Happy Dog wrote:
"Matt Whiting" wrote


I've not blamed the victims of this disaster. I do blame the local and
state governments


Many of the victims are to blame. Doesn't it give you pause when you learn
the extent to which the people left there are behaving in a way *opposite*
to what you would do or expect others to do? Using a natural disaster as an
opportunity to plunder and rape and attack those that are trying to help is
*exactly* what you should expect from people who have socially evolved over
decades to live off the efforts of others. It isn't politically correct to
say this but most of the people carting off alcohol and TV sets instead of
essential supplies have lived as wards of the welfare state, and quite
happily so, for their entire lives.

From this mornings newspaper...
(Read the parts about 20% saying they would stay in their homes during
any storm.)


Warning ignored
Eerily accurate, 2004 exercise predicted fate of New Orleans
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Alan Judd
COX NEWS SERVICE

Hurricane Pam was the big one. With 120-mph winds and 20 inches of rain,
it breached New Orleans’ aged levees, flooded half a million buildings
and stranded thousands of residents in a ruined city below sea level.

Unlike Hurricane Katrina, though, Pam wasn’t real. It was a
computer-generated exercise in July 2004 that provided the latest
confirmation of what researchers, disaster planners and engineers have
contended for decades: New Orleans needed a better response plan for a
catastrophic hurricane.

Years of conferences, computer models, animated simulations and disaster
drills had made it clear what could happen if a major storm struck
southeastern Louisiana.

Still, when Katrina hit last week, disaster authorities were, by all
appearances, horribly illprepared.

Officials couldn’t get tens of thousands of residents to leave
vulnerable coastal regions before the storm, despite mandatory
evacuation orders. In New Orleans, many people were sent to a shelter of
last resort, the Superdome. Conditions there quickly became untenable:
no food, no water, no electricity, no medical care, no working restrooms.

With hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people dead, and with relief slow
in coming, the city descended into what the New Orleans newspaper, the
Times-Picayune, called ‘‘mayhem and madness."

Such chaos, hurricane experts said, was both predictable and preventable.

‘‘We pretty much knew this would happen somewhere along the line," said
Gregory W. Stone, director of the Coastal Studies Institute at Louisiana
State University. He is among the scientists who have issued dire
warnings for years.

‘‘A lot of that has not been taken seriously" by the federal government,
Stone said. ‘‘That’s a regrettable thing to say."

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat on the
House Homeland Security Committee, concurred.

The government has shown ‘‘not much of a commitment to this issue,"
Thompson said. Congress will investigate whether the suffering caused by
Katrina could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, he said.

‘‘Why aren’t we prepared for that kind of occurrence?"

When the University of New Orleans surveyed the city’s residents about
their personal hurricane evacuation plans last year, it found that many
people had none.

More than one in five of those surveyed said they would stay at home,
even during a major storm. Researchers estimated that at least 100,000
New Orleans residents had no means to evacuate: no car, not enough money
for airfare or a bus ticket, no friends or family to help them leave town.

‘‘They knew they were going to have a large number of people who weren’t
going to be able to get out on their own," said Jay Baker, a geography
professor who studies hurricanes at Florida State University.

But authorities apparently never put plans in place to evacuate them
before a storm. Instead, a day before Katrina hit, the city opened its
massive stadium, the Superdome, as a shelter of last resort — nothing
more, Baker said, than ‘‘a place for people to have a better chance to
survive than if they stayed in their homes."

It quickly became obvious that the Superdome was far from an ideal shelter.

‘‘Putting 20,000 to 30,000 people into a facility that will surely lose
power and therefore lose air conditioning and lights, not to mention
begin to get flooded, is not something that’s very appropriate," LSU’s
Stone said. ‘‘These people are trapped like rats."

No one, he said, seemed to consider how quickly conditions at the
stadium would deteriorate. Even as evacuations got under way, reports
from the Superdome and another nearby shelter depicted virtual anarchy:
fighting, filth and bodies of the dead left untended.

‘‘We need to be able to streamline how we move from the occurrence of
the disaster to relief," said Thompson, the Mississippi congressman.
‘‘We probably could have moved more people in faster. That probably
means more military people."

Hurricane experts say shelters should have been opened outside New
Orleans, both for the storm and the duration of the recovery. Officials
say New Orleans could be uninhabitable for six months.

After the Hurricane Pam exercise, authorities said the New Orleans area
would need shelters for just 100 days after a catastrophic storm. Once
the drill was complete, the Federal Emergency Management Agency hired a
consulting firm to develop recommendations. Well into the second
hurricane season since the drill, no final report from the firm has been
publicly released.

On ABC-TV Thursday, President Bush acknowledged the ‘‘frustration" of
New Orleans residents, but said, ‘‘I don’t think anyone anticipated the
breach of the levees."

In fact, such a failure has been forecast for years.

Since 2000, the Army Corps of Engineers has been studying the idea of
reinforcing the levees to withstand a Category 5 storm, the strongest on
the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. The 300 miles of existing levees, at
17 feet, were designed to protect New Orleans — parts of which are as
much as 10 feet below sea level — from no more than a Category 3 hurricane.

‘‘We certainly understood the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5
hurricane," Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the corps’ chief of engineers, told
reporters Thursday in a telephone briefing.

Last spring, the Army engineers’ New Orleans office complained that
budget cuts proposed by the Bush administration and approved by Congress
‘‘will prevent the corps from addressing these pressing needs."

Thompson said the corps’ arguments contain ‘‘significant merit."

‘‘What concerns me is the fact that for the last several budgets, the
president has pretty much zeroed out a lot of the corps’ work," Thompson
said. ‘‘We (in Congress) always had to go back in and try to help. I
have not seen flood control as a real priority in this president’s budgets."

The levee construction is one of two massive public-works projects that
hurricane experts say could have protected New Orleans from Katrina.

Since 1990, Louisiana’s congressional delegation has sought funding — a
total of $14 billion — to restore the state’s coastal marshes and
barrier islands. Scientists say the marshes and islands act as a first
line of defense for New Orleans and the region’s other populated areas
by absorbing much of a storm’s force.

Built to prevent incessant flooding, the New Orleans levees also
interrupted the natural flow of water to the marshes south of the city.
Before the levees were built, that flow carried sediment that could
restore the wetlands, which are under constant barrage from waves and wind.

According to LSU’s Hurricane Center, which has studied the matter
extensively, more than 1 million acres of wetlands have disappeared
since 1930. LSU scientists estimate that the area is losing 28,000 acres
a year — the equivalent of a football field every half-hour.

‘‘At the start of every new hurricane season on June 1," Stone said,
‘‘Louisiana has become more vulnerable to storm surge inundation and
surge damage than it was the previous hurricane season."

Yet, 15 years after the restoration began, Congress has appropriated
just $540 million of the $14 billion needed to complete the project.

‘‘This is a regrettable demonstration of ignoring the magnitude of the
problem," Stone said. ‘‘That could well have retarded some of the water
finding its way" into the city.

‘‘What’s been missing is a sense of urgency," said Rep. Bobby Jindal,
R-La., a longtime proponent of coastal restoration. After Katrina, he
said, ‘‘hopefully, it will help us convince people who weren’t convinced
before."

Some scientists, along with public officials, have questioned whether
the project’s benefits would be worth its cost.

Stone, referring to some of the worst casualty estimates, put it in
starker terms: ‘‘How do you weigh the economic value against four or
five or six thousand deaths?"