Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Katrina

Yesterday I heard Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff saying that here were actually two catastrophes in New Orleans this week: first Hurricane Katrina, and then the breach in the levees that allowed Lake Pontchartrain to flow into the debilitated city, and drown it.

At the time, this struck me as kind of an odd thing to say. I mean, yes, technically, the hurricane and the various nasty things caused by the hurricane are separate things, but that’s kind of like saying that being caught out in the rain and getting wet are distinct and unrelated phenomena.

But now, after reading statements by various Bush Administration officials tying themselves into rhetorical pretzels to escape blame for the horror that New Orleans has become, it all makes perfect sense. Because here’s the thing: they planned for the hurricane, they were perfectly prepared for a hurricane, but this levee thing — my God, no one could have seen that coming! How were we to know!

We know that the Bushies don’t live in the reality-based community, so this formulation probably makes perfect sense to everyone caught inside the White House’s Happy Fantasy Bubble, but, really, it’s absolutely ridiculous. Quite apart from the fact that the various governments had two days warning about Katrina, this exact scenario has been discussed and dissected ad nauseam from pretty much the moment New Orleans was established in its sinking bowl. This wasn’t ignorance; this was negligence, or carelessness, or incompetence, or all three wrapped up together.

There are probably a lot of reasons for the scale of this failure, from the slow degradation of FEMA during Bush’s tenure to the resources being drained by the Iraq war to last year’s inexplicable decision to deny New Orleans the funds necessary to shore up its levees, but what it comes down to is this: we are watching a profound failure of governance, at every level. It’s a national tragedy.

Hunter says it best:

We have witnessed two disasters this week. The first was an act of nature. The second was not. The second disaster, still ongoing, is unforgivable.

That’s the only word that comes to mind, a word I keep repeating to myself. These deaths, these men, these women, these infants dying now in these hours didn’t have to happen. They did not have to die waiting for convoys to gather outside their city or for reservists to stand alongside their shattered police forces. They did not have to wait in darkness and fear for help to arrive, only to struggle for days without that help ever coming.

This is not politics. This is not partisanship.

This is unforgivable.

So, yes, there are two catastrophes here: Katrina, and our federal government’s breathtaking incompetence in the face of Katrina. Chertoff got it half-right; which, for this administration, isn’t bad at all.

For me the failures are on many levels, least of which is our own arrogance that we should and can build on such a location (lower than sea level, on fault lines in CA, etc.). It is the foolish man that builds his house upon the sand.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00060286-CB58-1315-8B5883414B7F0000

Cool article. Agree that building New Orleans in a bowl wasn’t a great idea, but my point is that it was such an obviously bad idea with such obviously, inevitably cataclysmic consequences that the fed gov’s claim that it couldn’t have possibly imagined this scenario makes them out to be either boobs or liars. And, with a few exceptions (cough W cough), I think most of the people running the show up their are demoniacally intelligent. So that leaves lying. And if they’re going to the trouble to lie about their ignorance, and then going to the further trouble to pin the blame on the local governments, then they must know they screwed up big.