Levees.org to Speak to African Visitors in State Department Program

Thursday, August 9th, 2012

Sandy Rosenthal addresses African visitors in the U.S. under the auspices of the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program.

Today, Sandy Rosenthal, founder of Levees.org will speak to a group of eight visitors from Africa who will be studying Transparency and Good Governance.

The visitors are invited to the United States under the auspices of the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program. They represent the countries of Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Camaroon, Ghana, and South Africa.

Ms. Rosenthal will discuss the role of grassroots citizen activism holding the government accountable after Hurricane Katrina.

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The Corps of Engineers’s Harassment of Dr. Robert Bea

Sunday, July 29th, 2012

Robert Bea, a professor emeritus at UC-Berkeley gives an impromptu civil engineering lesson to reporters at the Times-Picayune on Jan 8, 2006. Photo/Mark Schleifstein

Attorneys for the United States continue to spend taxpayer dollars in their efforts to defend the Army Corps of Engineers from liability for the failure of its levees and flood protection in the New Orleans region during Katrina.

The federal attorneys’ most recent strategy apparently was an attempted character assassination of respected scientist and New Orleans’ hero, Dr. Robert Bea.

Dr. Bea is one of a small minority of civil engineers who have stood up against the Corps and testified on behalf of southeast Louisiana residents who were harmed when federal levees failed during the 2005 storm.

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California Reporter Gets Levees.org Seal of Approval

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

These ‘before and after’ photos of a Lower Ninth Ward home communicate the extent of the flooding devastation a few blocks from the east breaches of the Industrial Canal. Photo/courtesy of Levees.org

This week, a reporter for the Sacramento Bee in California received the Levees.org’s Seal of Approval for characterizing the metro New Orleans flooding in 2005 as caused by levee failure.

Sean Cockerham resisted using fast easy Katrina ‘shorthand’ and refrained from giving all the credit for the catastrophe to Mother Nature.

Writing about New Orleans resurgence in the past seven years, he wrote:

“…The levees had failed and the city was in tatters….”

Saying Katrina is solely responsible for the 2005 Flood is like saying an iceberg is solely responsible for the Titanic Disaster. Now, at the 100th anniversary of the sunken liner, the undisputed fact is the Titanic ignored seven heavy ice warnings and the ship was going too fast.

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