Posted on 03/03/2006 10:31:24 PM PST by Ellesu
The videotape of Governor Kathleen Blanco telling White House staffers the New Orleans levee had not breached was the talk of the Capitol on Friday. The videotaped, obtained by the Associated Press, was taken hours after the White House received confirmation from the National Weather Service that the levees had breached.
At noon on August 29th, Blanco's voice is heard on the tape telling staffers, "I think we've heard that we have not breached the levees. We have not breached the levees at this point in time." That was the same time Hurricane Katrina was flooding New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish. A little later on the tape, Blanco said, "...where we have waters that are eight to ten feet deep and we have people swimming in..."
The White House staffers claim the National Weather Service confirmed the levee breaches at 9:12 that morning, three hours before the phone call from Governor Blanco.
Governor Blanco explained Friday that communications were down and it was tough to get any reports confirmed during the worst of the storm. She says the tape shows that she reported what was important, that New Orleans was flooding and that people were in trouble.
"In the middle of a hurricane, it is very difficult to understand exactly what is going on and, you know, I responded to the White House what I knew at the time, but also reassured the nation that things were changing dramatically," Blanco said.
On the tape, Blanco told White House staffers that water was overtopping the levees. Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana Homeland Security, defended the governor Friday, saying, "It doesn't matter whether or not the water is from an overtopping or whether ot not it's from a breach."
Blanco says what was said then is not as important now as trying to rebuild the Louisiana coast. "A hurricane hit our state of great dimensions. A second one followed behind it and finished off the rest of the coastline. Our work is far too great to sit around and try to kick blame from one corner to another."
Col. Jeff Smith says the office of Homeland Security is working on fixing communication problems between emergency agencies. He's hoping the state gets a $35 million federal grant so all police, fire and EMS radios will be able to communication with each other.
Reporting for duty sir.
I lived on Canal Blvd near the corner of Harrison avenue. It is about 1 mile from the 17th street canal breach, 2 miles from the London avenue canal breach and about 2 miles from the lake. I was there through the entire disaster.
I thought we had escaped this hurricane relatively unscathed. With the exception of a couple of tons of oak tree on the back of my house and lots of tree debris in the street. It seemed the worse had passed.
It was maybe 1 or 2 hours at the most, after the worst of the hurricane had passed, that I walked outside to survey the damage and to plan for the cleanup. There was lots of debris and wind damage, but not hardly a puddle of standing water. The areas near the lake and near the river are the highest in New Orleans. We have never had flooding here, ever. That is when I saw the surge coming down Harrison avenue from the east. I know now, it was the London avenue canal breach.
This was not a little water running along the streets, as if a sewer line had broken. It was a mass of water. It looked to be only about two feet high in front. But you could see the mass growing in the distance. It looked like a mountain of water. It was as if the whole lake was coming at me. This mass moved all at once - like an invading army, fanning out in every direction. Like it had a purpose. In this mass was every manner of debris. All the remnants of what the hurricane had torn apart, was being gathered my this mass of water and moved with it. I could hear the crashing as debris ladened water was being slammed into the buildings and houses in its path. It moved faster than a man could run. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
As the surge approached Canal blvd - the Canal blvd median being 4-5 feet higher than the surrounding area - it turned and went down Canal blvd. There was a hope still in my mind at that point that some might be sparred this odious threat. But it was not more than an hour later, that another surge came down Harrison avenue from the west. Which I know now was from the 17th street canal breach. When these two surges met at Canal blvd I knew we were in deep trouble.
The living room of my home has a window which reaches floor to ceiling, wall to wall. So I had a panoramic view of everything that was happening on the street. As I sat there, trying to come to terms with what I was witnessing, I saw something moving along the Canal blvd median. At first I thought it was just debris. It was moving in the same direction as the surge. Which was now heading downgrade toward the center of the city. There was every manner of object now being carried in the surge. The to my horror, I realized it was 2 women and two children. After a moment of panic from what I saw, I ran as fast as I could to try to get to them. So I ran downstairs to go outside to call to them. But my progress was impeded by the fact that I had to swim under the water to get out of my house and then out into the open where they could see me. By the time I got out there, there were already almost out of ear shod. So I got up as much strength and air as I could muster, which is difficult when you are immersed in water, and yelled as loud as I could. To my great relief they turned and saw me.
I started then to swim to them. All the debris that was just below the surface of the water was constantly trying to ensnare me. When I got to them I asked the oldest, "were in the hell are you going". She said, "the bank". I told her "the bank is closed". I think she was in shock. Not only was the bank in the direction of the London avenue breach, it was under 8-10 feet of water. Worse still, the debris in the water was like a mine field - step in the wrong place and you would drown.
So I told them to come with me. As I led them back to my house, now about 50 yards away, I had to be mindful of the debris. Of the children with these two women, one was a 9 year-old girl, and the other an 18 month old baby. I tried to take the baby from her so I could carry her, but the baby started screaming which just raised the tensions further. So I gave the baby back to her. I was trying to find them a safe path back to my house. I was trying to find an area which was shallow enough and free of dangerous debris. As I was trying to feel my way, my foot become entangled in something. I fell forward and was under water and could not right myself. After a couple of tugs I was not able to free my foot. I remember a feeling of panic ran through me. Then I thought, while still under water, that I still have air in my lungs, I'm going to try to pull one more time to free my foot, if it doesn't work I'm going to use the stuck foot to pull myself down to where I'm snagged and free myself with my hands. So I pulled one more time as hard as I could, and the foot came lose. I then directed the women to walk around that area to another I was now walking.
After I got them in the house I dried them off and fed them. I had food and water for at least a month. Plus everything else I needed to survive. I know this drill well. They just sat there and stared out the window, not saying a word. I think they were in shock. Then when the rescue boats arrived, only a few hours later, and as they started to board the boat - my second story patio was now a boat dock - they broke down and cried. I knew then they would be alright. I decided not to go with the rescuers. I thought there might be more for me to do. I ended up leaving 3 days later. Which was the beginning of a 6 month struggle of survival. But that is another story.
I was witness to many acts of courage and humanitarianism. There are people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude I can never repay. God bless them for their kindness and generosity. These were people who had little to give, but gave generously. I will never forget them. I will write about them later.
This event brought out the best in good people, and the worst in the bad people.
God bless America.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I pinged the list so that they could read for themselves what it was like.
Wow, so the breaches were a couple of hours after the storm passed right?
FYI
Yes. That is exactly the way it happened. It was mere hours after the worst of the storm had passed that the city was inundated with surge water. And it would have taken only minutes after the breaches had occurred for the water to reach my pos.
If those two canals had been isolated from the lake with flood gates, where the canals meet the lake, then none of this would have happened. And they are still not putting flood gates there. Even though it would be easy to do because they are only drainage canals, not transit.
I will consider moving back to New Orleans only after they put flood gates on both of those canals, and any other canal that leads to the lake. Starting with the drainage canals. And when I see the heads of those responsible for this disaster on pikes.
I don't blame you for not wanting to move back until it's safe again. Are the canals even necessary?
Because the city is beneath sea level, all the rain has to be pumped out of the city. The canals are the medium through which the pumps remove the water from the city into the lake. The lake levees are huge earthen levees. There is no problem with them being breached. Being topped is a minor problem, if the pumps continue to run. Which they did not. The canals are protected with a relatively small levee with a flood wall atop them. They should have never been exposed to the mass of the lake water. I know now, it was inevitable that they would fail.
If those drainage canals had been isolated, none of this would have happened.
This disaster happened because of the depraved indifference and ruthless greed of evil men. I wont consider going back until we have had justice done. It will take years before this city is purged of the ruthless corruption that led to this unprecedented disaster. We will see what happens next hurricane season. There may be come a time when we will seek our own justice. This is the Deep South I remind you.
Whose idea was it to use floodwalls? I'm very familiar with the earthen levees. They did just fine from what I have gathered.
I know that the pumps failed which there needs to always be a backup.
I am quite aware of the Deep South justice system. No need to remind me at all. Do you think that the corruption will honestly be dealt with?
I HATE that nanny-bitch!
The Levee Board and the Corps of Engineers are responsible for flood protection.
The Levee Board is as corrupt as the day is long. My family has been fighting them in court for generations now; for a criminal land grab fraud called the Bohemian spillway. The Levee board seized property of ours, and many others, on the pretense that it was needed as a spillway for flood control. But instead of creating a spillway, they leased it out to the oil companies and have been receiving oil revenues from them for generations. We have beaten them in court continuously, but still we have not gotten our property back; property that Chevron is at this moment pumping oil out of and giving the royalties to the Levee board.
This is the reality of the situation. The overwhelming majority of the tax payers of New Orleans have left. One can not have a city without tax payers. These are the people who built New Orleans in the first place. And these are the people who can rebuild it. These people are already making new lives for themselves elsewhere. Which is what one would expect from those kinds of people.
One of two things are going to happen. The corruption will end, and those with the wherewithal to rebuild will return in time. Or the corruption will continue and New Orleans will remain a waste land of predominantly deadbeats whining for welfare handouts.
New Orleanians are prepared for either scenario.
Hey Blanco...not even a good try. All you have been doing is blame others for your incompetence.""
Did she and Nagin EVER put their requests for help into the proper form and run them thru the proper channels?
Does anyone have any proof that they EVER did that???
I heard that Blanco's staff had drawn up the necessary forms, and that she was still dithering about signing them on Tuesday night, after the hurricane hit.
Anybody know more details??
I don't mean to be ugly, but all this blaming in getting old. Hurricanes are an act of nature and they are scary, I went through Hugo. My heart broke for the people who lost everything including their lives. The gulf is notorious for having tropicals storms gain rapid strength in a short period of time. My beef is with Nagin and Blanco, why, why, why were those school buses not used to evacuate????? The 1.5 million escaped because they had sense and the means. But when you are in charge of a city that has the largest welfare rolls per capita then the mayor and gov. have the responsiblity to do something. You can't rely on people hundreds of miles away.
My point was that it wasn't a week where they knew that it was going to hit. I'm not blaming anyone but simply gave you an accurate timeline. One reason that they panicked was because the storm bombed less than 72 hours before landfall. That is why it really does matter who you vote for. It's in times of crisis where it matters most if those in charge can think on their feet.
For the record I do believe that this blame is being media driven and distorted. I know all about hurricanes myself since I live where Rita slammed ashore. This area got hit just as hard but we didn't have the flood to deal with. FWIW Blanko did find her footing with Rita, it helped that the local leaders were very competent. It's also easy to go back in hindsight and say this is how it should have been done.
It isn't quite as simple as it sounds. I have lived near N.O. for 13 years and I always evacuate if it looks like a hurricane is coming close. My parish is one of the first ones to call for mandatory evacuation because of our location. I have probably evacuated 6 or 7 times in the past 13 years. It is expensive, nerve-wracking, exhausting and miserable, even if you leave very early like my family does. With the 6 or 7 evacuations that I have experienced only 1 time was the N.O. area actually hit by a hurricane. Because of all the false alarms many, many people just ignore the warnings. I hope I will always have the financial means to evacuate; but, it is a miserable thing to do. Also, I have known people who evacuated to Jackson, MS for a hurricane headed for N.O. Their home in N.O. was safe; but, the hotel they stayed in at Jackson was hit by a tornado. There are no good or easy solutions.
Whats amazing is the level of confusion over these two terms - what...5 or 6 months after the event. The MSM evidently doesn't understand English - or own a dictionary.
Overtopping is like too much water in your tub....it flows over on the floor - maybe a gallon or two.
Breaching is like the whole side of your tub busts out and all the water.....50 gallons or so, flood your bathroom.
A higher percentage of New Orleans was evacuated for Katrina than was Houston for Rita. I guess the officials in Texas are more inept than those in Louisiana. Is that what you are really saying?
I don't know if Houston is below sea level, but I do know that it is not surrounded by levees. All I am saying is this blame game has got to stop. The first responders are the people who actually are there on the ground. Not the people in D.C.. Why weren't those school buses used for evacuation? Why wasn't the Red Cross allowed to bring water and supplies to the Dome? Who was responsible for those decisions, George Bush? This was a horrible natural disaster and it won't be the last. Were mistakes made, heck yeah. The mindset to just wait on the federal goverment to act is ridiculous, how did we ever survive before FEMA?
Much of Houston does not face catastrophic flooding from storm surge the way NOLA did. If there had been a direct hit by the strong side of Katrina, the death toll in NOLA could well have been in the tens of thousands.
Comparing the need to evacuate all of NOLA to the need to evacuate all of Houston is like comparing the need to evacuate Galveston versus Houston - Galveston is much more vulnerable, as is NOLA. Oh, and Galveston, unlike NOLA, had a plan to use school buses to evacuate those without cars.
Nice work getting those people out of the water. They probably wouldn't have made it if not for you.
The storm peaked over NO around 9:15-9:30. If you were out an hour or two later when you saw the surge from the London breach, that would have been between 10:15 and 11:30. Another surge an hour later from the 17th street breach would have been between 12:15 and 12:30.
"Faster than a man can run" indicates the water would have been moving at least ten miles an hour (roughly marathon pace) meaning the actual breach at 17th street occurred six minutes before you saw the surge, and the London breach occurred 12 minutes prior to the floodwaters reaching your position. There is more uncertainty here, as other elevation changes had more of a chance to delay the water from reaching you over the greater distance to the London Canal.
If you were overly high in your estimate of the water's speed by a factor of two, then the window for the time of the breaches doubles to 12 minutes and 24 minutes respectively. If you were too slow in your estimate, it doesn't affect the breach time significantly.
From here, we can pin the time of the 17th Street Canal Breach down to between noon and 12:15, within an uncertainty of, what, an hour? What's the most you safely think you could be off in your timing estimates?
The London Canal Breach then would have occurred between 09:50 and 11:15, again within the same uncertainty limit.
Because the fourth near breach in the London Canal left the capwalls leaning up to 30 degrees out of plumb, there's a good chance the three actual breaches also caused their capwalls to lean prior to the lateral shift of the entire embankment section that allowed the first wall of water to come through. The capwall joints between the monolithic sections were probably weeping or even trickling as early as 0300, and seepage through the inboard toe of the embankment followed soon after.
The capwall lean was probably induced slowly, with more and more flooding occurring as the top line of the capwall assumed more curvature.
For a two foot high wall of water to suddenly appear at your location, one and two miles from the breaches, the final stages of failure, mostly involving the embankment's lateral shift and catastrophic failure of the capwall, probably took place very rapidly, something along the lines of an underwater mudslide. It couldn't have happened too quickly though, because a 14 foot high wall of water at the breach would have taken all the houses nearby, instead of only a few of them.
It is hard to say whether floodgates at the mouths of the canals would have prevented such widespread flooding of the metro area. Clearly, St. Bernards, and east Orleans would not have benefitted from floodgates, and downtown NO suffered at least six breaches, three of which were by the Industrial Canal. This flooding was reported very early, roughly the same time or even preceeding the barge iduced failure into the Ninth Ward, west of the Canal spreading out from the Florida Avenue bridge.
The water from those breaches might have filled the city even if the London and 17th Street Canal floodgates you propose would have withstood the storm surge. Then again, that floodwater may not have filled the city, too. I is difficult to tell without onsite inspection how deep the base of the Industrial Canal breaches were. If they were above the storm surge levels, then as soon as the surge passed (two hours after the storm) flooding there would have stopped.
The real issue here is that floodgates on the Canals emptying into Lake Pontchartrain you speak of are not enough to offer any guarantees. To get that kind of protection, you have to armor the Industrial Canal too, and one of the gates necessary to do that is two thousand feet long.
Since the cost of the Lake only floodgates includes a significant increase in the cost of service on an ongoing basis, beause then all the water in all the Canals would have to be pumped 14 feet up and over the gates during storms, an infrastructure has to be in place to allow that ready to go at all times. Relatively speaking, the option requires increasing the city's total pumping capacity on the order of double or possibly even more.
I think the cost would be worth it, if those floodwalls and extra pumps did offer some sort of guarantee, but ti doesn't not till you spend several billion more yet extending the protection around the Industrial Canal.
That leaves us with an all or nothing choice. I'm willing to spend the money to do it right, to surround the city with a Cat 5 plus safety margin multi-layered protective infrastructure, but like you, I understand that cannot be accomplished with the pack of thieves entrenched and still running Louisiana.
Until that happens, I expect the quality of life in New Orleans to remain at Bangladesh levels except for isolated pockets of civilization.
Blanco passed on a report of the 17th Street breach at the 2:10 pm press conference, buried at the end of her statement.
Nagin mentioned breaching for the first time at 6:15 PM, but he had also made it clear that St. Bernard's was underwater as early as 9-10 am.
I don't believe either one of them realized the import of the breaching at those times. Nagin seemed to get a clue as to what was yet to come around midnight-1 am, and the first of the majors to pick up on the significance of the breaching was CNN around 02:10 am Tuesday morning. The rest of the major media outlets didn't catch on until the Tuesday AM news hour.
I think the locals, Blanco and Nagin, et al, were fully aware that they had taken a hard hit, they knew about the Ninth Ward breach early, I think they knew east Orleans had flooded, but they were concerned about a wide variety of things, only one of which was the question of whether downtown would flood. Downtown was the last area to flood, and until it did, other problems took priority in the local press conferences.
Because of this apparant lack of concern on the part of the locals, and because of the outside world's ignorance of the topographic minutia for the whole area, it took a very long time for understanding of what had happened, and even longer to understand what was yet to happen.
As for Bush, yes, he was briefed early about the breaches, along with everything else, not just in New Orleans but the entire affected region, and you simply can't move Corps level units around on the basis of early and fragmented reports. The lay of the land takes time to divine, and deployment takes even longer.
I always thought his comments that no-one expected the breaches were informed and genuine. Before Katrina came ashore, the main concern was overtopped levies, not levee failures. I don't think the issue is important anyway. Whether you expect breaches or not, breaches in large earthen or concrete retaining structures, brought about by a catastrophic hurricane, cannot be repaired until the water equalizes. All the whining notwithstanding, the Panama Canal wasn't dug in a day, and building it's aboveground mirrored image isn't going to happen in one day or even ten either.
The real guilt here belongs to those who took the levee money and spent it elsewhere, long before Katrina ever existed.
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