[/caption]NEW ORLEANS - Judith Martin - Mother suffered a
stroke and died in my arms on the night of August 29, 2005, as we were
trying to climb the hall stairs in our house to escape the rising flood
waters, all freezing cold and fetid. I know from my emotional
near-death experience why the levees failed.
Those rising flood waters
poured into my neighborhood from the man-made breaches in the 17th
Street and Orleans Canals that border Lakeview in New Orleans,
Louisiana.
So, I have more than sufficient reason to be letter
perfect, and to know at a deep and personal level, what caused the
breaches in those levees and who was responsible. What I have learned,
and have discovered by my own on-site explorations of the breaches,
makes me more determined never to forgive the essence or to forget
the cause. The innocence I can embrace; the ignorance I cannot.
The
breaches in the canals were not caused, as Ms. Lenna Gonya claims in her article on Helium entitled "Why the New Orleans levees failed
during Hurricane Katrina, "by tidal surges attendant upon the effects of
Hurricane Katrina in the Lake Pontchartrain basin."
As
we who survived the trauma of seeing 80% of our city "go under" know,
they were caused because of failures of the poorly designed and
shoddily-built levees and floodwalls along the canals.
we who survived the trauma of seeing 80% of our city "go under" know,
they were caused because of failures of the poorly designed and
shoddily-built levees and floodwalls along the canals.
Let's examine the facts. A citizen
journalist may not have read widely enough to know that scientists have
already found what caused those failures. One of those scientists, Ivor
van Heerden, formerly of Louisiana State University, was dismissed for
"dissing" the hand that fed him, the research department under LSU,
Baton Rouge, that received abundant largess from the U. S. Army Corps of
Engineers.
What's up with the Corps?
How could shoddy
work have been done on something so important? The U. S. Army Corps of
Engineers that approves such construction projects is hand in glove with
its good political/contractor friends. (See Path of Destruction: The
Devastation of New Orleans and The Coming Age of Superstorms by John
McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, winners of the Pulitzer Prize.)
So
political and business allies, special friends can make more money,
shortcuts are made in ground surveys and in the procurement and
installation of materials.
In effect, in many ways my Mother was murdered by the U. S. Corps of Engineers.
By way of my impression about citizen news sites with respect to disaster reporting, I now see why professionals have problems doing this work, but "citizen journalists" have more.. Most of these people who write about Katrina have neither lived nor visited much southeast Louisiana, before or after Katrina, and often do not check their data thoroughly. Fact-checking at the rigorous level required by traditional newspapers, or bloggers who have been around, is the definition, in this case likely not used to do the job.
Those of us who "weathered the storm" are not the "potty-mouthed radicals" as you see on the TV series "Treme". We are middle-class people who no longer trust any pronouncements from the government at any level, and we are as angry as angry can be about how we were deceived by the Corps and its allies.
These are feelings that cannot be ignored, especially when supported by fact. The investigation into the failures of the levees, as demanded five years ago, must take place, for the sake of us all, including the ignorant who write about things they know nothing about and where correction is met with frustration.
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