A decorated senior reporter with TIME magazine has connected the dots and told the whole story about what happened in New Orleans and south Louisiana on August 29, two years ago.
Michael Grunwald also nicely summarizes everything in the first paragraph.
“The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn’t a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city’s defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment “Heckuva job, Brownie.” The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city’s man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government’s response, but they still haven’t come to grips with the government’s responsibility for the catastrophe.”
Sure, many think they know the whole Flood Story, but they really don’t. When something as terrible as the destruction of a major city happens, it’s because lots of things went wrong, and Grunwald does a pretty good job of telling the complete story.
What happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere. Please go to www.levees.org, your source for flood protection information everywhere, and join us.
Sandy Rosenthal
Founder, Levees.Org
TIME magazine’s article, “The Threatening Storm,” undermines the real science and risk information citizens need to make informed decisions about rebuilding with its reckless disregard for the truth.
The Corps provided TIME magazine with engineering, scientific and risk information derived from the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force’s (IPET) study done in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The IPET study has been independently peer reviewed by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the National Academies. TIME chose to base their article on upon technical quotes that are not supported by science-based facts or the analysis done by IPET, ASCE or the National Academies.
TIME magazine’s article, “The Threatening Storm,” fails to include relevant Corps, IPET or HPDC information that would provide readers with the balanced context needed to make informed decisions about the situation in southeast Louisiana.
The Corps is committed to providing quality science and engineering, and to transparently communicating to the people of Louisiana about what coastal restoration and protection will, and will not, do for them in future storms.
For more info, visit:
http://www.usace.army.mil/response.htm
I think that the Corps has done one hell of a job these past two years. The problem does not lie in the Corps, but our politicians who have been decieving us for decades. It is their responsibility to get us the money to upgrade our levees/flood control structures, and they have been too busy to do anything about it. What we need to do is get some people in office who actually care about South Louisiana and will argue for our share of the money and not stick it in their freezer.