If you’ve only gotten your news about Hurricane Katrina from the mainstream media, everything you think you know about Katrina flooding New Orleans is probably wrong. On this first anniversary of the tragedy, while the networks congratulate themselves on their often wildly inaccurate reporting in the days following Katrina, there’s a far more important story not being told.
I wouldn’t have seen Kevin Aylward’s analysis without Captain Ed’s referral and commentary. Kevin’s opening quoted above is a true statement. Read on for a succinct summary of what we now know.
Surprisingly, the video gives us every indication that New Orleans was doomed with or without Katrina. The amount of water in the canal was not unusual and, in fact, that wall had held far more water on previous occasions; that was before it was undermined for the better part of a year.
All this leads to the even more shocking conclusion that Hurricane Katrina probably saved 50,000 lives.
That levee was doomed. While Katrina was the last straw, it was destined to fail. Studies done before the storm indicated that if a major hurricane overwhelmed the city’s levees, as many as 100,000 people would die as a result.
If the levee had failed without warning, there would have been no evacuation, no preparation, no state/federal support, no Coast Guardsmen in helicopters etc. If you think Katrina was bad with governmental preparations, consider an event half that size without it.
Captain Ed wrote
The same bad reporting that happened when the eyes of the nation were fixed on New Orleans — do you recall news reports of cannibalism, roving bands of rapists, hundreds of homicides, toxic flood waters that would kill on contact — persisted in the weeks afterwards. The news agencies seemed so intent on scoring points off of the Bush administration that they neglected to research the real problems in New Orleans: the lack of any coordinated local response, the refusal of Louisiana to authorize military intervention, and the real reason for the levee failure.
Incredibly, the evidence was available almost from the start. A video taken by firefighters at the start of the collapse showed the water levels behind the levees as far below what had been assumed, and far below water levels in the past. This led investigators to look further into symptoms of an engineering failure — and they discovered that residents had warned for months about seepage under the levees, a sign that the walls had already begun to catastrophically fail.
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