Yo, Michael Chertoff: Still Think Waiving Environmental Laws Are the Best Way to Get Up This Border Fence? « The Washington Independent

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Critics have said the design of the pedestrian fencing being put in on the Arizona border is flawed. Much of that fencing consists of 10-foot wide and 15-foot tall steel-mesh panels, some featuring a series of wide horizontal grates at the bottom designed to let water and sediment flow through.

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“While the Bush administration may claim it’s taking environmental impacts of the border wall into consideration, building wire mesh fences across washes prone to debris-laden floods is fundamentally flawed,” Robin Silver, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

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The Organ Pipe monument’s staff produced a report earlier this month on the pedestrian fence’s effect on the 330,000-acre monument’s drainage systems and infrastructure.

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It concluded that the fence failed to meet hydrologic performance standards of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or standards set by the U.S. Border Patrol’s final environmental assessment for the project.