These articles seem to compare what’s happening in NOLA with local leadership, taxes, and the spirit of residents in the other cities. Some even compare these factors with what happened after the Chicago fire, Atlanta after Sherman, or other cities that have rebounded successfully after disaster. It’s interesting reading and great history, but they all seem to miss the main point and the major difference.
It was flooding that ravaged New Orleans and the flooding was due entirely to the levees that failed during hurricane Katrina. This extensive levee system was designed, built, and maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. The blame and the responsibility for reconstruction lie entirely on the shoulders of the federal government, no one else.
Not even Katrina can be blamed for the failure of these levees because they were supposedly built to withstand the force of a Category Three hurricane. And that’s what Katrina was, a Category Three hurricane, as were Rita and Wilma that followed in the same season. If you want a valid comparison, take a look at the damage Rita did to Texas and Wilma to Florida. Had the levees held, had the levees done the job they were supposed to do, the damage to New Orleans would have been similar to what you would find in Texas and Florida.
But we haven’t heard much about the damage and the recoveries in those two states have we? How come? Could it be because one is George Bush’s home state and the other has his brother for governor?
There’s even evidence that the side of Katrina that hit New Orleans was much less than a Category Three hurricane which would have brought sustained winds of 115 to 134 miles per hour to the Crescent City. Before President Bush’s unprecedented trip to the South Florida headquarters of the National Weather service, NOAA had reported Katrina’s maximum sustained winds over the mostly below sea level city at 95 miles per hour. This would put the part of the hurricane that hit New Orleans at barely a Category Two that has sustained winds of 95 to 114 miles per hour close to its eye. Serious winds, but considerably less than the levees were supposed to withstand.
President Bush brought in his own generators to back-light the famous cathedral in Jackson Square for the sterling speech in which he promised that New Orleans would be rebuilt bigger and better than ever under the greatest reconstruction effort the world has ever seen. I expected to witness something as great as the islands Dubai is building in the Persian Gulf in hopes of switching their economy from oil to tourism. At the very least, I expected the federal government to hold up its end of the deal by rebuilding a better dike system, maybe even starting the plan to restore barrier islands and wetlands while doing so.
But then Bush began to cop out.
The first thing he did was to say that he wanted to wait and see what the “locals” wanted to do. What their plan to rebuild was. After all, it was their city and their state.
Meeting in Baton Rouge, the Council to Rebuild New Orleans said that they wanted the levees rebuilt to withstand a Category Five hurricane, any hurricane with winds over 155 mph. They said it would take this level of protection to bring back citizens and businesses scattered across the country. They also estimated costs at $22 billion.
Now, you would think that twenty-two billion would not be prohibitive for an administration currently borrowing more than a hundred billion a month, supporting invasions and occupations, and planning even more of the same. After all, New Orleans is one of our historic and colorful treasures plus a unique and vital port for exporting goods from the Midwest via the mighty Mississippi River. A river that is also under the control of the federal government’s Army Corps of Engineers as well as its tributaries.
So far, Bush has committed somewhere around $7 billion to levee reconstruction and Congress has yet to approve most of that inadequate sum. The objective is to put the levees back to the level of protection before Katrina and hope that such a hurricane doesn’t happen again.
Meanwhile, we have many stories of corruption, graft, inadequacy, favoritism, even racial slurs and debacle circulating in every direction. The “spirit” that helped rebuild San Francisco, Chicago, and other devastated cities seems to be missing.
We seem to have adopted the same attitude we have towards Iraq and other quagmires we find ourselves in – fa-ged-abow-dit.