Katrina's Smoking Gun Appears--Does Anybody Notice?

Today's Times-Picayune again leads the media pack, obtaining documents that forensic investigators looking into the Katrina floodwall breaches have found, documents that clearly pinpoint the moment when the Corps of Engineers appear to have engaged in what the paper's Chris Rose bluntly calls "criminal negligence". The documents, dating from 1990, show that the Corps' Vicksburg, Miss., office clearly calls into question engineering assumptions about soil strengths at the site of the 17th St. Canal floodwall project, then in final design review by the Corps.

Corps documents show the mistake of overly optimistic levee strength was detected by its Vicksburg, Miss., office, which directed local engineers to make changes. But when the chief engineer in New Orleans replied that the results were based on "engineering judgment," his superiors dropped the issue.

While such responses are normally expected to include numbers and statistics backing up such "judgment", Vicksburg received no such supporting evidence. Why superiors walked away from the issue, leaving New Orleans to drown, is not yet known.

Last night on CNN, Anderson Cooper interviewed two men who found bodies of lost relatives in the mass of debris that is the lower Ninth Ward. He patted himself on the back for continuing to cover the story, pointing out that he had asked Gov. Blanco on Nov 16, on the air, who had made the decision in early October to stop the search for bodies, even showing tape of that exchange. But by the evidence of last night's program, that was the last reporting he or anyone else at CNN did on the question. Nor was there any reporting on the reason the Lower NInth is still as covered in debris, making access to the homes still standing so dangerous and difficult. The reason: neither the city nor the state has the tax base to fund such a massive cleanup, and the Feds don't appear to be leaping to the task. It's one thing to tug at our emotions with the horrible loss and discovery experienced by those two men; it's quite another to equip us with the understanding to know why these things are happening. There was a time when the latter task was seen as the prime responsibility of the news media.