Posted on 08/27/2011 10:45:49 AM PDT by PROCON
The buses will be rolling north as a gigantic school bus caravan beginning in late September.
It will be a historic model for future hurricane evacuations.
“The majority of the damage to New Orleans was a lack of preparedness for flooding which occurred in the aftermath when the dikes broke. The local Democrat-controlled dike commission had been preparing to divert funds for maintenance to the construction of a casino.”
Corps: Levees’ design caused deadly failure
Updated 6/1/2006 10:30 PM ET
By Alan Levin, USA TODAY
New Orleans’ levees failed during Hurricane Katrina because federal engineers for decades did not anticipate the potential height of storm waters and underestimated the strength required to hold them back, the Army Corps of Engineers concluded Thursday.
“That is a very sobering thing for us,” said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the corps chief. “This is the first instance of a failure of a corps design of any significance.”
A well-designed levee system might not have held back the high waves and storm surge that swamped nearly 80% of New Orleans and vast areas nearby, but it would have minimized damage and allowed a swifter recovery, the corps said in a 6,000-page report.
The design of critical levee walls that failed near Lake Pontchartrain on New Orleans’ north side was “marginal,” the report said. Tests conducted by the corps in the 1980s showed that the levees could crumble under pressure from high water — as they did after the storm hit on Aug. 29 — but those findings were not used in the design.
The corps oversees construction of flood controls in the nation’s waterways. Katrina damaged 169 miles of the 350-mile levee system that protects the New Orleans area and caused more than 1,570 deaths in Louisiana alone. The corps, Strock said, is “deeply saddened and enormously troubled by the suffering of so many.”
The report, prepared with the help of outside engineers and scientists, offers the most complete account yet of why the levees failed. Some engineers said the report did not go far enough in identifying failures within the corps. A report last month by engineers at the University of California-Berkeley urged that the corps be made more efficient and less vulnerable to political pressure.
“If you cannot fix the organizational problems, the flood control problems will never be fixed,” said Robert Bea, a Berkeley professor who helped prepare last month’s analysis.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-01-levees_x.htm
That's okay for you young'uns, but us older types need the security of four wheels :)
LOL...and no doubt they’ll have Pelosi on as an “expert” in bipartisanship when Congress reconvenes.
The New Orleans Disaster Plan was a work of art. Unfortunately, it was hidden away in some filing cabinet and never opened. Have Nagin explain that first thing!
If you do the opposite of what he suggests you are more likely to be correct..
Hey, get off my thread..:=)
5 days notice? WRONG. All of the computer models took it into Florida until Saturday morning when all hell broke loose.
“Au Contraire! Ray-Ray had 5 days notice. He didn’t get serious and mention the word ‘evacuation’ until SUNDAY. ONE day before landfall. “
Why are you spouting off absolute CRAP? The evacuation for New Orleans came on a Saturday morning. Sheesh.
Dear Deadwood,
Katrina DID cross Florida, then went out into the Gulf, picked up power and THEN aimed for the Gulf coast with the center making landfall on the border of Louisiana and Mississippi. The ENTIRE Gulf coast was gearing up for this storm that was strong, weakened and then got strong AGAIN. For any civilian authority figure, who had a city population with most of the city BELOW SEA LEVEL to NOT order evacuations is, in my opinion, CRIMINAL.
Read up on it, bub.
http://www.brookings.edu/fp/projects/homeland/katrinatimeline.pdf
EXCUSE ME?? Were you here in N.O. that weekend?
I was, with a helpless father and a 5 year old. And there was NO talk of evacuation of N.O. on Saturday morning. Lower Plaquemines, yes- the city, NO. We heard the FIRST call for real evacuation of N.O. while we were in Nobile the next day. We would have STAYED PUT- even with my father’s condition- because local officials were in a dither and were NOT decisive.
Our lives were saved by friends from Mobile who called Saturday morning because of what they were hearing about N.O. THERE. We were getting no such news here- and they were shocked that we weren’t paniced.
If we had waited to evacuate when ordered-on SUNDAY- my father would never have survived the 15+ hour road trip. He barely survived the 10 hour one.
Don’t tell me what I lived.
Don’t rewrite history when there are people alive who lived it either.
Replays of news from then are very selective.
Every book written about Katrina details how the officials did not want to call a mandatory evacuation of N.O. until Sunday.
The local news media was CRAP. The local government was CRAP. The levees were CRAP.
Katrina was being called ‘ blustery day’ Saturday morning on local tv broadcasts. That’s the truth! My father died weeks after Katrina because of all we went through. Every detail is burned into my mind. Call me anything you like- you can’t change the truth.
From Wikipedia:
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Just after midnight, at 12:40 AM CDT (0540 UTC), Hurricane Katrina reached Category 4 intensity with 145 mph (233 km/h) winds. By 7:00 AM CDT (1200 UTC), it was a Category 5 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 175 mph (280 km/h), gusts up to 215 mph (344 km/h) and a central pressure of 902 mbar.
In a press conference at roughly 10:00 AM CDT (1500 UTC), Nagin declared that “a mandatory evacuation order is hereby called for all of the parish of Orleans.” “We’re facing the storm most of us have feared,” he told the early-morning news conference, with the governor at his side. Following Nagin’s speech, Governor Blanco stated that President Bush called her “just before” the press conference and said that he was “concerned about the [storm’s] impact” and asked her “to please ensure that there would be a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.”[9] Katrina was expected to make landfall overnight.[
1O am Sunday morning!!! Landfall less than 24 hours away!
If you don’t know what you’re talking about- say nothing!
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