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...

The Perfectly Predictable Perfect Storm

Via Power Line, City Journal has something you need to read about the looting portion of the New Orleans Apocalypse:

This week’s looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute) was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the storm, but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.

Was this week’s looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans’ officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims—according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.

WOW. RTWT.

My Good Friend James?

You know something's wrong with the picture when James Carville is your ally:

I think CNN would turn Noah's flood into a partisan attack on George Bush. Even such a hardened politico as James Carville had to tell their brain dead reporter to shut up and deal with the reality in front of him, rather than casting blame. What is wrong with these CNN people? What culture do they come from? Their lack of moral and psychological sophistication is truly stunning.

When I see this kind of reporting, I know we are doing the right thing at Pajamas Media in trying to organize the blogosphere, just a little bit, as the beginning of an antidote.

Keep your eye on the Pajamas. The one that remains after watching too much Communist News Network.

Perspective From The Trenches

This is straight through from one of Glenn's readers. You need to read the whole thing:

I run a trade association of tank truck carriers trying to assist in the relief efforts by transporting food and potable water. I'm in regular contact with many of the companies, and here are some "on the ground" facts: 1) Large trucks (80,000 lbs. gross weight) almost always have to use the Interstates. For trucks attempting to come in from outside the area, most of those roads (approaching the disaster area) are either closed or have bridges out. The so-called secondary roads may be somewhat passable, but their bridges (over rivers and streams) are not built to sustain such loads. Simply stated, you can't get there from here.

2) Trucks domicled in those areas (because that's where the companies traditionally serve customers) are still underwater, thus the equipment is not accessible;

3) Nobody in their right mind is going to take loads of gasoline and fuel oil into a city controlled by unfriendly folks carrying automatic weapons. A tank truck loaded with 8,000 gallons of gasoline can produce a very impressive fire;

4) Those local trucking companies can't contact their drivers. There's no power, thus (even) cellular is unavailable, and many of the drivers homes (in places like Kenner, Slidel, Metarie, etc) have been destroyed and families dispersed. I have one member with about 120 drivers and mechanics in that immediate area. To date, management has been able to contact 12. Those in the National Guard have been mobilized and are not available to drive.

5) Pumps -- needed to load the vehicles -- don't work because there's no power.

UPDATE: It keeps getting better and better:

Oh yeah, it [the venality of the press coverage] is just that bad. If anything Jeff understates the case. One begins to wonder if the founding fathers got that freedom of the press thing right, after all.

Okay, it's not that bad, but it has been pretty shameful. When all is said and done the press will be stunned to discover that the only people they have impressed are themselves.

Yup.

The problem with ankle-biting.

"They got that one right."

Things are getting tough when Beslan no longer seems quite so unthinkable.

The most sobering refugee tale you'll ever read...

And then there were 3 more.

Did I forget to mention that it's always all about W? But don't worry, they'll assure you it's not a psychological disorder as they blink blankly...

And just when I get done criticizing the Captain, he turns around and criticizes the Israelis -- and gets it right... (Yes, I know you're shocked but he's actually supporting Sharon after all.)

"Given how many local politicians whose fiefdoms would disappear, that will not happen, and so we will see this disaster occur again." ... If we're senseless enough to rebuild it.

At least Katrina got her to take a breather from assassination exhortations...

Stunned Atlantis-Gazing

Needless to say, I have been massively stunned watching and reading about the Katrina disaster and it has put quite a crimp on my posting productivity -- not to mention having quite a week at work. My last post finally did break the torpor a bit.

And it looks like my Salvation Army donation recommendation was even more prescient than I thought:

A lot is going on down here that is not in the news. First, our esteemed governor and the mayor of NO are both idiots. This is the real reason for problems. Second, the NO police force is second only to the mafia in corruption and much of the looting and theft are coming from them as well as their lassitude in doing their job. Third, all Louisiana communities need clothes of any kind. See if your local Salvation Army will send to the shelters throughout the state and blog to give any clothes to the [Salvation] Army. You notice I did not say the Red Cross, they do not have a sizable presence here and are only fishing for money like after 9/11.

WOW. Maybe I was going too easy on the Red Cross and mayor Nagin after all. That will teach me to be Christian :(

And then there's the small matter of the pecking order in congress. While -- ironically -- the leader of the House started to "channel" the somber reflections on rebuilding New Orleans of my previous post -- until his political instincts came back to life.

But one can count on Wretchard for some perspective on the sudden appearance of our modern-day Atlantis.

UPDATE: The Captain has more: "There is not enough money in the gross national product of the United States to dispose of the amount of hazardous material in the area." And in spite of this he doesn't want to throw in the towel! That IS optimism! I love the Captain -- but he needs to read his own posts more carefully once in a while :(

Please Help Our Southern Neighbors Recover From Their Apocalypse

Biblical. Sized. Help. Is. Needed.

Please. Give. Generously!

I just made a good-sized contribution to the Salvation Army -- and expect to make more contributions as the scope of this clarifies.

Glenn has a blogburst round-up of charitable donation options. I have some personal/political reservations about the Red Cross, but frankly this is such an awesome situation that it would be a mistake not to see that their substantial distribution network isn't fully utilized. If that doesn't give you some perspective on how bad I think this is then nothing will.

In fact, that's probably my key insight: We probably need to keep spreading donations among the major relief organizations so that no one of them burns out -- because they're going to be afterburners-on for MONTHS if not YEARS.

In fact, this situation is so sobering that I have trouble imagining rebuilding New Orleans like it was. And certainly not without an ENORMOUSLY expensive 3-ringed dyke system like the Netherlands finally invested in after their catastrophe in the 1950s...

And this just rips your heart out while making you want to scream. Frankly, it's probably not appropriate to tear Nagin a new one even though every fiber of my body wants to. Odds are that he and his administration as well as the police and fire leaders are probably now virtually sleepwalking -- and in the knowledge that they have personally lost everything as well.

All the usual puerile bile is now targetting W for how this is all his fault because of Iraq (funny how Clinton wasn't on national TV mobilizing the country to put a 3-ring dyke around the Big Easy -- or did I just happen to miss it?)

But in retrospect, we'll probably have to have some sort of FEMA team in future that can literally replace or spell a local administration trying to cope with this scale of disaster.

Oh, and by the way, this looks to be a dry run for what a small nuke will do to one of our major cities -- only not quite as severe. After all, there's still SOME chance that the residents may be able to move back within the next few years.

Did I forget to mention that we'll be really lucky if it's only one nuke and one city?

APOCALYPTIC UPDATE: "Or does it haunt the landscape like a ghost?" (HT Michael)

HEARTENING UPDATE: From Michelle.

Please be generous in your help to them -- it looks very bad for New Orleans and the surrounding states...

French Gone Missing (Part 36,359)

Callimachus suggests that there should have been this before this: "I solemnly withdraw the German signature from the declaration, extracted by force from a weak Government against its better judgment, that Germany was responsible for the War. "

Nicely done Calli!

Of course, the Gramscianization of our educational system is now so complete that Hitler's January 1937 speech is now as good as down the memory hole.

I have been pointing out the missed opportunity for a long time. It's one of the reasons I love the French so...

Foxy Chickens Huff And Puff...

... and only sometimes blow your house down.

I was teaching my 8-year-old about this tonight and used the analogy of Chicken Little. Slam dunk he got it. At first he couldn't believe that I was criticizing Fox about it too -- but I think he got that too...

"Probably the notion that half the country thinks their entire staff should be in jail hasn't quite sunk in yet."

BARKING BULEMIC BEAST BELLIES.

It's going to be fascinating watching the MSM ignore this one... I expect that by the time it's all over they'll be claiming all the men in the west are racist for not wearing burkas themselves...

ALL.
CREDIBILITY.
TOAST.