Laura on March 19, 2007 at 5:38 PM

You’re right, the Corps of Engineers are to blame for the damage, but I think Blanco and Nagin are to blame for much of the death. Blanco, it is my understanding, could have forced a mandatory evacuation but refused to. But I agree completely that many people CHOSE not to leave. I guess my issue is that I hate to blame the victim, but I really hate to hear the Bush blaming that went on and is what is in the minds of most Americans. But in reality, you’re right, people chose not to leave. It’s similar to people who choose to go on insane hike’s, get stranded, and hundreds of thousands of tax dollars are spent trying to save them… only to a much more extreme degree.

Back to the election. I guess I get what you’re saying, and now I do recall the whole “run off” situation, etc. and also completely understand what you mean about name recognition… It’s just hard for me to conceive of this being the guy who people had no choice but to vote for:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=F_bbuc4cgJs

And one more thing (argh! I DO NOT want to defend Nagin!) – it’s really not a fair statement to say that he’s “almost entirely responsible” for the deaths. People didn’t want to go. Nagin was on the news early and often begging people to get out, saying “this is the big one, get out NOW.” Which Katrina was, before the track changed slightly to the east, hitting St. Bernard and the MS Gulf coast instead of New Orleans. People just decided to “ride it out” – a phrase which drives me right over the edge.

Nagin blew it with the buses and the train, I completely admit. I don’t have an explanation or an excuse for that. I doubt even he does. But many of the people who stayed had the means to leave and chose not to, and it’s not right to lay that at his feet. And it also leaves out the Corps of Engineers.

Better work on that reading comprehension, Limerick. In the past I have agreed with you on many issues and doubtless will again in the future, but on this one, you are way off base. I’ve explained clearly how we ended up with Nagin for a second term. Quite simply, the alternative was worse, and since he’d done a good job before Katrina, we had every reason to hope he’d pull himself together. It’s frustrating that he hasn’t, but he’s STILL better than Landreiu.

Laura on March 19, 2007 at 4:57 PM

Laura, I’ve tried to stay away from that part of the discission as I desperately tried to figure out exactly what Bradky’s argument is… but I do have to comment on why you have Nagin again. I understand the argument about the the alternative being worse, but after his Katrina performance, are you telling me there weren’t at least a handful of people who would have sought the office and been able to easily gain a lot of support simply because they weren’t Ray “buses” Nagin? I mean, you should have been able to put up anyone and defeat him, after he let all of those people die, no?

I’m not saying elect Mitch by any means, but how is it that there were no other candidates? I’m sure there must have been a few early on in the race that considered a run. It seems clear that people there must be complete idiots if they couldn’t have urged even a retarded homeless person to run just to get Nagin out of there.

I’m really just at a loss for how anyone could vote for a guy who is almost entirely responsible for the deaths in NOLA.

And while you’re talking about what America deserves, I guess that means you’ll deserve gas prices at the levels they were immediately after Katrina, and much higher costs for fresh seafood, etc…

Yep that’s me. Uninformed. Stupid KKK Irish IRA Bushitler.

N.O. deserves Nagin. America deserves a new wetland. Like the people in the Mississippi valley who build their houses on the river front…….you got flooded? Gee imagine that.

And no I didn’t cherrypick, I just gave you a detailed explanation, hoping you’d digest it.

I still don’t understand what your point is… I looked back at how we got here… I was glancing through comments and saw you provided three links, one of which was FactCheck.org, a site I usually like to check. But as soon as I got there I realized it was VERY outdated and WRONG.

So I provided information that the storm was a category 1 to 2 at most in NOLA. You chose to cite CYA “probablies” in the same article, contending that the storm surge was in fact still category 5. But as studies have shown, THE SURGE NEVER EVEN CAME CLOSE TO OVERTOPPING THE LEVEES, AS IT WOULD HAVE STARTED TO WITH A SURGE OF A CATEGORY 3.

Again, I have no idea what you’re attempting to argue.

Cherry pick is what you did with the article if your description of what I did was cherry picking. Further it seems that you are less concerned with the issue of the storm and more involved with your anger about the underreporting in regards to the MSM.

I’m not sure why you’re even arguing this,

You admitted you hadn’t followed the earlier part of the thread

I’m not going to go back and figure out exactly what you guys are debating

and jumped in with your rage about race baiting.
The news was incorrect, no argument there, but the fact that you know some of the initial reporting was not true shows that eventually the truth did come out — just not front page like you seem to feel was merited.

RW,
The quote I cited was from the article YOU referenced. Why would I need to look at other links you provide when you are not even reading them yourself?

Bradky on March 19, 2007 at 8:46 AM

Bradky, I’m going to attempt to be civil with you, despite my frustration with your cherry-picking and dishonesty. YOU completely ignore the part of the link I sent showing that the storm was a category 1 to 2 AT MOST in New Orleans, and go straight for the “but the surge was still PROBABLY a 5″. Probably isn’t going to cut it. As my second link (which may be a blog, but I link it because it links to other WAPO pieces in a well organized post) shows, the surge WAS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO THAT. THE SURGE WAS SO WEAK, IT NEVER EVEN CAME CLOSE TO OVERTOPPING, WHICH IT WOULD HAVE HAD IT EVEN BEEN A CATEGORY 3.

I’m not sure why you’re even arguing this, but these are things that were discovered over time, but VERY underreported. Should that shock you? We haven’t been told by the MSM that a disproportionate amount of white people died, and disproportionately LOW amount of black people died there. We haven’t been told that the bodies in the Superdone weren’t “piling up” that there weren’t gang battles and rapes going on everywhere you looked. We aren’t told that Bush begged them to force a mandatory evacuation. We aren’t told that Blanco blocked the Red Cross from entering the city. etc. etc. etc. Why are you hanging on so tightly to this LIE that the storm surge was still massive? Do you work for the Corps of Engineers or something?

I’m not very optimistic that this will occur,

I’m not either. Between the ultra-slow disbursement of the Federal aid – and the fact that MS got a *boatload* more money per capita than we did – the illegal aliens, lack of medical care, high murder rate, and the difficulty in getting home insurance… people are very close to a revolt around here, and I’m hoping for something to just push it a little bit farther. There has been political change – the old levee boards were dismantled, for instance – but it hasn’t gone far enough yet. I’ll stick it out for a few more years, and fight as hard as I can to make things better, but in six years when my daughter gets out of college, if things aren’t better we’re moving on. And I know an awful lot of people with similar plans.

It’s going to take a few years for it all to shake out, and these simple declarative sentences (i.e. “bulldoze it”) that people keep tossing out are not helpful or based on accurate information.

Laura on March 19, 2007 at 11:55 AM

I agree with this but it is going to take a lot of frank and honest discussion among politicians and the state’s citizens to get a realistic plan in place. I’m not very optimistic that this will occur, especially in Louisiana.

It’s going to take a few years for it all to shake out, and these simple declarative sentences (i.e. “bulldoze it”) that people keep tossing out are not helpful or based on accurate information.

Good points on the importance of NO in regards to the economy. I’m not an advocate of let it all slip into the ocean but now is the time for everyone to be realistic about what NO will look like in 25 or 50 years. Couple of things to consider:

(1) It will take years to clean up the mess. For most of the people who had homes that were destroyed they will not wait that long to get started somewhere else.
(2) Unless the wetlands are restored NO is destined for the majority of it to be underwater in 100 years.
(3) The charming “street performers” didn’t do this because they loved doing it – they did it because the job situation was next to hopeless. Service based economies always make it tough for the majority of urban residents. Nagin’s first order of business after the storm was to get the casinos up and running again.

So what to do?
Start with an honest dialog about how to preserve it for the economic reasons you mentioned without trying to rebuild it in totality and planning on a similar catastrophe in the next 100 years.
It would seem that some of NO could be maintained with its historical district and outlying areas be the residential areas who commute in daily.

Your points about hurricanes in other states are relevant- I don’t like the idea of insuring houses in hurricane zones that are dependent on federal relief to make up the difference.

And once again, while I don’t defend Nagin’s actions in his second term, HE WAS THE REFORM CANDIDATE. In his first term he was a reformer to the point that he had his own cousin arrested and charged. Before Katrina, he was a good mayor. We had every reason to hope that he would pull himself together. The other candidate was Mitch Landreiu, one of the Cajun Kennedys and every bit as corrupt. His sister got into the Senate due to the votes of thousands of dead people. We don’t want more of the same old corruption, so people voted against Mitch in the hope that Nagin wouldn’t let us down. The fact that Nagin did indeed let us down doesn’t make his opponent a better candidate.

RightWinged on March 18, 2007 at 9:33 PM

RW,
The quote I cited was from the article YOU referenced. Why would I need to look at other links you provide when you are not even reading them yourself?

I don’t care a single iota for NO. When they re-elected this SOB they lost any sympathy I have for the city. Bulldoze the place flat and turn it into a wetland for Americas contribution to carbon-offsets.

One last thing about the levees – they were seeping for over a year before Katrina. People complained, and nothing was done. And where the seepage was reported, was where they broke. There’s actually video of the 17th St. Canal break, early in the break, that shows they were nowhere near overtopping. The Corps managed to suppress that video for almost a year, and when it finally did go public, there wasn’t much outrage because most of the country had moved on. But there are an awful lot of levees all over the country that the Corps has mismanaged – there was a report on that recently – and what happened here will happen again, probably in CA.

http://www.brendanloy.com/2005/10/katrina-may-have-been-weaker-than.html

The storm surge WAS NOT as powerful as some claim. The Corps of Engineers and others have been playing a game of CYA and you need to check out ALL of WaPos coverage, and listen to what experts actually studying what happened and reconstructing it to learn how it really went down. Again, NOLA only experienced category 1 to 2 conditions at most and the levees should have held… they were supposed to withstand category 3, and even above that, the only concerns expressed (publicly and to officials anyway) was overtopping, which would have caused flooding, but not total flooding as happened when the levees broke. And again, the “but it still had a category 5 storm surge” doesn’t wash, because as we know, the surge never even came close to overtopping, which it would easily have, had there been a category 5 style storm surge.

Give that man a prize!

Hey Ray,

Got Hate?

William

I’m not going to go back and figure out exactly what you guys are debating, but I have to point out that contrary to that FactCheck.org link which is very outdated, Katrina WAS NOT Category 4 to 5. It was in fact a 3 that struck east of NOLA. NOLA only endured category 1 to 2 conditions.
RightWinged on March 18, 2007 at 7:21 PM

In the article you cited the following is quoted and contradicts your own assertions.

“In the Gulf, Katrina was a Category 5 storm, and the surge was still Category 5 when it hit the ground,” said spokesman Susan Jackson. “It’s the surge — the pressure of water against those levee walls — that’s the most important factor, not the winds.”

National Hurricane Center scientists similarly noted that though Katrina was probably a Category 3 storm at landfall, with winds of 125 mph, its destructive force was probably amplified by the fact it had been a Category 5 only a day before landfall and whipped the waters up beyond Category 3 levels. While the winds die off quickly, waves do not.

Yesterday’s report echoed earlier conclusions by Louisiana State University experts who had gathered their own data on the storm’s intensity.