[Gumdrop]

I agree that the first 24 hours after Katrina hit NO, the reports were quite optimistic that the city had been hit, but spared the most severe outcome of a levee break. It does seem to me that I remember later on Monday some mention of flooding beginning in NO, but the exact nature of the seriousness was not known until early Tuesday.

And throughout the entire time, both Nagin and Blanco seemed clueless.

[nuconvert]

Can you give us a synopsis of "Why Levee Breaches In New Orleans Were Late-Breaking News"? What's the writer's explanation.? No inspectors at the dam keeping an eye on it?

[visitor]

any chance you could post the entire article?...rto

[stockpirate]

Isn't Russert the one who referred to the Gulf Coast as the "Redneck Riviera"?

[1903A3]

Go on Anti idiotarian rotweiler blog
September 9 and click Alvaro slide show ( 197 pics )
It is evident that the city did not flood before day 3

[IamConservative]

Among many amazing things about this to me:

- a city that lived below sea level relied on a pumping system powered only from the electrical grid. My single family home has a backup generator.

- in normal conditions, the city is surrounded by water. The city owned 3 boats, only one was functional. It is hurricane season.

[OESY]

MORE EXCERPTS:


In its Aug. 29 online edition, the New Orleans Times-Picayune first reported a breach in the 17th Street Canal levee at 2 p.m., citing City Hall officials. No other major news outlets picked up that report....

No major newspaper printed a headline that literally said New Orleans "dodged a bullet," as Mr. Chertoff claimed. But some did say the city had escaped a direct hit -- which was true, but misleading -- while others focused on the levees along the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, it was the levees along canals extending south from Lake Pontchartrain that gave way.

"But the city managed to avoid the worst of the worst," read a front-page Washington Post article on Tuesday. "The Mississippi River did not breach New Orleans's famed levees to any serious degree, at least in part because Katrina veered 15 miles eastward of its predicted track just before landfall."...

* * *

COMMENT: Note that the journalists who wrote this article are playing word games. They claim newspapers did not say New Orleans "dodged a bullet." Instead, they said New Orleans "avoided the worst of the worst" or as the New York Times claimed August 30, 2005, "Katrina Misses New Orleans, Heavily Damages Mississippi." Washington Post, CBS News, NBC, NPR and many others in the omniscient establishment press also reported New Orleans had been "spared."

In other words, Chertoff was more honest in recounting the known facts in the immediate aftermath of Katrina than Russert and the rest of the MSM.

[Mike Darancette]

Didn't the NOLA Emergency Management Director tell the AP something like the water is rising slowly and the levee breach will be fixed in several hours'?

If that is what he told The Mayor, Governor and Feds is it any wonder that the breech was downplayed for so long.

[KarlInOhio]

I don't have the reference to it, but I remember that even on Wed. August 31 the authorities in NO were hoping that they could patch the levies and minimize the flooding. It wasn't until later they gave up and accepted that soon New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain would end up having the same water level.

[syriacus]

Unfortunately for EVERYONE, at the Federal and the local level, NOLA's chief of homeland security, Terry Ebbert, spread the misinformation that the levee break would be repaired within hours and that the water would rise very slowly. Here are Ebberts words, as written in an AP report from August 30th:

"It's a very slow rise, and it will remain so until we plug that breach. I think we can get it stabilized in a few hours," said Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security chief.

[See also: FR thread Is T. Ebbert [NOLA DHS chief] responsible for delay in large-scale response to levee breach? ]

"It's a very slow rise, and it will remain so until we plug that breach.

I think we can get [the breach] stabilized in a few hours"

[don-o]

I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers, and I saw headlines,

Dpmebody, please tell me he does not get his news this way.

[yoe]

"Leonard Downie Jr., the Washington Post's executive editor, says the paper's reporting was hampered by communications problems caused by the hurricane. "Unfortunately, where our communication was good was where it wasn't flooding," he says. "All the media were hampered by the fact that people on the ground didn't know what happened."

If people on the ground did not know what happened or was happening, why print or say anything as fact? Filling air time and filling print space can get you in a whole lot of trouble.