This morning, there are the many articles about the anniversary of
Hurricane Katrina, and all the various evils and errors that came from
it. Blame, of course, is put on the various government administrations
with some people more or less burned in journalistic effigy. None of
them, however, mention that New Orleans was a textbook example of
warnings on what not to do and where not live in undergraduate Natural
Hazards and Water Resource management classed for decades before
Katrina. This was not buried in obscure Academic journals,this was in
undergraduate textbooks. There were plans, studies and two generations
of scholars, scientists and engineers screaming " It is a disaster
waiting to happen, not if, but when". But, because partytown with a
bunch of horn players and some decent food has been there for a couple
hundred years, the rest of the country is forced to pour in resources to
protect and pump the water from a place that is below sea level and
subsiding, while industry destroys the coastal wetlands. And when the
disaster does happen, and the governor and the typically useless mayor
of a city and state so dysfunctional that bribery is considered normal
business, sit on their thumbs like halfwits terrified of the fact that
what they had been warned of was actually going to happen, they then sat
there blaming a small federal agency with no police powers and no
authority. I have no sympathy. You built a house on an island and
complained about getting flooded out in the spring. You were warned. A
thousand times. And now, for ten years since, we have been told of the
evils of redevelopment, how people have not returned, how there has been
no funding for ordinary people. That is all typical, for the connected
and powerful circle government funding and contracts like vultures. Here
is the problem...No one should live there. No one. We should simply
have resettled people elsewhere, rather than pouring money into a place
that does not belong there. We should have cleaned up and bulldozed and
let the water reclaim much of the place. Let it wither and die.
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