Today, New Years Day, many articles are covering the most memorable events of the decade. Naturally, they all include the metro New Orleans flood.
But the former chief of Gannett's Capitol Bureau stands out and gets a "seal of approval" from us for accurately describing the August 2005 flooding.
Today, John Hill, discussing the effect of hurricanes on Louisiana, is quoted as saying,
...absent the Noah-like flooding of New Orleans because of levee failures, Katrina would have taken second place to Rita.
Hill effectively resisted simply saying 'Katrina flooded New Orleans.' Indeed, that would be like saying traffic broke the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis. Both the traffic and Katrina exposed structural flaws. Both revealed blatant civil engineering mistakes.
John McQuaid co-author of Path of Destruction with Mark Schleifstein has observed this is more than a matter of semantics.
Says McQuaid, using Katrina as 'shorthand' and its association with a natural disaster is confusing because it implies "what the heck are those people doing living down there?"
The flooding of metro New Orleans was a civil engineering failure, the worst in the world since Chernobyl according to Dr. Ray Seed, levee expert and geotechnical specialist at the University of California Berkeley.
And responsibility for the failures belongs overwhelmingly and primarily to the federal Army Corps of Engineers.
Follow Sandy Rosenthal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/LeveesOrg
True, the storm kicked booty, but then that was over and the levees burst because they were built wrong...and the rest as we say is history.
I will never forget that storm, or that flood.
They are two separate animals. The former Natural, the latter Feral.
It is way past time of getting the whole truth.
This is such an important story. Not just for New Orleans but for the rest of the country. Most people in the US don't realize that 55% of the population of the United States is protected by levees and flood walls, most built and maintained by the Corps of Engineers. The engineering failures that caused the devastation here could happen anywhere. People need to understand that next time it might be their turn.
Hold the Corps Accountable!
Servando Mendez
You and Levees.org have done so much to raise awareness about the flooding of our city, not only in New Orleans, but throughout the nation.
I was in the South Lakeview area of New Orleans for Katrina, due to my car breaking down 2 days prior to the storm. The winds from the storm were very strong but there really wasn't that much rain.
It is unbelievable that over 4 years later, many people still do not know the true facts - that it was the failure of the levees and flood walls that caused the flooding of New Orleans. Not Katrina.
On June 1st, 2006, General Carl Strock, of the USACE, stood up and took full responsibility for the flooding of New Orleans.
"A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data.
"This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, `We've had a catastrophic failure,"' Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/01/national/main1675244.shtml
Thank you Sandy and Levees.org!
Roberta Miller
continue to flood out New Orleans.