So how did the destruction of New Orleans happen?

[DanS]

There's still no particular significance to that quote because it signifies nothing more than a turf war. It is riling you up to read it, I'm sure. It was designed to do that. It's manipulative.

Am I the only one with a shred of constructive cynicism here? My pattern recognition algorithm, honed over years of reading similar stuff in the Washington Post, says it's a turf war.

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by Patroklos
Lets make this easy for you, a special explanation, for a special boy.

Lake Pochatrain is to the NE of New Orleans, on that mak and every other map, not along the Gulf coast as you thought. The storm surge did not strike the levees there like you said, gradual flooding as the water filtered inward through the waterways burst it.

Still with me?

The levee break on the Miss, is to the West of New Orleans, just where the map says, or in other words up river.

If you need any more help, feel free to ask

More total bull**** being made up!



*DIG**DIG**DIG*

Sorry, who is it you're trying to convince by now?

Everyone knows you're talking out your arse - we've spelled your bull**** out to you over and over and over and your still making sh.it up - you're so BUSTED...

No one on this site believes a word you're saying because it is all wrong, you have made a total and utter tool out of your self - even Ned would have had the smarts to quit by now...

[Patroklos]

Apparently light blue, since he said the same thing. In fact the only one in denial of this basic geography lessen is...well...

YOU

As normal, you are all by yourself.

[Guynemer]

Originally posted by DanS
There's still no particular significance to that quote because it signifies nothing more than a turf war. It is riling you up to read it, I'm sure. It was designed to do that. It's manipulative.

Am I the only one with a shred of constructive cynicism here? My pattern recognition algorithm, honed over years of reading similar stuff in the Washington Post, says it's a turf war.

Sure.

It's a turf war that cost lives. That makes it very, very different.

[DanS]

Here's a good article from the Washington Post. You still have to read between the lines as you are inclined, but I found the following quote very illuminating, although there is a lot of blame shifting going around (be careful as to what you ultimately believe)...

Other federal and state officials pointed to Louisiana's failure to measure up to national disaster response standards, noting that the federal plan advises state and local emergency managers not to expect federal aid for 72 to 96 hours, and base their own preparedness efforts on the need to be self-sufficient for at least that period. "Fundamentally the first breakdown occurred at the local level," said one state official who works with FEMA. "Did the city have the situational awareness of what was going on within its borders? The answer was no."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301653.html

[lightblue]

MOBIUS on this one Patroklos is right. The levees did not break due to wind or the whipping up of the water due to storm but due to the rain that fell upstream on the Mississippi and then surged down to NoLa. Same as that village in England last year that got wiped away because of rain fall into the river that went through it. Obviously there was significant rain in NoLa and a not inconsiderable surge of water up the Mississippi, but nothing comared to the surge coming downstream after the storm had passed.

TBH it's all arguing about apples and oranges really, point is that the human destruction of the natural flow of the Mississippi meant that the surge could grow to a high enough height that it could overwhelm the levees. If the water has nowhere to go then it will build up like a wave coming down the river.

(I am Dutch so I've been exposed to waaaaay too much water management crap over my years, but now some of the knowledge comes in handy )

[techumseh]

Originally posted by DanS
Here's a good article from the Washington Post. You still have to read between the lines as you are inclined, but I found the following quote very illuminating, although there is a lot of blame shifting going around (be careful as to what you ultimately believe)...



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...090301653.html

I followed your link, and I didn't find the above quote. Here's what I did find:

What Went Wrong
Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top

By Susan B. Glasser and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 4, 2005; Page A01

The killer hurricane and flood that devastated the Gulf Coast last week exposed fatal weaknesses in a federal disaster response system retooled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to handle just such a cataclysmic event.

Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.


Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government's highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.

Born out of the confused and uncertain response to 9/11, the massive new Department of Homeland Security was charged with being ready the next time, whether the disaster was wrought by nature or terrorists. The department commanded huge resources as it prepared for deadly scenarios from an airborne anthrax attack to a biological attack with plague to a chlorine-tank explosion.

But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that his department had failed to find an adequate model for addressing the "ultra-catastrophe" that resulted when Hurricane Katrina's floodwater breached New Orleans's levees and drowned the city, "as if an atomic bomb had been dropped."

If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions. "This is what the department was supposed to be all about," said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former inspector general. "Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It's a devastating indictment of this department's performance four years after 9/11."

"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.

Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.

But several current and former senior officials charged that those worries were never accorded top priority -- either by FEMA's management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed "Hurricane Pam" last year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up study was never completed, according to a FEMA official involved.

"The whole department was stood up, it was started because of 9/11 and that's the bottom line," said C. Suzanne Mencer, a former senior homeland security official whose office took on some of the preparedness functions that had once been FEMA's. "We didn't have an appropriate response to 9/11, and that is why it was stood up and where the funding has been directed. The message was . . . we need to be better prepared against terrorism."

The roots of last week's failures will be examined for weeks and months to come, but early assessments point to a troubled Department of Homeland Security that is still in the midst of a bureaucratic transition, a "work in progress," as Mencer put it. Some current and former officials argued that as it worked to focus on counterterrorism, the department has diminished the government's ability to respond in a nuts-and-bolts way to disasters in general, and failed to focus enough on threats posed by hurricanes and other natural disasters in particular. From an independent Cabinet-level agency, FEMA has become an underfunded, isolated piece of the vast DHS, yet it is still charged with leading the government's response to disaster.

"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able to do.

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by Patroklos
Apparently light blue, since he said the same thing. In fact the only one in denial of this basic geography lessen is...well...

YOU

As normal, you are all by yourself.

#1 Lightblue is agreeing with me about lake Ponchartrain!

#2 If I were you I think you should actually understand what a storm surge is before talking about something you patently don't understand...

#3 The only levee breach waters from the Mississippi could have conceivably affected was the industrial canal breach - which is ironically a helpful breach... So your assertion about the Mississippi is bull**** - surprise surprise!

[DanS]

I followed your link, and I didn't find the above quote.

See page 4.

[DanS]

Originally posted by lightblue
MOBIUS on this one Patroklos is right. The levees did not break due to wind or the whipping up of the water due to storm but due to the rain that fell upstream on the Mississippi and then surged down to NoLa. Same as that village in England last year that got wiped away because of rain fall into the river that went through it. Obviously there was significant rain in NoLa and a not inconsiderable surge of water up the Mississippi, but nothing comared to the surge coming downstream after the storm had passed.

TBH it's all arguing about apples and oranges really, point is that the human destruction of the natural flow of the Mississippi meant that the surge could grow to a high enough height that it could overwhelm the levees. If the water has nowhere to go then it will build up like a wave coming down the river.

(I am Dutch so I've been exposed to waaaaay too much water management crap over my years, but now some of the knowledge comes in handy )

I didn't understand that's actually what happened. Thanks for the clarification. I thought that the waters from Lake Pontchartrain were what did it, not the waters from the Mississippi.

[lightblue]

I am not exactly sure of course, but I assume that the Lake is fed by various waterways as well, so it will have risen in the same way as the Mississippi. I think most of the Mississippi levees held, but water went over the top of them. As for Pontchartrain levees i am not sure, at a guess water was coming over the top of them as well and they were less stable.

I don't know full details on how and why this all happened in NoLa (I don't think anyone does at this point), but the main source of all the water comes from the rainfall after the storm has gone by rather than the wind during. The levees only broke late monday night/early tuesday at which point the storm was well clear of NoLa.

And I think both Patroklos and MOBIUS are pretty much arguiing the same point here with slight differences in naming things

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by lightblue
MOBIUS on this one Patroklos is right. The levees did not break due to wind or the whipping up of the water due to storm but due to the rain that fell upstream on the Mississippi and then surged down to NoLa. Same as that village in England last year that got wiped away because of rain fall into the river that went through it. Obviously there was significant rain in NoLa and a not inconsiderable surge of water up the Mississippi, but nothing comared to the surge coming downstream after the storm had passed.

TBH it's all arguing about apples and oranges really, point is that the human destruction of the natural flow of the Mississippi meant that the surge could grow to a high enough height that it could overwhelm the levees. If the water has nowhere to go then it will build up like a wave coming down the river.

(I am Dutch so I've been exposed to waaaaay too much water management crap over my years, but now some of the knowledge comes in handy )

Except that the two major levee breaks are on the opposite side of the city from the Mississippi, on Lake Pontchartrain - so it would be interesting for you to point out exactly how that water was able to get there. Now, all the water surging into Pontchartrain from the Gulf, or even falling onto the lake due to its large surface area - that would produce the overwhelming pressure on the levees required.

[Patroklos]

One is on the opposite side of the Miss, and the lake is fed from many sources, the Gulf being one.

And we did attribute flooding in lake P to the Gulf, just not from a storm surge.

[lightblue]

Looking at Google Earth, there's a number of what look like fairly sizeable rivers flowing into the Lake (or at least the little lake next to it which flows into Pontchartrain). Add to that the rainfall on the lake, and the water draining from the wetlands surrounding the lake on all sides...

Tbh I think water came over the levee, soaked it through and it slowly cracked. If only they'd had someone to stick his finger in the ****...

[Patroklos]

Hah, it edited dike.

Well, at least thats what I assumed you said, guess not.