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Levees.org Publishes Myth Buster #5 on the 2005 Flood in Metro New Orleans

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Francis James films the disaster zone at ground zero of the 17th Street Canal breach in Lakeview New Orleans. Photo/Stanford Rosenthal

In the weeks after the federally designed and built hurricane protection broke to bits in metro New Orleans, public officials and experts immediately assumed the worst and publicly scolded the vast majority of the city’s residents for not having flood insurance.

It turns up they were wrong, as revealed in data painstakingly gathered by aides to Donald Powell, the Bush administration’s liaison to the disaster zone.

While the New Orleans Times Picayune reported on this in March of 2006, the initial image of lazy irresponsible New Orleans residents remains entrenched.

As observed by Harry Shearer last month at the National Press Club, it is in the early stages of news stories that Big Media creates a “template.” Later, despite the appearance of conflicting data from experts, news editors tend to cling to the original versions.

So Levees.org is publishing Myth Buster #5 — Per capita, more New Orleans residents had flood insurance, even if it wasn’t required, than the rest of the nation, on the day the federal hurricane protection failed them.

Click here for the full article featured on the Huffington Post.

Levees.org Milestone: Three Quarters of a Million Hits to Website

Monday, April 4th, 2011

Levees.org has just passed a very significant milestone. Using free software, we can see that our website has received over 750,000 page loads or ‘hits’ since we went online in December of 2005.

This free software, called Statcounter, has done more than tell us when we had reached a sweet milestone.

Using Statcounter, combined with backend blogger tools at NOLA.com, we discovered that employees at the New Orleans District Army Corps of Engineers were waging an apparently coordinated campaign of intimidation and harassment in the form of comments on public forums. The campaign seemed designed to intimidate critics of the Corps.

Without Statcounter, we would not have discovered that the harassing comments originated at the Corps of Engineers Headquarters in New Orleans on Leake Avenue.

And we wouldn’t have known about this important milestone today!

Click here for more on the Corps of Engineers’ Campaign to harass its critics.

Associated Press Reporter Kevin McGill receives ‘Seal of Approval

Sunday, April 3rd, 2011

Kevin McGill (in green shirt) at Levees.org press conference in Lower Ninth Ward on August 4, 2010. Photo/Stanford Rosenthal

Kevin McGill of the Associated Press has received the Levees.org ‘Seal of Approval’ for accurately stating the facts associated with the flooding of metro New Orleans.

In his April 1, 2011 article, Mr. McGill reports on how nearly 100 blighted properties will be auctioned in New Orleans.

“It’s the latest step in the city’s efforts to diminish a blight problem that was bad before the 2005 storm and worse after the levee breaches and flooding that damaged an estimated 134,000 housing units.”

At our kick-off rally in January of 2006, we stated that we would not stop our work until the true facts about the New Orleans flooding became mainstream knowledge. Associated Press reporter Kevin McGill’s article is clear evidence that we are making progress.

Click here for AP story.