Documents Show Govt Forewarned on Katrina - Yahoo! News
An Aug. 28 report by the department’s National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center concluded that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would cause severe damage in the city, including power outages and a direct economic hit of up to $10 billion for the first week.
“Overall, the impacts described herein are conservative,” stated the report, which was sent to Homeland Security’s office for infrastructure protection.
“Any storm rated Category 4 or greater … will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching, leaving the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months,” said the report.
The documents are the latest indication that the federal government knew beforehand of the catastrophic damage that a storm of Katrina’s magnitude could cause. The Bush administration has been lambasted for its lackluster response to Katrina and its aftermath, including criticism that the government should have known a hurricane of that strength posed a danger to the area’s levees and was unprepared to cope with it.
I guess this is somehow surprising. Or maybe the mainstream media is finally reporting the truth? I do recall that there was information that said the gov’t knew what would happen with a catastrophic hurricane in the Gulf Coast region. I do recall Brian Williams on NBC going into detail about it. But, since the memories of so many Americans are so short, I guess it has become news worthy once again.
The funny thing is that the feds say they didn’t know what was going to happen. How could they? It was an act of God, they said. That’s all well and good, except they failed the people in that region horribly by reducing spending on natural disaster preparedness. They failed by assuming that everyone in that (poverty-stricten) region would hop in a cab and find safe haven. They failed by providing support in case of an emergency of this magnitude.
But we all know that now, don’t we? Anyone who saw the images of the Gulf Coast (or lived through it) knows how they failed. How many know how they’re still failing? How many keep up on reports that evacuees are being evicted from their Houston homes because FEMA has failed to come through with their (emergency) rent checks? How many people know the numbers of the homeless in Gulfport? How many people decry the injustice the people on the bridge to Gretna suffered when they weren’t allowed safe passage (presumeably because they were all criminals)?
I don’t have all the stats, but I’m glad this is coming back into the news. I’m just sad that our gov’t is once again caught with their pants down.
All that warning and Bush still couldn’t leave his little speaking tour to make sure all was going well on their end….hmph. I’m saddened by this, but not at all shocked.
Oh, and, Mayor Nagen, you deserve some blame too. There were definitely things that could have been done on a local level. I hope you get booted out of office.
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