A decorated senior reporter with TIME magazine has connected the dots and told the whole story about what happened in New Orleans and south Louisiana on August 29, two years ago.
Michael Grunwald also nicely summarizes everything in the first paragraph.
“The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn’t a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city’s defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment “Heckuva job, Brownie.” The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city’s man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government’s response, but they still haven’t come to grips with the government’s responsibility for the catastrophe.”
Sure, many think they know the whole Flood Story, but they really don’t. When something as terrible as the destruction of a major city happens, it’s because lots of things went wrong, and Grunwald does a pretty good job of telling the complete story.
What happened in New Orleans could happen anywhere. Please go to www.levees.org, your source for flood protection information everywhere, and join us.
Sandy Rosenthal
Founder, Levees.Org
Click here for the article in TIME.
