Posted on 08/31/2006 4:02:02 PM PDT by auzerais
Kevin Aylward: Katrina: Forget everything you thought you knew Kevin Aylward, The Examiner Aug 31, 2006
WASHINGTON - If you’ve only gotten your news about Hurricane Katrina from the mainstream media, everything you think you know about Katrina flooding New Orleans is probably wrong. On this first anniversary of the tragedy, while the networks congratulate themselves on their often wildly inaccurate reporting in the days following Katrina, there’s a far more important story not being told.
We’ve all heard the story: In the early morning hours of Aug 29, 2005, the Category 4 Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, overwhelming the New Orleans levee system and flooding the city. That story is, frankly, an urban legend.
In the year since Katrina, we’ve learned that the storm was a Category 1 by the time she hit New Orleans. We’ve also learned that the primary levee breach — the one that caused 70 percent of the flooding in the city — was not caused by the storm surge but by poor engineering.
After months of dissembling and obfuscation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — the designers of the levee system — the Corps was forced to admit what all the outside experts were saying; critical engineering mistakes caused the walls that were supposed to protect the city to collapse before they were overtopped by the storm surge. And on the east side of the city, the flooding was largely caused by a shipping channel the Corps dug three decades earlier.
The Great Flood of New Orleans was not a natural disaster but a man made one.
What was not really told to the public however is how quickly the floodwalls in the city collapsed — how high the water got up the walls before they failed. This is an important question to a city rebuilding — $250 billion in infrastructure. It is commonly assumed by the public that the water must have been quite high.
A newly released video, taken by New Orleans firefighters as the 17th Street Canal floodwall was actually in the process of breaking during Katrina, shockingly, seems to dispute that.
The video, taken while the damage in the floodwall is still limited to meters and not city blocks shows the water in the canal at near normal levels. (The wall fell over a period of about two hours.)
The real importance of the video comes from looking not at the breach itself, but at the wall of the canal where the water appears to be less than 1 meter above normal. City planners were hoping that only 2.5 meters of water would enter the canal.
Months after the storm, it was reported that water had been seeping underneath the levee for almost a year near the break. Homeowners in the area reported it, but the report never got into the right hands.
Engineers had not properly accounted for the soil conditions in the area and the pilings supporting the wall were not long enough, allowing water to come under the levee.
Poor soils in the area, engineering blunders, bureaucratic snafus, but only a little water conspired to wash out the foundation of the floodwall and produce the majority of New Orleans’ flooding.
Surprisingly, the video gives us every indication that New Orleans was doomed with or without Katrina. The amount of water in the canal was not unusual and, in fact, that wall had held far more water on previous occasions; that was before it was undermined for the better part of a year.
All this leads to the even more shocking conclusion that Hurricane Katrina probably saved 50,000 lives.
That levee was doomed. While Katrina was the last straw, it was destined to fail. Studies done before the storm indicated that if a major hurricane overwhelmed the city’s levees, as many as 100,000 people would die as a result.
If the levee had failed without warning, there would have been no evacuation, no preparation, no state/federal support, no Coast Guardsmen in helicopters etc. If you think Katrina was bad with governmental preparations, consider an event half that size without it.
To be sure, while this single floodwall accounted for the majority of the flooding in New Orleans, the story does not end there. Even without the 17th street canal wall failing, there would have been significant flooding especially to the east side of the city and the Gulf Coast would have been hammered either way.
But the story of the flooding in New Orleans that the media is telling is largely wrong.
The Great Flood of New Orleans was not a natural disaster. It was an engineering disaster bound to happen sooner or later.
Kevin Aylward is President of Wizbang, LLC and publisher of Wizbang. Examiner
What, and have Shep Smith have to retract all his whining and grandstanding about the helpless standed people on the freeway he DROVE into with a camera team in 4 (countem, four) SUVs?
Nah, never happen.
Fascinating! Totally contradicts what I thought happened.
"I wonder if any of this revelation will ever make the MSM??"
I doubt it.....not via "kevin", anyway.....
Results 1 - 10 of about 33,200 for "by Kevin Aylward". (0.03 seconds)
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22by+Kevin+Aylward%22&hl=en&lr=&start=0&sa=N
Good find. Thanks for posting this.
That is believable. Most of the Hurricane related damage was caused on the Gulf coast and east side of New Orleans. Whether the levees in New Orleans failed due to improper construction or high water still misses the fact that everyone should have been prepared for their failure. Including the Mayor of the flooded School Buses.
The MSM has been falling all over itself with how courageous and altruistic its coverage was. What a sham. Saw a report about the local NBC TV news affiliate in New Orleans that 'braved the storm' just to bring the images to people affected by the storm. They were patting themselves on the back with how their coverage 'helped safe lives'. Apparently the MSM is unaware that televisions require electrical power to operate. No one who was flooded had electrical power. Therefore, no one affected was helped by their coverage. But lets not let facts get in the way of the MSM making the story all about them.
Forward to Spike Lee.
Oh wait, he needs to pimp that new film.
Sorry.
Next...
ping
Quite a few people down here have battery operated televsions. I have one. They are small and not to expensive and actually get pretty good reception if you're in the city.
Wow. Thanks for the correction. Did not know you had battery operated TV's. I think we can assume that they have to remain dry to operate ? I was assuming however that most people were using battery operated radios for emergency use.
Bookmark.....thanks
Thanks for posting. Who's responsibility was it to make sure the levees were functional, local, state government? Who oversees the corp of engineers?
Instead of posting a google search, why not explain what it is you are seeing that makes you take that position. Link to a specific article.
This story is consistent with what I was told very recently by a resident of NOLA. Now I wonder how many local government people, contractors and engineers knew about the defects, and for how long.
I caught onto the media BS during the LA Olympics, when they had stories about cabs and stores hiking prices during the human crush. Of course they said nothing of the inflated prices the networks charged for advertising during this same time. ONLY the rich and exalted, can charge higher rates, without being accused of being profiteers.
This has been known in NOLA for a number of months.
I had 2 battery operated TVs. The Watchman I still have and the other one was left behind to the flood. Most everyone I know in hurricane country has both portable TVs and portable radios.
Ping.
Great article, thanks for posting it!
*
battery operated TV's can be bought for under $20 at any Target store or truckstop ,, they also have a radio tuner and will run for quite a while on batteries or you can plug into either 110V AC or 12V dc power..
"Link to a specific article."
Thats exactly what I couldn't find....except, of course, for the single ("Examiner") opinion piece at the top of this thread.....plenty of blogstuff, though.
So like I said re MSM getting onto this....not via Kevin.
Thanks for proving my point. There was a flaw that developed over time. A time in which the local levee board was responsible for inspecting and maintaining the levees. The local levee board failed in that mission. The thing was leaking for OVER A YEAR. Had the levee board done their job, they would have known about the design flaw by the leak. Once identified, they could have gone to the Corps and asked for assistance in repairs. Like I said before, plenty of blame to go around.
Interesting. I don't recall seeing a single refuge with one in New Orleans and the looters seemed more interested in picking up the unportable ones from the local Walmart. Quite a few Freepers questioned what the looters thought they were going to do with the TV. At any rate, good info and I can guarantee that hardly anyone here in earthquake country has a portable TV. Perhaps we should acquire them, but judging by the accuracy of Boob Tube news I think we are much better off with battery operated radios IMHO. But I could see where at the very least viewing the graphic of the satellite imagery of the Hurricane could come in quite handy. But then again a lap top with a satellite connection could get you access to one of the fine Hurricane threads here on Freerepublic. Links to everything and no dealing with the MSM Grim Reaper Agents.
I don't have cable TV, so I need to ask a question. On my battery-powered TV here in hurricane country, I've never seen a way to tune in FOX News when my power is off. Is it on wireless - IOW, where would I get a battery-powered TV that would get cable?
sorry, the guy is factually incorrect. Max winds in Downtown NO were 100 mph, which would have been Cat 2. However, just 40 miles to the soutneast, the winds were at Cat 4, and because of the counterclockwise wind circulation, all that water got pushed through Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans didn't take a direct hit from the wind itself, but got a Cat3-4 storm surge.
secondly, the 17th street canal breach had absolutely nothing to do with the flooding in Plaquemines and St Bernard.
This is a semantic game, and he's bending the rules. Katrina was a strong category 3 storm when it made landfall just to the east of New Orleans. The reference here to a category 1 is based on wind strengths measured in the city proper, but note these do not characterize the storm itself. Anyway, the Wikipedia article allows that these winds were of category 1 or category 2.
Of course, the storm surge was generated by a very large category 5 hurricane. It overwhelmed some of the outer levees, but it is true that the failures along the canals were under conditions where they were expected to hold. Nevertheless it's ridiculous to say they were not caused by the storm surge.
I note that in an article in Popular Mechanics, the notion that the 17th Street Canal levee failed due to the sheet pile foundations being "7 ft. shorter than called for in the design" is pretty well debunked. But, on the other hand, the replacements are going from 23 ft. (the original design) to 50 ft. deep. And in the PM article, the cause(s) of 3 breaches, the 17th Street Canal breach, and 2 in the London Avenue Canal, which DID flood large areas, are still regarded as "a mystery", as no overtopping of the levees there occurred.
The PM article is actually pretty good, though to my engineer's mind I do see a couple problems with it. For one thing, going from 23 ft. deep to 50 ft. deep is fairly impressive, but, it is NOT "almost three times the depth of the existing foundations". ("Why can't people do math?" - Robert Heinlein)
I just want to thank our Coast Guard for their tireless work one year ago.
Reality Bump! -- Katrina saves thousands of lives!
In my mind, the Coast Guard rescue crews were the heroes of that whole event!
I had the pleasure of setting a young man straight on the subject of the levees not too long ago. I was shopping at Trader Joe's, a store that caters to the somewhat crunchy crowd; organic foods, etc. I was checking out, and the young man mentioned my accent, asked where I was from (MS), and I mentioned we were moving back there. The subject turned to Katrina, of course, and he said that he'd read that the levees had failed because the Federal Govt. had denied the state any money to fix them. I proceeded to give the young man a short course in the abject corruption of Louisiana politics, and told him that they'd had enough money over the last 20 years to build a state of the art system in New Orleans, but that the Levee Board members had spread the money out into their own districts and had not allocated the money where it SHOULD have gone. Don't know if he believed me, but at least he got an alternate point of view that will counter what he's heard among his obviously liberal news sources.
"Thanks for proving my point."
Nice try, but it totally DISPROVES your point. It does however totally support that the flood was the result of federal incompetence. Too bad you can't even admit that since you as a taxpayer are paying for that incompetence. If the ACE had simply done the job right, the taxpayer wouldn't be stuck with a $112,000,000,000 bill.
"Interesting. I don't recall seeing a single refuge with one in New Orleans"
When you lose everything in a flood, you don't carry around things that no longer work. You also don't get to take personal items on rescue boats and choppers, although a watchman can fit in your pocket. The only problem is that the portable LCD TVs eat batteries pretty fast.
"battery operated TV's can be bought for under $20 at any Target store or truckstop ,, they also have a radio tuner and will run for quite a while on batteries or you can plug into either 110V AC or 12V dc power.."
They are cheap - especially the B/W ones. Some stores and banks give them away for opening an account down in hurricane country. There is no reason not to have one on hand when the power goes out whether from an icestorm or a hurricane or earthquake.
Same with Lap Tops. Good old battery operated transistor radios (now digital) are the best for low power use.
No one answered my question from the other day. How do you get cable stations on a battery-powered TV? I don't have a generator or voltage converter or a car battery. Thanks.
There was an AWESOME photo documentary by a young man posted on Flickr right after Katrina. (Someone here at FR posted the link). THe documentary showed all kinds of photos and shared a lot of details and blatant lies the MSM were spewing. Anyway, the documentary was posted all of one day and then mysteriously was removed from the Flickr website.
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