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Saying Katrina destroyed New Orleans is like saying traffic destroyed the Minneapolis bridge

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Sandy Rosenthal

For the third time this season, Becky Bohrer, reporter for the Associated Press has used lazy shorthand when describing the federal levee failures in metro New Orleans that devastated the region.

Yesterday, Bohrer wrote that Southern University in New Orleans was “virtually wiped out by Hurricane Katrina nearly four years ago.”

To say Katrina wiped out Southern U is like saying traffic wiped out the Minneapolis bridge.

Both Katrina and the traffic precipitated structural failures and exposed blatant civil engineering incompetence.

I am not alone in my condemnation of using “Katrina” as shorthand for federal levee failures. John McQuaid, noted author and journalist specializing in science, environment, and various forms of government dysfunction agrees with me.

Becky Bohrer of the AP won’t stop using Katrina shorthand

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Three times since April 16, 2009, Becky Bohrer of the Associated press has described the flooding in metro New Orleans as caused by Katrina.

John McQuaid, author of “Path of Destruction, a book on the history leading up to Hurricane Katrina, condemns this.

“…The shorthand of “New Orleans levees overtopped” – with its underlying associations of “natural disaster swamps city below sea level – what the heck are those people doing living down there?…

Three times, I have asked Levees.org supporters to contact Bohrer’s editor, and Bohrer herself, and point out the error, and the damage, by using such shorthand.

Certainly, the Associated Press wire service must hold its writers to a high standard of accuracy and clarity. This applies as well when talking about what caused the damage to the city of New Orleans in 2005, as the AP has so much influence over what the country understands about New Orleans.

Here are links to the three articles Bohrer wrote using the harmful shorthand.

Aug 17, 2009
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=AP&date=20090817&id=10280247

May 13, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j8-X1nHwH-vlFVwKRts8eixOSjHwD985IDG00

April 16, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hq6L7yRJi7Olo9iC018lpoiDk_RwD97J2K2G3

John McQuaid chastises NY Times reporter over Corps’ role in New Orleans flooding

Monday, August 17th, 2009

In the days, weeks, and months after the levees broke, the American people were handed a packet of myths. The myth packet maximized and exaggerated the vulnerability of south Louisiana, the culpability of those who chose to live there, and the strength of the storm. The packet minimized the role of the Army Corps of Engineers in the flood protection failures.

Since our founding, Levees.org has devoted a lot of time to challenging myths when they appear in print. So we were thrilled when we saw hurricane expert and author John McQuaid properly chastise a New York Times reporter for his shorthand. McQuaid observed sloppy work by Timothy Egan in a cover piece on Dave Eggers’s new book Zeitoun.

“Day 2, the world changes. Zeitoun wakes to a sea of water, after the levees have been overtopped. He’s neck-deep in a city of a thousand acts of desperation.”

As any New Orleans resident will tell you, the levees around central New Orleans, including the area where Zeitoun lives, were never overtopped. Rather, badly-designed floodwalls collapsed and breached in several places before Katrina’s storm surge got anywhere near the top. There was some overtopping in more-exposed areas to the east, but the vast majority of the flooding was caused by those breaches – in other words, human error by the Corps of Engineers.

This is not a minor semantic point.

Click here for the full post by John McQuaid.
http://johnmcquaid.com/2009/08/16/the-katrina-flood-was-a-man-made-disaster-part-xxiii/