The Hole in the Narrative

Sorry to be -- sorry to have to be -- repetitive, but maybe this little section of this little website isn't as agenda-setting as it should be. Today's NYT carries a perfectly reasonable story about the probable cost and lead time for providing New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with Cat 5 hurricane protection. And Brian Williams previews an emotional return to the city on tonight's newscast. What's missing? Let's imagine a spate of stories on the cost of rebuilding the Twin Towers, or the emotional return to Ground Zero after three months, without a mention of the cause of the disaster. If billions are needed to make New Orleans whole, the question of the political will to do that job is intertwined with the national sense of the narrative. Was New Orleans drowned by Katrina or, as a spate of preliminary forensic studies of the floodwall breaches indicate, by the design and construction flaws (and, as the Times Picayune revealed last week, the lazy approach to floodwall inspection) attributable to the Army Corps of Engineers.

And still, after all this time, a question rarely asked and certainly never answered: why didn't the Corps have sandbags pre-filled and pre-positioned when Katrina hit and the floodwalls breached?