This passage is written by Steve Gorelick, professor of media studies at Hunter College CUNY. While it was written circa the Fifth Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the message is still relevant, and not to be forgotten:

It was a bad hurricane. A horrible and lethal hurricane.

But it was the failure of the levees that caused most of the death and destruction, levees that didn’t magically materialize and blow into town, but levees that – according to a slew of experts along with the informed and unstoppable activists at Levees.org led by Sandy Rosenthal – failed in fifty places due to a combination of poor design, poor construction, too low a safety factor, and levees that simply weren’t high enough.

I once had a brilliant professor, a distinguished sociologist named Gaye Tuchman, who – among other things – had a profound and deeply held shtick about human agency and action. Always be aware, she implored us, to look behind language that would seem to attribute social change or calamity to unpreventable weather or randomness. This narrative and this vocabulary, she warned, denied human agency. It minimized the individuals and institutions whose actions could often be found hiding behind all the talk of water and wind.

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http://mediaandmayhem.com/tag/sandy-rosenthal/