We are going to hear a lot on this subject as August 29--the day two years ago that Hurricane Katrina made its final landfall, as a Category 3 storm, near the Mississippi/Louisiana border--approaches. I plan to blog continuously about the upcoming anniversary from now until the actual date. To that end--and to set the tone--I'd like to start off by quoting the powerful opening paragraph of Michael Grunwald's recent Time magazine cover story about the continuing vulnerability of New Orleans and the many pathetic failures of the Corps of Engineers (and their congressional supervisors). The scathing Grunwald piece deserves, and will soon receive, an extensive post here, but for now, let's just hear his own resonant words, which really speak for themselves:
The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe.
