Sandy Rosenthal at BP Protest in New Orleans. Photo by Matthew Hinton, the Times Picayune
Levees.org believes in the media and works hard to educate reporters and editors on the true root cause of the metro New Orleans flooding. So we respond every time a reporter uses ‘Katrina shorthand‘ or says “Katrina flooded New Orleans.”
Such laziness absolves the humans responsible for the levee breaches and does a disservice to the 55% of the American population that lives in counties protected by levees.
So, it’s encouraging that decorated journalist John McQuaid has – on his own- joined in our what some might think Quixotic quest to get the media to stop using harmful shorthand when describing the metro New Orleans flooding in 2005.
McQuaid called out two national reporters for their “selective amnesia” on the facts surrounding Hurricane Katrina in a recent blogosphere exchange.
Yural Levin of the National Review in a discussion comparing the BP oil crisis to the flooding of New Orleans had written:
“…these things (hurricanes) happen, and sometimes they happen on a scale that is just too great to be easily addressed.”
McQuaid didn’t allow this baloney sandwich to go unnoticed.
“The notion that “these things happen” and there’s nothing we can do about it beforehand overlooks the history and the facts of the flood,” McQuaid wrote on Truth/Slant. “Levin simply treats the disaster as an abstract argument for the pointlessness of emergency preparedness, which is an odd argument indeed.”
McQuaid then went to chide Kevin Drum for ignoring the “levees-falling-down” issue and for responding with “Katrina would have been an immense disaster no matter what…”
On that, McQuaid admonished:
“I realize levees are a lot less attention-grabbing than “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” – or the exotic mechanics of top kills and junk shots, for that matter. But this is an important issue, a significant failure of American knowhow and accountability that has never really been addressed by the government. That oversight will almost certainly lead to more disasters. It’s essential context for understanding Katrina, emergency management, and government dysfunction in general. Don’t leave it out, blogosphere.”
We agree with Mr. McQuaid. We also agree on comparing the BP manmade disaster with the levee failures because at the center of both is engineers and lack of federal oversight.
Yet again, due to the carelessness of engineers and lax federal oversight, a large portion of south Louisiana’s geography is laid waste.
