Pursuing Holiness

About time:

The professional organization for engineers who build the nation’s roads, dams and bridges has been accused by fellow engineers of covering up catastrophic design flaws while investigating national disasters.

… The panel is expected to issue a report by the end of April and may recommend that the society stop taking money from government agencies for disaster investigations.

The engineering group says it takes the allegations seriously, but it has declined to comment until completion of the panel’s report and an internal ethics review.

[The American Society of Civil Engineers] was accused of suggesting that the power of the storm was as big a problem as the poorly designed levees.

… The society got a $1.1-million grant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study the levee failures.

They got a grant to study the failures from… the organization that is responsible for the failures. Anybody see a potential conflict of interest here?

Paul from Wizbang has covered the Katrina levee failures - as he calls it, the Federal Flood - in depth. And here’s the part few people understand, because the media didn’t touch it even after the Corps of Engineers admitted it was their fault:

What I will say next will probably completely throw you. Katrina saved probably over 50,000 lives.

That levee was doomed. If it had failed without notice, the death toll would have been measured in tens of thousands. There would be no evacuation, no preparation, no Feds at all. (such that they were anyway) no Coast Guard in choppers etc. Tens of thousands of people would have been dead in hours and tens of thousands more would have died on 120 degree rooftops waiting for rescue. It would have been unimaginable. - More unimaginable.

“Luckily” -and I groan when I say that- Katrina allowed the city to be evacuated.

I’ve said it for months. Katrina didn’t flood New Orleans. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But what I find just as troubling is the history of this video. It was turned over to Federal authorities just days after the storm. The firemen who took it were told they would be fired if they spoke about it. For months the Corps -who had to have seen the video- claimed the walls were overtopped. For months the firemen listened to the lies and never said a word.

There was no national security reason to hold the video as there might be of a terrorist attack. In fact the video would have helped the scientists studying it determine the cause. Congress had the firemen testify behind closed doors then placed a gag order on them.

I routinely mock conspiracy theorists but I have trouble understanding why this tape was withheld for months. What I also find interesting is that the Corps denied they were to blame until June 1… Just TWO WEEKS before this video was quietly released.

Perhaps, I’m too cynical but it is impossible for me not to notice that if this tape had been released in the weeks after the storm, the media coverage -and the scrutiny of Congress- would have been vastly different.

You may draw a different conclusion but I’ll go to my grave believing that Congress withheld this tape intentionally. It was too damning.

What I don’t understand is where the media is today on this story… The story of their lives is waiting to be told but they just ignore it. If you didn’t read Wizbang, you’d never know the true story of the Great Flood of New Orleans.

Levees.org has a lot more, including this fact sheet which is an excellent summary of the basics.

I, too, routinely mock conspiracy theorists. But then, it’s not a conspiracy theory to note the facts at hand: Congress placed a gag order on witnesses, hid their testimony, and concealed video that would have made it abundantly clear that the federal government was responsible for flooding New Orleans. Doing so allowed the narrative to be shaped in such a way that it prevented a huge public outcry and shifted much of the financial burden of the consequences onto others - primarily home and business owners, and insurance companies*. It’s also not a conspiracy theory to note that the system is badly flawed when the investigator is on the payroll of the investigatee.

The national media isn’t going to give this story the push that it needs because the story complexity to Republican bashing ratio isn’t really high enough to trouble with, and because covering it adequately now reveals the inadequacy of their earlier coverage. All the same, I’m pleased to see that it hasn’t been totally forgotten and that somebody is watching the watchers.

*And before anyone shrieks, “$110 billion not enough for you, you greedy freeloaders?!” here’s a pre-emptive shush:

Actually the $110 billion went to emergency response and administration for three storms, Hurricanes Rita, Wilma and Katrina across five states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The allocation includes almost $30 billion for FEMA’s response and Department of Defense expenses including the restoration of federal facilities. And almost $20 billion was flood insurance payouts to citizens collecting on their own private insurance claims.

Read the rest of Levee.org’s FAQs to learn why anyone is so stupid as to build below sea level in a bowl (we didn’t) and a whole lot more.

written by Laura