Well we all knew that. It was God who was responsible, although which God has yet to be sorted out for blame. Was it YWH? Or Allah, or Shiva, the destroyer? Or maybe the Buddha in one of his incarnations….

Also, I was shocked, truly shocked, to find that left wingers who piss off the editor of Red State are told they cannot post again if they are mean to Mr. BUsh. Gee, that must really cut down on the number of hits..

Very true, Guy Cabot. The World Trade Center Towers were said to be able to withstand the impact of a 737, which means they would technically be able to withstand something bigger, say, a 747.

Oh, never mind. Guy Cabot, full of shit as usual.

Except, then the WTC would have went down in ‘93, and NO would have flooded out years ago.

The World Trade Center Towers were said to be able to withstand the impact of a 737, which means they would technically be able to withstand something bigger, say, a 747.

In reality, the WTCs were designed to withstand the impact of a 707. As it was, the towers actually withstood the impact of the 767s quite well. The failure mode in the case of the WTC was enormous amounts of fuel and resulting fires causing structural failure and the eventual collapse of the towers.

For the nitty-gritty details see the FEMA World Trade Center Building Performance Study

We now have a president who takes no responsibility for anything….this is the ultimate sign of poor leadership. Whether or not it is his fault, he is in the chair and he is, ultimately, the guy who takes responsibility. A new quote for the president…”THe buck stops..uh..over there somewhere, maybe behind the couch…no, no…I think the dog has it…”

This is an administration that is still running a campaign..everything they do is politically motivated or with, at least, a political end in sight. THey have to accept that they have failed to plan for the future and they have failed to repair mistakes of the past. And, they have to accept political criticism for their mistakes because that is how it works.

LIke many Americans (now more than 55%) I am deeply disappointed in this guy. He must succeed in his job as leader for all of us, any of us, to survive. Even though we may despise him, we still need him to get his act together. We all suffer when he fails. But, it often seems as if he is only interested in the political benefit of his actions to his loyal supporters, not how they affect all of us, as a nation, as a people, as Americans. We need leadership and, although he may be working hard to get it done now, most of us(more than 50%) are pessimistic about his ability.

Planning and criticism, based solely on politics or political motiviation, is suicide for this country.

This is the most telling quote. Whether it was tax cuts for the rich, or the Iraq Struggle, priorities were changed in the past 4 years. Every administration has to decide what is important. This administration thought that Iraq and tax cuts for the rich were important, New Orleans was not. This time it bit them in the ass- oh, not them, the poor people that actually thought their tax dollar was going to Homeland Security.

Jay C. also betrays his ignorance of civil engineering; when a design is said to be capable of weathering a Cat 3 hurricane–it means in reality, it probably could withstand a Cat 4 or even 5 under certain circumstances. When you class such engineering designs, there’s always a safety margin over and above the design limits.

Budget cuts haven’t made disaster preparedness any easier.

Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. Some 250 emergency officials attended. Many of the scenarios now playing out, including a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, were discussed in that drill for a fictional storm named Pam.

This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens.

Funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response director.

He said “Our efforts are now focused on three priorities: Our first priority is to save lives…. Our second priority is to sustain lives by ensuring adequate food, water, shelter and medical supplies for survivors and dedicated citizens — dislocate…

There are several glaring problems with this statement… but let’s start with the easy ones: Shipping docks, in fact most Port facilities aren’t safer now - so if all the money went to secure them, then why didn’t it happen?

The fact is funds earmarked for a variety of legitimate activities have been diverted to cover the massive boondoggle that Iraq has become… come on, what else could you call the CPA’s loss of millions, perhaps billions due to poor/no accounting - all this from the “BPA, we know how to run things” administration?!!!

your implication is that cutting funds for New Orleans s levies is okay.

Not at all. My implication is that the levees were rated at Cat3-ready and that up to Sunday, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that level of protection was enough, at least while we had other needs (You know, securing Nuclear reactors, inspecting shipping docks, and all the other litany of items we normally hear about.)

Again, the right puts party above country. There will be plenty of time to assess why this happened and how we can stop it from happening again.

It is disturbing, but not unexpected, that the right has taken a “Make excuses for Bush first” position on this disaster.

This sounds so like the 9/11 excuse machine- “But the PDB didn’t say WHEN the planes will attack”, “But Bush couldn’t predict that a Cat 5 hurricane actually WOULD happen”. The thing is, you prepare.

There are questions raised on what precautions the Republicans made to help make New Orleans safer. These questions can wait for another time. So can the excuses.

We all knew what happened on 9/11. We’ve had four years to plan and prepare for contingencies–not just to try and prevent attacks but to mitigate the aftermath via emergency preparedness.

What happened, GOP?

How much longer will you carry the water for these incompetents?

and not only is there not enough …. there is not CLOSE to enough of the above…

As for Disasaster Preparedness….Failure.

One more failure for Bushco.

Shifting federal budget erodes protection from levees;
Because of cuts, hurricane risk grows

By Sheila Grissett, East Jefferson bureau

For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area’s east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won’t be finished for at least another decade.

“I guess people look around and think there’s a complete system in place, that we’re just out here trying to put icing on the cake,” said Mervin Morehiser, who manages the “Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity” levee project for the Army Corps of Engineers. “And we aren’t saying that the sky is falling, but people should know that this is a work in progress, and there’s more important work yet to do before there is a complete system in place.”

In reality, levee building is a long-term undertaking. Section by section, earth is piled into walls as high as 20 feet to protect land on the east bank of the Mississippi River from water that a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane could shove out of Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne. But the levees gradually settle into southeast Louisiana’s mucky subsoil, and every few years, the corps comes back, section by section, to pile on more dirt in what insiders call a “lift.”

“It has always been part of our long-range plan to raise each section of the levee four or even five times,” said Al Naomi, the corps’ senior project manager. “After that, we think the levee might have stabilized and not need further raisings.”

Time for next lift

It’s time now for the next lifts in a number of places that have sunk 2 to 4 feet from their design elevations. These include in Kenner west of the Pontchartrain Center, Metairie between Causeway Boulevard and Clearview Parkway, Norco and St. Rose in St. Charles Parish, the Bayou Sauvage area of eastern New Orleans, and remote marshland areas of eastern St. Bernard Parish.

The subsidence is expected.

What’s new, said Morehiser and Naomi, is that the agency has run out of money for the next round of lifts. Naomi said this is the first time a lack of money has stopped major corps work on the levees since the project began in 1967.

“I can’t tell you exactly what that could mean this hurricane season if we get a major storm,” Naomi said. “It would depend on the path and speed of the storm, the angle that it hits us.

“But I can tell you that we would be better off if the levees were raised, . . . and I think it’s important and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status of these projects.”

Levees on the east bank of New Orleans, as well as some in eastern St. Bernard Parish, are among the area’s oldest and have had several lifts. Corps engineers said the next lift might be the last they need.

But the levees on the east bank of St. Charles and Jefferson parishes are much younger, and most stretches have had only one or two lifts.

“This project isn’t expected to end for another 13 to 15 years,” Morehiser said. “They aren’t really finished levees at this point. We don’t even turn them over to their local sponsors until we consider them stable, which is years from now.”

The levees are designed to handle a storm surge of 11 feet, and every additional foot of levee above that is intended to contain waves that otherwise would top the levee. The height of individual levee segments vary.

“When levees are below grade, as ours are in many spots right now, they’re more vulnerable to waves pouring over them and degrading them,” Naomi said. “We’re not below storm-surge elevation yet, but we will be if we stop raising our levees as they subside.”

Bush budget falls short

The Bush administration’s proposed fiscal 2005 budget includes only $3.9 million for the east bank hurricane project. Congress likely will increase that amount, although last year it bumped up the administration’s $3 million proposal only to $5.5 million.

“I needed $11 million this year, and I got $5.5 million,” Naomi said. “I need $22.5 million next year to do everything that needs doing, and the first $4.5 million of that will go to pay four contractors who couldn’t get paid this year.”

Naomi said the corps already owes four contractors more than $2 million for hurricane protection work they’ve done this year without pay, and he expects the figure to climb to about $4.5 million by Sept. 30, the end of the federal fiscal year.

The challenge now, said emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri in Jefferson Parish and Terry Tullier in New Orleans, is for southeast Louisiana somehow to persuade those who control federal spending that protection from major storms and flooding are matters of homeland security.

“It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay,” Maestri said. “Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”

No I didn’t. I concurred that the STORY EXISTS, but it’s got holes bigger than the eye of that hurricane. Why don’t you read the rebuttal?

It is disturbing, but not unexpected, that the right has taken a  Make excuses for Bush first position on this disaster.

Umm..no. The fact is, the LEFT, before bodies have even been counted, have already made a natural disaster a political issue. “BUSH IS TO BLAME!! BUSH IS TO BLAME!!!” And you’re saying the right is putting party above country? You’re so full of sheot it’s coming out of your ears.

As for the levees, all the facts gathered reach the conclusion in the piece I linked above:

Was it rational and defensible to shift funding from any source toward defense- and war-related activities in the aftermath of 9/11? Of course. Did that shift leave the levees unready to handle Katrina’s deadly burden? No. The levees were inherently unready: even at maximum proposed funding, their design was only for a Cat3 storm, not the Cat4/5 that Katrina was. It is true that in 2004, proposals were floated to upgrade to a Cat4/5-capable levee system; it is also true that even in an ideal situation, the studies — not the construction! — necessary to assess what that would entail would not be finished before 2008

Not according to this article, Farris.