“No hurricane….no damage,” he said.
Hecker wrote to the flood victim because she had expressed surprise that the Times (in a recent article) attributed the horrific flooding on August 29, 2005 to a storm.
She had included in her letter that she had “lost a lifetime of priceless, irreplaceable art, family heirlooms, (her) health, financial and emotional stability.”
Here is Hecker’s exact reply:
I am sympathetic to your view that many bad decisions led to the damage after Hurricane Katrina. As I hope you are aware, The Times published many article on the subject after the storm and has continued to report from the city. But had there been no Hurricane Katrina, engineerrng and other decisions would not have caused the damage. So I think we are correct in attributing the cause to Katrina.
Don Hecker, Senior Editor, New York Times
Levees.org maintains that this defense is only superficially correct. To say a storm devastated New Orleans disregards what really happened on August 29, 2005 when a major American city went underwater and over 1,600 people died.
Please sign our petition to the New York Times.
Urge the paper to be more specific on what really caused the devastating flooding.
http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/1625/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2959