Thursday, September 01, 2005

The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of dead bodies."

from Scientific American in October of 2001 comes this prescient article. we have evidently known for a long, long time what would happen if a large hurricane were to hit Louisiana and yet we (as a government) have done worse than nothing. we gutted federal disaster relief to one of the few areas everyone knew would suffer the most.

3 comments:

aughra said...

Money was supposed to be used to build up the Levees. It went to Iraq.

Tragic.

airplanejayne said...

btw - my big bro' Jeff (lives in New Orleans) is okay. Evac'd to Houston just prior to Katrina, can't go back home, and is heading to Nebraska to Mom and Dads.

ScarySquirrelMan said...

good to hear, APJ. keeping life is ever so much more important than keeping possessions. sounds like your bro understood and could "afford" to get out. very thankful for that.many didn't have the means to leave or had nowhere to go, but many chose to stay even though they had an out.
unfortunately, as will be borne out, our wonderful government screwed new orleans royally and it started some time ago.
aughra, wonderful to have you grace my blog. i truly enjoy yours. and your comment is right on the button. $71.2 million dollars taken from the new orleans army corps of engineers this year. plus all of the bush years of repealing the clinton laws that protected the wetlands between the big easy and the gulf.