Ground zero of the 17th Street Canal in Lakeview New Orleans

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has earned the Levees.org ‘Seal of Approval’ for his portrayal of the flooding of New Orleans in a recent column about crumbling American infrastructure.

(Hat tip to the New Orleans Ladder for hipping us to the column.)

Mr. Herbert points out that most U.S. citizens take their water systems completely for granted (e.g clean drinking water, flood protection) and why that is a dangerous thing to do.

He closes the piece by observing the failure of the levees and floodwalls in New Orleans in 2005.

“The horror stories abound: the drowning of New Orleans when the levees failed in 2005, the 2007 explosion of an ancient steam pipe in Manhattan that killed one person and injured more than 30, the gas pipeline explosion and fire last month in San Bruno, Calif., that killed seven and injured more than 50. There are endless other examples, tragic, costly and unnecessary.”

We observe that Mr. Herbert did not even mention the word Katrina. Mr. Herbert gets the ‘Seal of Approval’ for accurately describing the flooding of metro New Orleans. That’s important because saying the region was devastated by a hurricane could be dangerous for the 55% of the American people who live in counties protected by levees.

Click here for the article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/opinion/26herbert.html?_r=2

Click here to see the counties protected by levees.
https://levees.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/USCountiesWithLeveesMainMap5_121009_107K.jpg