Intent On Burying Drowning The Lede Leader

(UPDATED 9/11/05: With the latest leftie attack about Bush being a liar for saying that nobody anticipated the levees would breach now heating up, I went back to the PopSci article and added the relevant paragraph RE overtopping versus breaching to my excerpt. No surprise: it talks about overtopping, not breaching -- and then goes on to suggest that the levees would "serve as a bathtub"! They couldn't do that very well if they were breached could they now? It then goes on the say that this is a "highly improbably event" to close it out. But please do continue on to read at least the last half of this post -- I guarantee you'll still learn something interesting even if the first half has become somewhat dated!)

Since we have the Gramscian, emotive MSM and lefty bloggers spending most of their coverage playing the "blame game" with their bully pulpits,



us poor stupid righty bloggers are all that remains to actually consider the facts.

The two main MSMemes of the disaster are of course:

1) BusHitler hasn't done enough to cope with the immediate disaster (and what "little" has been done has come too slowly)

and

2) Shrub McChimpy is giving all our money to those da*n "brownies" in Iraq that are too stupid to be interested in democracy and therefore he's the one responsible for killing New Orleans since everything would have been just fine if part of the Louisiana National Guard wasn't gone and all that money hadn't been diverted from levee construction

Let's look at each in turn:

1) BusHitler Hasn't Done Enough Right Now!

Well, let's open with this from Power Line:

The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

Whoops! The MSM has been trying to bury that one BIG TIME through the whole disaster. Unfortunately for them, that will likely mean they will have to stop covering Chertoff's press conferences since he made a point this afternoon of mentioning that W made the call!

So the left has done a face plant right out of the gate but are either too self-deluded, venal or dim to realize their position.

Did I forget to mention that both the governor and mayor are Democrats? And did you notice this little newsflash from Drudge?

WHY DIDN'T YOU DEPLOY THE BUSES DURING THE MANDATORY EVACUATION, MAYOR?...

Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00

'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...

Then Drudge shows the picture of the New Orleans buses:



WHOOPS!

So W is supposed to sit on their shoulders and make the local Dem politicos implement their own plan? Junkyardblog has the nutshell:

As for Mayor Nagin, he and his profile in pathetic leadership police chief should resign as well. That city's government is incompetent from one end to the other. The people of New Orleans deserve better than this crowd of clowns iscapable of giving them.

If you're keeping track, these boobs let 569 buses that could have carried 33,350 people out of New Orleans--in one trip--get ruined in the floods.

In other words, we have the "Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool" -- but of course it's all W's fault... (More here, here, and here.)

And then after the fact we have the MSM TV airwaves filled with right after reports of how things aren't so bad on Canal Street. Everybody just calm down. Just more of our standard fare of "Hurricane Porn".

Whoops! Maybe not this time. What the h**l? Why wasn't the National Guard here already? What? It takes more than a day to mobilize and move HUNDREDS of helicopters? Incompetence I tell you! Incompetence!

For every hurricane we're supposed to have sufficient resources constantly on the move for optimal delivery to disaster areas hundreds of miles on each dimension even if all the roads and bridges are wiped out? I'll make a deal with you to do this for only, oh, say, a cost equivalent of 10% of the U.S. GDP. Chinooks aren't cheap folks. And just imagine what shape we'd be in if we were France and didn't have a military capable of flying out of a brown paper bag!.

Did I forget to mention that all new buildings in the southeast may have to look like concrete bunkers? What's that? You say you're thinking of moving to Denver instead?

2) Without Bush, all the money for levee construction would have been there!

Being the nerd I am, and with a budding nerd 8-year-old son, you won't be surprised we have a subscription to Popular Science. Well, smart as David is, wouldn't you know that he pulls out the May issue with this little gem in it:

Hurricanes
At 20 feet below sea level, new orleans is a prime target. An ambitious new levee system would decrease the risk

By Michael Behar April 2005

It takes Scott Kiser only a split second to name the one city in the U.S., and probably the world, that would sustain the most catastrophic damage from a category-5 hurricane. "New Orleans," says Kiser, a tropical-cyclone program manager for the National Weather Service. "Because the city is below sea level—with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other—it is a hydrologic nightmare." The worst problem, he explains, would be a storm surge, a phenomenon in which high winds stack up huge waves along a hurricane’s leading edge. In New Orleans, a big enough surge would quickly drown the entire city.

...

UPDATE 9/11/05: ADDED THIS GRAPH TO THE QUOTE: The Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale defines a category-5 storm as one with "winds greater than 155 miles per hour and storm surge generally greater than 18 feet." Although hurricanes of this magnitude slamming directly into New Orleans are extremely rare—occurring perhaps every 500 to 1,000 years—should one come ashore, the resulting storm surge would swell Lake Pontchartrain (a brackish sea adjoining the Gulf of Mexico), overtop the levees, and submerge the city under up to 40 feet of water. Once this happened, the levees would "serve as a bathtub," explains Harley Winer, chief of coastal engineering for the Army Corps’s New Orleans District. The water would get trapped between the Mississippi levees and the hurricane-protection levees. "This is a highly improbable event," Winer points out, "but within the realm of possibility."

New Orleans has nearly completed its Hurricane Protection Project, a $740-million plan led by Naomi to ring the city with levees that could shield residents from up to category-3 storm surges. Meanwhile, Winer and others at the Army Corps are considering a new levee system capable of holding back a surge from a category-5 hurricane like Ivan, which threatened the city last year.

Now, needless to say, my eyebrows nearly shoot through the ceiling! But not primarily because of the text of the article. (As I looked for blog links to this article, I found a number of folks like Jeff and Carol linking through to the Redstate reference to the PopSci article.)

But it turns out that the online article doesn't include the graphic -- and what REALLY blew me away was the graphic (that I have slightly modified here by adding a red rectangle):



Look at where the upgrade to Cat 5 protection (indicated by the red line) was planned to be built: between the city and the Gulf of course. What kind of dummy would do otherwise? But check out the location of the big red rectangle that I have added on the north side of N.O. That's where at least one of the major levee breaks was! As we all know now, the city was flooded at least largely by Lake Pontchartrain, not from the Gulf!!!

So basically the only prayer in h*ll we had to save the city from Katrina's trajectory would have been a complete upgrade of the levee system to Cat 5 protection!

And even that looks questionable to me if Katrina had hit N.O. full on like it did Mississippi. Look at how buildings there were just utterly splintered by the storm surge.

I hate to tell you this, but if you think the fact that that complete Cat 5 upgrade wasn't up yet was because of W and the war, you deserve the stupor you live in. This was a problem that stretched through multiple decades and multiple city, state and federal administrations. And even if W made saving N.O. from hurricanes his #1 priority in life immediately upon election in 2000, the odds of it being ready for Katrina are about the same as N.O. ever being restored to its former glory.

NIL.

And I leave the whole topic of rational cost/benefit analysis and scoping of various types of natural and man-made disasters for further posts. Lucky y'all...