“If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.”

Seventeen hundred years before Christ, Bel Am I Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon and the first king of the Babylonian Empire, wrote the Code of Hammurabi which is one of the first known set of laws of the civilized world. The above is just one of them, code number 229 of 282.

To this day, sculptures, carvings, and reliefs of Hammurabi appear in many of our government halls including the building of the Supreme Court and that of the members of Congress in the District of Columbia. Our leaders should be familiar with this first lawmaker.

Stemming from the Code of Hammurabi, penalties for violation of codes for buildings and fences were once even harsher than they are now. Interpretations of the above law say that for actual buildings, the Code of Hammurabi stated that if a building killed the owner or his son, the builder would be put to death. If the building was found structurally unsound, the builder had to fix the edifice out of his own money. If a wall was crumbling, the builder also had to repair the wall without further compensation.

We should apply this law to our own federal government.

New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina is widely blamed for the disaster in New Orleans when it was truly a man made disaster. Everyone in the country should know this by now particularly since we had two other hurricanes of comparable strength within weeks of Katrina. Rita hit southeast Texas and Wilma crossed the Gulf hitting the west coast of Florida. Neither Rita nor Wilma caused one tenth of the damage seen in New Orleans when the levees broke.

Built by the government’s Army Corps of Engineers, the levees meant to protect Nola from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain have always been inadequate although the Corps and the government claimed they could withstand a Category Three hurricane (sustained winds from 116 to 135 miles per hour).

The National Hurricane Center that flies planes through the eye of hurricanes recording wind speed and direction of the system’s movement claimed that during Katrina sustained winds over New Orleans were 95 miles per hour (one mph beyond a Category One hurricane). That’s a long way from the Category Three that the levees were supposed to withstand. This bit of news was quickly quenched by the powers that be and George W. Bush’s unusual visit to the Center in South Florida buried it forever.

Lake Pontchartrain is normally one foot above sea level while the City of New Orleans ranges from sea level and a few feet below in the French Quarter to as much as ten feet below sea level in some of the poor neighborhoods. It was the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain that broke and when they broke the city flooded until level with the Lake, the flooded city water rising and the lake water falling until even.

Another thing never acknowledged is that because Katrina came ashore East of the Crescent City and in our hemisphere hurricanes revolve counterclockwise, the 95 mph winds came out of the north and combined with the waves generated were sufficient to take out the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge as well as the levees in three areas.

Hundreds died and thousands were displaced from their homes, many never to return. And President Bush made several well publicized trips to New Orleans promising to rebuild the city “better than ever” in the “greatest reconstructive effort the world has ever seen.”

Since then, blunders and simply ignoring the major problems of New Orleans has been the rule instead of keeping promises. No doubt, Bush’s unprecedented visit to the National Hurricane Center assured him of the unlikely probability of another large hurricane coming ashore in the manner of Katrina.

The most that’s been done to solve the main problem of inadequate levees is to repair the two breakage areas by restoring them to their original condition. Instead of driving reinforced steel coated concrete fifteen to twenty feet into the soft soil of New Orleans, even the Army Corps says they would need to be driven down fifty to sixty feet to be effective against a Category Three hurricane.

Don’t you feel that it’s about time we adopt the code of Hammurabi and hold the builders responsible? After all, the “walls” crumbled. We needn’t execute anybody but they can certainly be punished. How about a dozen years in Guantanamo and personal payments to right the levee’s admitted inadequacy?