Founder briefs membership on NYT’s response to request

On May 29, 2024, days before the start of hurricane season, Levees.org mobilized its membership to contact the New York Times.

Nearly 150 people requested that the news house use the right words to describe the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

The request was reasonable and polite. The request also included a complimentary word of kudos to the NYT for doing a Sunday 2015 story that pointed blame in its proper place – the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The Levees.org leadership was hoping for discussion of the request, which would lead to changes to the NYT’s style guide. Specifically, it was hoped that the news house would issue an alert to all its reporters, when writing about the flooding of New Orleans in August 2005, to include mention of levee failure.

At a bare minimum, Levees.org expected to hear a reply from Mr. Kahn even if it was not the outcome had hoped for. So we were surprised when we did not even receive an acknowledgement of the request.

At this time, let’s remember the huge successes we did have over the past 19 years toward changing the narrative of the New Orleans flood from mother nature to engineering failure.

The Army Corps of Engineers tried to keep its $186 billion failure out of the public eye and away from Congress. They did not get away with it.