It’s been Katrina anniversary week throughout the mainstream media this week, but precious little has been said about the clearest lesson of what conventional wisdom calls the most expensive natural disaster in American history. That lesson is that Katrina was essentially a man-made disaster thanks to big, bureaucratic, distant, wasteful and ponderously slow government. This is seen from the first crack in the 17th Street Canal wall whose breakdown swamped the city and created the sad spectacles of human misery that followed and continues one year later in the incredibly botched recovery effort.
Those who scoff at or merely doubt this lesson should spend some time at Wizbangblog.com, a Washington-based blog overseen by Kevin Alyward, which has had a reporter on the scene from before Katrina made landfall east of New Orleans. In the year since, Wizbang has comprehensively investigated and documented the causes and consequences of the man-made failures in the agony of New Orleans. At last count, there were 175 posts in the blog’s Katrina archives, which can be viewed at http://wizbangblog.com/categories/weather/hurricane-katrina/. Many of these posts report news that has yet to be reported in detail by the major national media.
Before going to the archives, however, check out the video that Wizbang tells us Congress kept out of the public airwaves for months after the disaster. This amazing video was taken by a New Orleans fireman and it shows the 17th Street Canal shortly after it was breached early in the morning as Katrina lashed New Orleans. You can watch the video at: http://wizbangblog.com/2006/08/28/the-katrina-video-congress-didnt-want-you-to-see.php
The key fact to be gleaned from this video is that the canal was not over-topped by Katrina’s massive storm surge; it collapsed due to structural and design failures long before the flood waters neared the top of the canal wall.
Even the Army Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for designing, building and maintaining the 17th Street Canal, recently admitted the flooding that submerged New Orleans was not caused by over-topping but by structural failure:
“This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, ‘We’ve had a catastrophic failure’ … Words alone will not restore trust in the Corps,” Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said earlier this year when the agency issued its 6,000-plus page report on the disaster as this year’s hurricane season began. Despite this admission, however, numerous politicians and demagogues continue to claim loudly that New Orleans’ flood defenses were overwhelmed by Katrina’s ferocity, or worse, by white racism.
As for the Katrina recovery, waste and fraud is endemic in the $10.6 billion of federal recovery contracts. This outcome was completely predictable because for the most part the contracts were awarded noncompetitively and because the Bush administration refused to make the contracting process as transparent as possible from the outset.
Consequently, debris remains to be seen throughout the New Orleans and Mississippi coastal regions, thousands of Katrina victims still haven’t received checks to begin rebuilding and more thousands are still waiting on one of those Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, many of which are simply rusting away unused in the summer heat and humidity of rural Arkansas. If ever there was a fitting symbol of what ought to be the enduring lesson of Katrina, it is those rotting FEMA trailers in Arkansas.
