The Truth Comes Out

A few things conspired to make the New Orleans disaster worse than it had to be. I was watching the chief coordinator of planning for New Orleans this evening and he had conducted simulations three years ago projecting the damage of a category 5 hurricane.
And he called it right; only a few things happened to prevent him from getting the protection he needed for the City. Bush virtually doomed two of the projects to failure when he cut them badly. One was to reinforce the dikes; the other was to strengthen their ability to pump out water should the dikes be breached. Although New Orleans was viewed as the third greatest potential threat to the US, the Chief Planner said that the money was taken out of these projects to be used for Homeland Security. The other thing was ongoing: It was the destruction of the marshlands and islands that surround New Orleans and acted as somewhat of a buffer. When the corps of engineers started extending the dikes all the way up the river, it prevented the alluvial deposits that had originally shaped the whole Delta area from traveling downstream to replenish the nutrients needed by the wetlands resulting in their eventual demise. This could have been prevented but then again it involved money that the government didn't want to provide. After all, they had squeezed by two times before without spending any money on fixing the problem, maybe they could squeeze by again. Great thinking for the greatest superpower in the land now made to look like a third world nation.
Therefore, it was clear that the blame lay not with New Orleans, the city or its planners, but with the Federal Government that was not particularly predisposed to helping out a city that was mostly democratic when it voted.

Les Aaron