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One has to marvel at the thinking behind the levees. Yes, lets build them for a cat 3 hurricane and they will fail at cat 4-5, which will surely come....duh!

Can you imagine if they put this to the vote of the people they would vote to build it to Cat 3 strength?

Yes, lets build them for a cat 3 hurricane and they will fail at cat 4-5, which will surely come....duh!

The levees were designed at a lull in the hurricane cycle so the risk of a Cat 4 or 5 hurricane is probably higher than was believed (about once in 200 years) when they were designed. Given that the levees were never designed to withstand anything above Cat 3, it is unconscionable that Nagin and Blanco didn't order a mandatory evacuation 48 hours or more ahead of the projected landfall. Considering the Louisiana state evacuation plans called for the Governor to commandeer all state owned transports, there were over 2,000 school and transit buses available in the state available to evacuate people who had no cars from New Orleans.

I am so tired of reading posts by folks who have no clue about life in New Orleans, but never cease to offer advice.

Aren't you reading what the investigation is saying? The flood walls (not earthen levees) were incorrectly designed and incorrectly constructed. The failure was going to happen sooner or later. The flood wall failed well after the hurricane and storm surge passed. We've had plenty of storms and winds in New Orleans -- no more or less than the folks in CA have earthquakes and fires. The flood wall failure unfortunately happened in the aftermath of the hurricane with all of the folks in the neighborhood nearest the failure forced/ordered out in the mandatory evacuation. The folks who would have been first responders and interested in preserving their property were not there when the city needed them the most. As you should know, failures such as this are not instantaneous and if the neighbors were there, action would have been taken to limit the failure. Sandbagging and diking with all of the available debris would have limited the damage to a much smaller length of flood wall, rather than the 500 foot breach that was allowed to form because there were no first-responders in the neighborhood to act.

People are safer to shelter in-place rather than drive into horrible traffic. Evacuation is simply an invitation to the looters to ransack your house.