Consider these lines from a ‘what if’ piece in the National Geographic of October, 2004:
“As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
“The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
“Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.”
That was written a year ago. You see, we did know. We’ve known it was coming for years.
The Big Easy is being buried now under a blanket of lies.
Consider this from a Sept. 4, 2005 Chicago Tribune piece:
“While federal and state emergency planners scramble to get more military relief to Gulf Coast communities stricken by Hurricane Katrina, a massive naval goodwill station has been cruising offshore, underused and waiting for a larger role in the effort.
“The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.
“The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.
“But now the Bataan’s hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven’t been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.”
Or this from an Associated Press piece this morning:
“The top U.S. disaster official waited hours after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast before he proposed to his boss sending at least 1,000 Homeland Security workers into the region to support rescuers, internal documents show.”
We did the best we could? That’s a lie. We did not do the best we could. The federal response to this disaster was a tragedy of incompetence.
This administration failed us—and thousands of Americans died as a result of that failure.
Sure, there will be hearings and inquiries. There will be commissions of one sort or another. We had those after 9/11, remember? What was that conclusion?
“Across the government there were failures of imagination, policies, capabilities, and management. The most important failure was one of imagination.”
Thousands of Americans died as a result of those failures, too. Was there any accountability? Were there any firings? Any charges filed?
No.
Instead we got Homeland Security, a new federal agency with 180,000 employees and a $40 billion budget, an agency that waited five days to respond to Katrina–five days during which Americans died for lack of a bottle of water.
