Riding on the City of New Orleans.
Who's to blame?
Interestingly, the Army Corps of Engineers is being sued for $77 billion dollars for the failure of the levees and the subsequent disaster to the City of New Orleans. CNN posts a poll, so far showing that 63% of respondents (voluntary readers of CNN) are not in favor of making that award, 37% favor. These results always bother me, as for the most part there are only two choices given, while in reality there are many different alternatives.
The award can be lowered, which is most likely the actual result expected by the city; however, asking for the maximum figure means that lowering the award would leave a larger amount in the end.
The Army Corps of Engineers can sue its planning consultants and its contractors for their failures. Although it is the body in charge of the total building project that formed the levees, failures in analysis of soil type (evidently the muck wasn't up to the amount of cohesion it was supposed to exhibit), inadequate total power to withstand Mother Nature on the part of the actual levees, steel and concrete not being of strength enough to resist the forces of the storm, ongoing maintenance of the levee walls and their underpinnings, all of these enter into the performance of the levees during Hurricane Katrina.
Then there's the force of the storm. Katrina was cataclysmic in every way, and not only hit with great force but then turned and dumped on the city again in its massive hit on the whole area, inundating the whole delta.
Then there's the inability of the city to sue the several areas of government itself. Given chance after chance to upgrade the levees, Congress did not allocate and the state did not request the huge structural upgrades, and maintenance, that it would have taken to meet the disaster of a storm like Katrina. Reasonably, though, would that be a foresight that one expects of the various government bodies - until after the event, anyway?
Rehashing like this makes the whole exercise of cleanup after Katrina into an exercise in disfunction. A city has been destroyed, many lives lost, tens of thousands of lives (455,000 is the pre-flood population) uprooted. Now what that event comes to is haggling over points of the level of he-said they-said.
So does 63% of your CNN audience coolly say 'get over it' and turn the Army Corps of Engineers into a sympathetic victim of unreasonable tort? Okay, maybe that's wording this vote in wingnuttia language. And at this point the wingnut is reminding us that Clinton didn't fund the construction so that's why this maladministration failed the people of New Orleans.
When a poll like this presents two choices, the poll taker has to play a role. Symbolically choosing to give New Orleans what it asks assumes that you make amends to the ultimate level. Symbolically choosing to protect the defendant, the Army Corps of Engineers, requires you to judge New Orleans as asking for more than it deserves.
The Corps designed the levee system that was supposed to protect the low-lying city of New Orleans. But after Katrina stuck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, steel-and-concrete levees eroded and failed in several areas, flooding about 80 percent of the city with water up to 20 feet deep.
By now even I am asking, well, what do you choose? I don't know. Now I've failed as a pundit. Sometimes you have to admit, you aren't the final authority. I've made a lot of contributions to the city, and to individuals uprooted by Katrina, some of them here in our area.
We're riding on the City of New Orleans. And we'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
Interestingly, the Army Corps of Engineers is being sued for $77 billion dollars for the failure of the levees and the subsequent disaster to the City of New Orleans. CNN posts a poll, so far showing that 63% of respondents (voluntary readers of CNN) are not in favor of making that award, 37% favor. These results always bother me, as for the most part there are only two choices given, while in reality there are many different alternatives.
The award can be lowered, which is most likely the actual result expected by the city; however, asking for the maximum figure means that lowering the award would leave a larger amount in the end.
The Army Corps of Engineers can sue its planning consultants and its contractors for their failures. Although it is the body in charge of the total building project that formed the levees, failures in analysis of soil type (evidently the muck wasn't up to the amount of cohesion it was supposed to exhibit), inadequate total power to withstand Mother Nature on the part of the actual levees, steel and concrete not being of strength enough to resist the forces of the storm, ongoing maintenance of the levee walls and their underpinnings, all of these enter into the performance of the levees during Hurricane Katrina.
Then there's the force of the storm. Katrina was cataclysmic in every way, and not only hit with great force but then turned and dumped on the city again in its massive hit on the whole area, inundating the whole delta.
Then there's the inability of the city to sue the several areas of government itself. Given chance after chance to upgrade the levees, Congress did not allocate and the state did not request the huge structural upgrades, and maintenance, that it would have taken to meet the disaster of a storm like Katrina. Reasonably, though, would that be a foresight that one expects of the various government bodies - until after the event, anyway?
Rehashing like this makes the whole exercise of cleanup after Katrina into an exercise in disfunction. A city has been destroyed, many lives lost, tens of thousands of lives (455,000 is the pre-flood population) uprooted. Now what that event comes to is haggling over points of the level of he-said they-said.
So does 63% of your CNN audience coolly say 'get over it' and turn the Army Corps of Engineers into a sympathetic victim of unreasonable tort? Okay, maybe that's wording this vote in wingnuttia language. And at this point the wingnut is reminding us that Clinton didn't fund the construction so that's why this maladministration failed the people of New Orleans.
When a poll like this presents two choices, the poll taker has to play a role. Symbolically choosing to give New Orleans what it asks assumes that you make amends to the ultimate level. Symbolically choosing to protect the defendant, the Army Corps of Engineers, requires you to judge New Orleans as asking for more than it deserves.
The Corps designed the levee system that was supposed to protect the low-lying city of New Orleans. But after Katrina stuck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, steel-and-concrete levees eroded and failed in several areas, flooding about 80 percent of the city with water up to 20 feet deep.
By now even I am asking, well, what do you choose? I don't know. Now I've failed as a pundit. Sometimes you have to admit, you aren't the final authority. I've made a lot of contributions to the city, and to individuals uprooted by Katrina, some of them here in our area.
We're riding on the City of New Orleans. And we'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
Labels: Katrina
posted by Ruth at 12:37 AM
1 Comments:
Just one more example of the nation turning their back on my hometown. I guess we are not REAL Americans. The levees failed in 27 places under a force they were designedto stand up to. It ends up that they were designed incorrectly. 100,000's of lives, American lives, destroyed, but America doesn't want to hear that. They want to punish us for what? Being different? Having a largely black, poor population? For showing the world that our government is either totally incompetent or totally heartless? We have seen the best and the worst of America since our world was destroyed. I will never feel the same about my own country. America has lost its way.
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