks ago in what has become a grim rite of spring, the big, red-lettered sign beside the churning Kern River is already outdated.

As motorists enter the winding Kern River Canyon with their freight of sunscreen and fishing rods and beer, it tells them about the river with no minced words: "234 lives lost since 1968."

But when a Long Beach construction worker was flipped from his inner tube on Memorial Day weekend, the Kern's toll rose by one — the first of the drownings anticipated by rescue workers this season as an unprecedented volume of water shoots through the narrow river.

In the High Sierra, nearly twice a normal year's snowpack is melting, turning usually swift rivers such as the Kern into swollen cascades. On top of that, the 17-mile lower Kern — in some ways the river's most treacherous section — is receiving emergency releases of water from Lake Isabella upstream, where engineers are lowering the reservoir to investigate possible weaknesses in one of its two aging dams.

By Elizabeth Williamson, Washington Post Staff Writer

Virginia scientists have discovered millions of native oysters thriving along shorelines in a section of the lower Chesapeake Bay once thought uninhabitable for them, a discovery that could shift efforts to revive the bay's ailing oyster stocks.

The dense colonies of oysters analyzed this year in Virginia Beach's Lynnhaven River suggest that, with the right habitat, the native species can once again thrive -- cleaning the bay's water and sustaining annual harvests, according to a report to be released this month by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Most remarkable, the scientists say, is evidence that oysters survive far better on riprap -- man-made shoreline barriers built of granite boulders -- than on many of the shell reefs researchers have developed for them. The finding is a breakthrough in a quest to replace oyster habitat that has consumed tens of millions of dollars over decades, with spotty success.

Orlando Sentinel Editorial: Ignore no more

Our position: Residents shouldn't be victimized by breach of Okeechobee dike.

Florida urgently needs a regional evacuation plan for residents of Lake Okeechobee, and one needn't look any further than the Army Corps of Engineers for a credible reason why.

The Corps last month pooh-poohed a clarion alarm sounded by the South Florida Water Management District that the 140-mile dike surrounding the lake stands a one-in-six chance of breaching this or any year.

The data-backed description of the dike as Swiss cheese by engineering experts hired by the district failed to impress the Corps, which contended it can shore up weaknesses in the dike over 20 years.

Anyone assured by that work schedule hasn't paid attention to the Corps' deplorable maintenance of the levee that imploded in Katrina's path.

For Situational Awareness

Gov Exec.com: Pentagon to automate personnel management systems

By Karen Rutzick

The Defense Department is introducing two automated human resources systems this month in order to modernize performance management and benefits processing.

Starting in mid-June, supervisors in the National Security Personnel System will rate their employees' job performance with the aid of a computerized system. The nameless system will house digital performance plans and electronically link individual employee goals to broader departmental objectives.

NSPS -- which replaces the familiar General Schedule with broad paybands and new job classifications and bases annual pay raises in part on performance ratings -- is designed to encourage high performance among civilian workers. The password-protected computer system, which will be available to all civilians as they enter NSPS, is designed to help achieve those objectives.

New York Times: Army Builders Accept Blame Over Flooding

By John Schwartz

In a sweeping new study of the causes of the disaster in New Orleans last year, the Army Corps of Engineers concludes that the levees it built in the city were an incomplete patchwork of protection, containing flaws in design and construction and not built to handle a storm anywhere near the strength of Hurricane Katrina.

"The hurricane protection system in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana was a system in name only," said the draft of the nine-volume report, released yesterday in New Orleans.

Several outside engineering panels that have been critical of the corps have come to similar conclusions, and have found a more extensive chain of flaws in the design, construction and maintenance of the 350-mile levee system.

But the 6,113-page report is remarkable for being a product of the corps' own official investigation, which brought together 150 experts from government, academia and business to study what went wrong and how to build better systems for the future.

By Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS — The Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged Thursday that design defects in the levees protecting New Orleans caused the majority of flooding during Hurricane Katrina and that the disaster would almost certainly trigger reforms in how the federal government protected the American public.

The corps said its 40-year effort to construct a hurricane protection system for southern Louisiana had resulted in a set of piecemeal projects that "was a system in name only," a recognition that a wide range of errors, weak links and incomplete construction was at the heart of the massive damage that occurred Aug. 29.

The corps released a 6,000-page report written in the couched language of government engineers but which delivered a stunning set of findings about errors made in the design of storm walls and earthen levees that failed during Katrina.

The report found that four major breaches of I-walls, a type of concrete storm wall that sits on an earthen levee, caused 65% of the flooding in the New Orleans area.

Although the report's summary never uses the words "design defect," corps officials said they now accepted that their work had shortcomings and errors that were responsible, in large part, for the damage.

New Orleans Times-Picayune: Levee design, building system failed on many levels, report says

By Bob Marshall, Sheila Grissett and Mark Schleifstein

The hurricane protection system that supposedly shielded 1.3 million New Orleans area residents before Hurricane Katrina was “a system in name only,” incomplete and inconsistent in its levels of safety, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-sponsored panel concluded Thursday.

Nearing the end of an eight-month study, the corps’ Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force concluded that each of the many levee, floodwall and pumping failures that occurred during Katrina has its roots in the inadequate process that the United States uses to address flood control projects through the corps.

By Cain Burdeau, Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS - A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data.

“This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, ‘We’ve had a catastrophic failure,”’ Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season.

The Corps said it will use the lessons it has learned to build better flood defenses.

“Words alone will not restore trust in the Corps,” Strock said, adding that the Corps is committed “to fulfilling our important responsibilities.”

The $19.7 million report includes details on the engineering and design failures that allowed the storm surge to overwhelm New Orleans’ levees and floodwalls Aug. 29.

MSNBC: Army: ‘You can hold the Corps accountable’

The man in charge of rebuilding the levees speaks with Brian Williams

By Brian Williams, Anchor & “Nightly News” managing editor, NBC News

NEW ORLEANS - In light of the new 6,000-page report on what went wrong in Katrina, and its conclusion that it was people and not an act of God at the root of all this, we met Thursday with the man in charge of the effort to rebuild these levees and floodwalls, Col. Lewis Setliff, the commander of Task Force Guardian with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Brian Williams: The question of the day also pertains to a report out today about the work of the past. It, in plain English, says that the damage from Katrina is the work of people and not God. How does the Corps react to that?

Col. Lewis Setliff: Well, no city is safe. There's always a level of risk in each and every city and I think the Corps’ responsibility, working with elected officials, is to minimize that risk as much as we can, but we'll never eliminate it. And what we need to do is keep people, keep businesses informed, so they're making these very important decisions. We understand that this summer a lot of people are going to be on the edge of their seats and be making some very tough decisions. We want those decisions to be informed. The second part of that is that the administration and Congress is committed to continuing not only through this summer, but through the next several years to make this protection system better and better.

GovExec.com: Government continues to subsidize building in hurricane-prone areas

By Paul Singer, National Journal

SOUTHPORT, N.C. -- This quaint coastal town, with its cozy shops, broad main street running to the shore, and hint of salt in the air, is essentially the "before" picture. This is much like what Bay St. Louis, Miss., looked like until Hurricane Katrina's 20-foot storm surge smashed most of the town.

But there is one critical difference. Bay St. Louis is in Hancock County, which before being struck by a Category 3 hurricane last August was home to 47,000 people, having added just 4,000 residents between 2000 and 2005. Southport is in Brunswick, one of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties. Its population jumped from 73,000 to almost 90,000 during that five-year period and will soon explode if the state of North Carolina gets its wish.

 News-Press (FL): Environmental groups sue to stop Collier project

A coalition of five environmental organizations filed suit today in federal district court in Fort Lauderdale challenging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' issuance a development permit for a development in Collier County.

The suit alleges that if the Parkland Collier golf course community development is built it will destroy more than 200 acres of core foraging habitat for the endangered wood stork in the Cocohatchee Slough.

This slough is an historic natural flowway adjacent to Audubon's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary within Florida's Western Everglades.

Corkscrew Swamp is home to the largest wood stork rookery in the United States. Wood stork nesting data from Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary show that nesting pairs have declined almost 90 percent from 4,000 - 6,000 pairs in the 1950s and 1960s to 400 - 600 pairs currently.

Vicksburg Post: More ‘smart people' needed, Barbour tells ERDC crew

By Sam Knowlton

More Mississippians who know how to run supercomputers are needed, Gov. Haley Barbour said at Wednesday's dedication of the newest supercomputer in Vicksburg.

Barbour told an audience of about 150 at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' information-technology research facility on Porters Chapel Road that it's essential for Mississippi children to have a chance to learn advanced skills.

The supercomputer is a Cray XT3. It was installed in November, ranking then as the largest supercomputer in the public inventory of U.S. Department of Defense and the 14th largest in the world.

“It's run by a bunch of smart people, and that's got to be our focus: Generating more generations of smart people like y'all,” Barbour told his audience, which included many federal computer scientists.

1. Associated Press
June 1, 2006

Report on Katrina Floods to Be Released

By CAIN BURDEAU, The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS -- As a new hurricane season began Thursday, a widely anticipated report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers may shed light on what happened when levees and flood walls were breached by Hurricane Katrina's massive storm surge.

The 6,000-plus page document was expected to include details on alleged engineering and design failures that led to the storm surge overwhelming the city's outer levees and breaking through flood walls within New Orleans, killing more than 1,570 people.

The new report, prepared by the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, is expected to lay out the minutiae of the disaster _ flood wall designs, storm surge, storm modeling, levee soil types _ in greater depth than the preliminary studies.

2. Reuters

VIOLET, Louisiana (Reuters) - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has met its goal of fixing battered levees around New Orleans as the new hurricane season starts, but residents still face flood risks, senior officials said on Wednesday.

Standing on a clay and dirt levee in St. Bernard Parish, which was inundated by floodwater after Hurricane Katrina, Maj. Gen. Ronald Johnson said the Corps repaired 169 miles of the 350 mile system by its June 1 target.

``I think New Orleans can be confident in its hurricane protection system because it is better and it is stronger,'' Johnson said after a helicopter tour.

``We've spiraled in new information as we've learned some things, working with the technical experts to tell us what it is we need to do to build this system using the best materials, science, engineering and construction practices.''

But it is not certain it will protect against all storms, officials said. Katrina came ashore as a Category 3 hurricane.

``There will always be a risk,'' said Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the Corps' director of civil works. ``Another Katrina, on a different track, at a different speed, moving slower with more rainfall could do damage.''

3. Los Angeles Times

Standing on a clay-and-dirt levee in St. Bernard Parish, which was inundated after Hurricane Katrina, Maj. Gen. Ronald Johnson said the Corps had repaired 169 miles of the 350-mile system.

"I think New Orleans can be confident in its hurricane protection system because it is better and it is stronger," Johnson said after a helicopter tour.

The hurricane season begins today.

4. Associated Press
May 31, 2006

New Orleans Sinking Faster Than Thought

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Everyone has known New Orleans is a sinking city. Now new research suggests parts of the city are sinking even faster than many scientists imagined -- more than an inch a year.

That may explain some of the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina and it raises more worries about the future.

The research, reported in the journal Nature, is based on new satellite radar data for the three years before Katrina struck in 2005. The data show that some areas are sinking four or five times faster than the rest of the city. And that, experts say, can be deadly.

''My concern is the very low-lying areas,'' said lead author Tim Dixon, a University of Miami geophysicist. ''I think those areas are death traps. I don't think those areas should be rebuilt.''

The blame for this phenomenon, called subsidence, includes overdevelopment, drainage and natural seismic shifts.

For years, scientists figured the city on average was sinking about one-fifth of an inch a year based on 100 measurements of the region, Dixon said. The new data from 150,000 measurements taken from space finds that about 10 percent to 20 percent of the region had yearly subsidence in the inch-a-year range, he said.

As the ground in those areas sinks, protection from levees also falls, scientists and engineers said.

5. New Orleans Times-Picayune
June 1, 2006

Pumps won't hit '06 goal this summer
System to be limited at least until fall

By Sheila Grissett, East Jefferson bureau

It won't be possible to provide the maximum promised pumping capacity at the new floodgates on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals during what are usually the most active months of hurricane season this year, and perhaps not until the start of the 2007 season, Army Corps of Engineers officials confirmed Wednesday.

They said the magnitude and complexity of installing the gates, which requires configuring as many as 28 separate pumps, platforms and diesel engines, makes it impossible to provide the 6,000 cubic feet per second of drainage capacity that corps officials had been working to have ready in September.

The soonest that level may be attainable is Oct. 31. All corps officials can guarantee this year is 2,400 to 2,800 cubic feet per second of drainage capacity using auxiliary pumps now being installed adjacent to each structure. They will try to use portable pumps to add 1,000 cfs.

"We have to do it right to minimize risk as much as possible, . . . and nothing like this has been done before," said Col. Lewis Setliff III, chief of Task Force Guardian, the corps team doing more than $700 million worth of emergency construction to the system damaged by Hurricane Katrina. A big part of that work is the installation of gates to keep storm surges out of the 17th Street, London Avenue, and Orleans Avenue canals and auxiliary pumps to drain the big canals when the gates are closed because of an approaching storm.

6. New Orleans Times-Picayune

By Allen Powell II

BATON ROUGE -- Waving signs proclaiming their love for their community, hundreds of Plaquemines Parish residents descended upon the state Capitol on Wednesday, demanding that federal officials rebuild levees that were severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina so residents can finally return home.

Chartered buses and private caravans carried residents to the capital city for the Stand Up for Plaquemines Parish rally. Some residents bore signs urging officials to "Cherish Our Parish," while others sported T-shirts saying, "Our levees broke. Our spirit isn't."

Business owners and residents from Pointe a la Hache to Buras cast aside territorial concerns, imploring federal officials to improve levee protection throughout the parish, especially in the south and east; restore coastal wetlands; and provide affordable flood and homeowners insurance.

7. New Orleans Times-Picayune Editorial

No one would argue with the need to repair hurricane protection levees damaged by Hurricane Katrina as quickly as possible, but problems with a 400-foot section of the levee in Plaquemines Parish proves that doing things right is every bit as important as doing them fast.

The section of levee near Buras High School twisted in place, losing 6½ feet overnight Saturday, and that's a worrisome development as hurricane season begins.

Fixing the problem will take three to six weeks, which means it will be a vulnerable area for the first month or so of hurricane season.

8. Los Angeles Times Commentary

By David Helvarg, DAVID HELVARG is president of the Blue Frontier Campaign (bluefront.org) and author of "50 Ways to Save the Ocean" and "Blue Frontier: Dispatches From America's Ocean Wilderness."

TODAY MARKS the beginning of the 2006 hurricane season, one that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts will be "above normal," with four to six major hurricanes expected to form in the Atlantic — storms that could make landfall anywhere from Boston to Galveston.

Everyone agrees that we're into a decades-long cycle of intensified Atlantic hurricanes linked to a periodic 1-degree warming in the North Atlantic. Add an additional degree of ocean warming since 1970 from anthropogenic — human-caused — carbon-dioxide emissions, and you have the makings of a hurricane cycle that may never return to a more tranquil phase. Yet when it comes to the way we live in hurricane territory, we're stuck in the 1970s and 1980s, when a lull in storm activity aided and abetted unprecedented development along the Atlantic seaboard, helping assure that 17 of the 20 fastest-growing counties in the U.S. were coastal.

9. Daily Environmental Report

CHICAGO--Organizations engaged in wetlands restoration have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, accusing the agency of ignoring federal wetland mitigation requirements when it issued a permit last year to Chicago's O'Hare Airport Modernization Program (OMP) (National Mitigation Banking Ass'n v. Army Corps of Engineers, N.D. Ill., No. 06 C 2820, 5/19/06).

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois May 19, challenges a permit issued by the corps last December that would allow for a massive expansion of O'Hare Airport. Among other things, the permit authorizes the destruction of nearly 100 acres of wetlands and streams under federal jurisdiction.

The organizations objected to the corps' decision not to require actual mitigation sites or plans in issuing the permit. Instead, the corps authorized an "in-lieu fee arrangement," permitting OMP to pay a fee to a nonprofit organization and defer actual mitigation. The lawsuit alleges that this provision violates requirements for mitigation contained in the Clean Water Act. Moreover, the lawsuit contends such arrangements have been widely discredited as an environmental strategy.

10. Wall Street Journal

By MARK H. ANDERSON

WASHINGTON -- So far, the Roberts Court has been good for business.
The U.S. Supreme Court's 2005-2006 term docket is loaded with cases impacting the business sector and the decisions handed down since Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. joined the Supreme Court last October have generally been favorable to business interests.

"This is the richest business term in recent memory," said Mark Levy, a Supreme Court litigator with Kilpatrick Stockton LLP. "Of the cases that have been decided so far, business interests have done very well."

The Supreme Court has issued a number of significant business decisions already this year and still has several cases left among the almost 30 remaining cases. Still left before the high court's current term ends June 30 are appeals dealing with racketeering lawsuits against corporations, anti-retaliation requirements in employment law and the reach of the Clean Water Act.

11. Washington Post

By Stephen Barr

The Supreme Court's ruling on freedom-of-speech rights of public employees has created a stir across the government, in part because of the way Justice Anthony M. Kennedy , writing for the 5-to-4 majority, framed the issue:

"When public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline."

Although the wording seemed stark, the court did not redefine federal whistle-blower protections. The majority, in some respects, seemed interested in ensuring that governments can oversee workplaces and that disputes between employees and supervisors do not automatically fall into the realm of a constitutional right.

1. Hattiesburg American

The commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Tuesday the possibility of a Category 4 hurricane striking New Orleans tops his list of concerns as the 2006 hurricane season nears.

Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander and chief of engineers for the Corps, said another storm similar to last year's Hurricane Katrina could create new, serious problems.

"Another Katrina and the system will not be able to withstand the storm surge that hit the Gulf Coast," Strock said during an appearance on the University of Southern Mississippi campus.

Hurricane season begins Thursday. At Southern Miss, Strock outlined the Corps' role after Katrina and its national plan to handle military engineering and similar needs after catastrophic events.

His appearance was sponsored by the Southern Miss School of Construction.

2. MSNBC

By Martin Wolk, Chief economics correspondent

For companies in the disaster business, 2005 was a very good year. And if preseason predictions are correct, it could be the first in a series of profitable years for a rapidly growing industry that encompasses engineering firms, debris haulers and logistical specialists who rush in whenever disaster strikes.

In addition to being the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina was a boon for companies that specialize in recovering from such devastation. It opened the spigot to billions of dollars in federal contracts to haul debris, make emergency repairs to damaged homes and buildings, and provide temporary housing and other structures.

The scope of the government aid and the private sector's degree of involvement was eye-opening to those on the receiving end.

“There is big money in disasters,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said recently at a conference of mayors. “Huge money."

Although the contracts went to more than 1,200 businesses, including some small and minority-owned firms, most of the biggest deals were awarded to the giant construction and engineering companies that dominate the disaster-recovery business. These companies, including well-known names like Halliburton and Bechtel, tend to have deep political connections and long histories doing business with the government.

But the growth of the sector is best illustrated by an emerging group of companies even more intensely focused on specialized aspects of post-disaster work. These firms, including Beck Disaster Recovery and AshBritt, typically spring into action after disasters strike by tapping networks of affiliated contractors to quickly dispatch personnel, heavy equipment and other specialized gear to the scene.

3. Chicago Tribune

By Howard Witt, Tribune senior correspondent

VENICE, La. -- All across the battered New Orleans region, where the damage from last year's killer hurricane has barely begun to be repaired, the Thursday opening of this year's hurricane season is being greeted with particular unease.

But only here, in low-lying Plaquemines Parish, a vulnerable tendril of land desperately hugging the tail end of the Mississippi River and surrounded by the yawning waters of the Gulf of Mexico, must residents grapple with the grimly certain knowledge that this hurricane season could be their last.

That's because the Bush administration decided last month to seek $2.5 billion in new flood protection money from Congress, enough to shield 98 percent of the region's population behind strengthened levees and floodgates in the event of another storm equivalent to Hurricane Katrina. But the additional $1.6 billion that would be needed to protect the remaining 2 percent of the population cannot be economically justified, White House officials said.

The estimated 20,000 residents of rural Plaquemines Parish are the 2 percent being left behind.

4. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
May 31, 2006

American Indian remains to be reburied

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MOSCOW, Idaho -- The remains of nearly 150 American Indians studied and stored at the University of Idaho and Washington State University are scheduled for a ritual reburial next month.

Besides the remains, personal possessions, including a Jefferson Peace Medal that might have been from the Lewis and Clark expedition, will be reburied.

The remains were unearthed in 1964 to make way for flooding behind Lower Monument Dam on the Snake River. They include members from the Palouse Tribe, made up of the Umatilla, Nez Perce, Yakama and Colville, and the Wanapum band.

"Many of the sacred human remains, grave sites and graveyards were dug up in the name of science," Armand Minthorn, a Umatilla Tribe board of trustees member and spokesman for the five tribes, told the Lewiston Tribune. "For us as Indian people, this is a violation of our religion, it's a violation of our traditional values, it's a violation of our customs to dig anything up once it's put in the ground."

The Palouse Tribe claimed the remains through the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The graves from which the remains were removed date from about 1850 to the early 1900s.

5. Mobile Register

By ANDREA JAMES, Business Reporter

"We're rocking and rolling," docks Director Jimmy Lyons said.

The U.S. Coast Guard is investigating the cause of the incident.

Over the weekend and Memorial Day, about a dozen ships had stacked up in the Gulf of Mexico waiting to access the port while half a dozen were stuck inside, according to docks officials.

Eleven bar pilots, about twice the number of pilots normally working in one shift, guided the ships in and out of port Tuesday, Lyons said.

"The pilots really rallied on this one," he said.

6. Boston Globe

CONCORD, N.H. --In 1936, when the Merrimack River overflowed its banks and swept away roads, bridges and buildings from central New Hampshire to the Massachusetts coast, the Army Corps of Engineers took action.

The agency built five dams and several reservoirs, seizing thousands of acres of private property in more than a dozen New Hampshire towns. The project, finished in 1963, protected residents downstream, including parts of Massachusetts.

In the 1950s, Massachusetts and New Hampshire entered into a deal to compensate those towns each year for lost property taxes. Because Massachusetts received more of the benefit from the dams, that state agreed to pay 70 percent. The states created a commission, with equal representation from each state, to oversee the payments and resolve potential disputes.

But in the early 1990s, Massachusetts capped its annual payments at $196,289 and refused to continue accounting for market increases.

7. Los Angeles Times