What Do You Know? Katrina Wasn't Bush's Fault After All
Media Blog
Stephen Spruiell Reporting
In the days after Katrina hit, many in the press — most notably the New York Times editorial board — jumped to the conclusion that a Republican-driven lack of funding for flood protection in New Orleans was responsible for the flooding that followed the hurricane. It turns out that the more we learn about the disaster, the more we learn how wrong those critics were:
<<< The evidence, by now, is overwhelming: Beautiful, decadent New Orleans wasn't doomed by Hurricane Katrina but by decades of human incompetence and neglect. As far as the drowned city is concerned, the greatest natural disaster in the nation's history would have been just a messy inconvenience if not for the fumbling hand of man.
The mortal threat to New Orleans, as Katrina plowed into the Gulf Coast, was not the powerful winds — Mississippi took the brunt of those — but the massive storm surge the hurricane generated. We now know that the levees, floodwalls and other barriers protecting the city were, for the most part, plenty tall enough and theoretically strong enough to keep the waters at bay. On paper, New Orleans should have ended up wet and wounded, but basically intact.
What happened instead was "the single most costly catastrophic failure of an engineered system in history," according to a report issued last week by the Independent Levee Investigation Team, a blue-ribbon panel led by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and funded by the National Science Foundation. >>>
Most of this system was constructed long before Bush assumed the presidency. The "blame penny-pinching Republicans" explanation for the levee failures was always shallow, but in light of recent investigations it looks like a particularly misinformed rush to judgment. The problem, which I wrote about here, was not a lack of funds but a complete lack of prioritization regarding how those funds were spent.
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