One of the enduring images of the catastrophic damage that last summer’s hurricanes inflicted on Gulf Coast oil and gas production facilities was the picture to the left of Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s MARS floating production platform (previous posts here and here), which was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina. As this Washington Post article reports, Shell has finished repairing the huge platform, just in time for this year’s hurricane season. The article goes on to provide a handy overview of the importance of the Gulf Coast oil and gas infrastructure for meeting the nation’s energy needs and the efforts to bolster the ability of that infrastructure to weather the severe storms of hurricane season.
Despite the massive repairs, the main improvement in the MARS platform to protect it from another severe storm is decidedly low-tech — stronger and twice as many clamps to hold the drilling rig to the platform. Those clamps work against vertical and horizontal forces and, during Katrina’s category 4-5 winds (the storm hit shore as a strong cat 3 storm), three inch steel bolts holding the previous clamps were sheared straight through. Although the old clamps had survived many storms, Shell engineers believe that the new ones will work even better.

So, you thought that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to the damage from Hurricane Katrina last year left much to be desired? Well, this NY Times article reports that a recent Congressional investigation has determined that the agency’s relief effort was stellar in comparison to its fraud management policies:

As much as $1.4 billion in government disaster aid to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ó nearly a quarter of the total ó went to bogus or undeserving victims, a new Congressional investigation concludes. [. . .]
The improper or fraudulent payments went to a dizzying array of con artists or other undeserving recipients, according to the analysis by the Government Accountability Office, which is set to announce its findings at a hearing Wednesday.
In one case, a man stayed more than two months on the government tab at a hotel in Hawaii that cost more than $100 a night. At the same time, he was getting $2,358 in government rent assistance, even though he had not been living in the property he claimed was damaged in the storm.
Emergency aid was used to pay for football tickets, the bill at a Hooters in San Antonio, a $200 bottle of Dom Perignon, “Girls Gone Wild” videos, even an all-inclusive weeklong Caribbean vacation, the report says. More than $5 million went to people who had provided cemeteries or post office boxes as the addresses of their damaged property.
FEMA also provided cash or housing assistance to more than 1,000 prison inmates, totaling millions of dollars; one inmate used a post office box to collect $20,000. . .
In another case, 24 payments, totaling $109,708, were sent to a single apartment, where eight people each submitted requests for aid eight times, each time using their own Social Security numbers.
Another person collected 26 payments using 13 different Social Security numbers ó a total of $139,000 ó even though public records show the individual did not live at any of the addresses reported as damaged. [. . .]
Investigators concluded that fraudulent or improper payments probably ranged from $400 million to $1.4 billion, leading them to settle on $1 billion as their most likely estimate, representing about 16 percent of the distributed aid. [. . .]

Representative Michael McCaul (Rep. Tex.), who is chairman of the House subcommittee that led the inquiry, is not pleased:

“When you have federal and state prisoners applying for the taxpayers’ money ó while they are in prison ó and then the disaster aid, that is a real assault on the American taxpayer,” he said. “I don’t have any tolerance for that.”