Chez Chesler

The Katrina Conundrum, an editorial by Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News ervice

As a nation, we are good at post-mortems, analyzing and explaining tragic events _ the '68 riots, the Loma Prieta earthquake, 9/11 _ and learning from the results. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina demands a commission to answer this question: How did an event that had long been predicted and presumably prepared for turn into the New Orleans catastrophe?

At first it looked like New Orleans had dodged a bullet, with the greatest devastation falling on its hapless neighbors to the east. But then, after Katrina had passed, three levees failed, flooding the downtown, forcing the evacuation of a major city and turning much of its population into homeless, destitute refugees. How could this happen?

It's not as if the consequences of a levee breach were a surprise. Planners had long said a doomsday storm was a matter of when, not if, and an eerily prescient Times-Picayune story three years ago laid out pretty much what came to pass this week. And charges are coming to light that even though there were known defects in the system, the levees were seriously underfunded. Once the breaks occurred, there seemed no plan of action, with material and equipment in place, to repair them.

And Ann McFeatters of the Block News Alliance writes "Once again, the government failed so many"

WASHINGTON -- There can be no subject more worthy of our attention right now than what happened when Hurricane Katrina rained catastrophe on the Gulf Coast. I predict that the world will be riveted by how quickly the thin veneer of civilization was peeled away in the most powerful nation on Earth, as looters ruled the streets of New Orleans, as dead bodies floated by, as thousands of the barely living waited in desperation day after day without food or drinking water or sanitation or power or a place to sleep or a way to contact their families.

...

How can we not be outraged when we think of the billions of dollars we've spent on homeland preparedness after Sept. 11, 2001, yet watched as babies died for lack of water and food and electricity three days after the hurricane hit?

We understand that the flooding was a separate catastrophe from the hurricane. But why were there no plans to evacuate the one out of every three residents of New Orleans too poor or disabled or incompetent or unwilling to leave just before the storm struck?

Thousands of reservists from Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are serving in Iraq. Yet where was the National Guard as people in Mississippi and Louisiana desperately begged camera crews for help?

Why were water and food not airdropped to the thousands of the sick and the elderly and the children who went days with no help?

Meanwhile Osama and our other enemies are looking for another dam that could be blown up, or some other weakness in our infrastructure.