This is a transcript of Levees.Org Founder Sandy Rosenthal’s Kickoff Rally Day Statement on January 21, 2006 at the US Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans Division Headquarters.
We begin today with a moment of silence to remember those who lost their lives due to the catastrophic levee failures of August 29, 2005.
We the citizens of Greater New Orleans have a message to the people of the United States.
Our beautiful city is destroyed and more than one thousand have died because the levees collapsed. This should not have happened because Katrina missed metro New Orleans. We sustained the winds of a Cat 1 and the storm surge of a Cat 2 yet levees broke all over the city – many without being over topped.
The levees failed because they were not properly designed, and the responsibility for the design and the construction of the levees belongs 100% to the US Army Corps of Engineers –a federal agency.
Metro New Orleans was not wiped out by a hurricane. Metro New Orleans was wiped out by a federal project done wrong. And there is no need to wait until June for the engineering studies to tell us the broken levees had design flaws. The evidence speaks for itself!
So now let us speak. Today, we stand together and say to America, and especially our nation’s leaders, we were flooded because of federal failures that engineering experts are calling the worst engineering failure in US history.
We the citizens of Greater New Orleans, hold the federal government and the US Army Corps of Engineers accountable for what happened to us!
It is time for Congress to acknowledge the federal government’s central role in the flood.
And at nearly 5 months later, it is high time that Congress accepts their responsibility and set aside the appropriate funding to rebuild our levees, our wetlands and our homes.
There are many good people at the Corps of Engineers who are working hard to improve our levees. And we thank them for their efforts. The failures at the Corps are institutional and date back decades. Our intention is not to blame current employees or any single individual.
Our mission is education. We are a non-partisan, non-sectarian grassroots group. Only the passion of citizens powers us. Our mission is to send America the facts about the metro New Orleans flood and we will not stop until this information becomes mainstream.
And at this moment our journey begins!
