Reply #10: Bush didn't cause the first storm to hit, he just failed in every duty [View All]

[jobycom]

he had to help New Orleans before, during and after the Hurricane. As the president of the US, he has sworn an oath to uphold the laws of the land, and he has an implicit duty to manage crises in America. Instead, he played air guitar in California, made up lies to cover his failures, and eventually made a bunch of photo-op promises that he refuses to follow through on.

There were other failures of government at the federal level stretching back 40 years that made the storm worse. Both parties stole all oil revenues from Louisiana, causing the state to continuously run at a bare subsistence level while trying to pay for the immense damage the oil industry did to the wetlands and barrier islands below New Orleans. Constant appeals by Louisiana Congresspeople in DC to help restore the wetland, stop the damage, provide the oil revenues that every other state got, etc, fell on deaf ears.

Bush did contribute to that, of course. He and his party since he took office rejected spending plans to restore the wetlands (which would not have been done in time for Katrina, obviously), and his budget slashed spending on levee maintenance (the duty of the Army Corp of Engineers), specifically on the 17th Street Canal levees, which failed during Katrina.

As Katrina struck the mouth of the Mississippi on exactly the same trajectory as Camille and Betsy, but at a far weaker level, there were no wetlands and barely any barrier islands to begin shearing the storm surge. Thus, the storm, which was a Category Three or a weak four as it began to come ashore, had no natural impediments. This caused a storm surge of over thirty foot to hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast--a completely unprecedented storm surge. Camille, a very strong Cat 5 hurricane, had a smaller storm surge, and a big part of the reason was the lack of wetlands to reduce the wave.

But the side of the storm to hit New Orleans was not as strong as the side to hit Mississippi. Without getting into the geography of the region much, the storm's main damage came from water that sloshed over undersize levees or that caused the collapse of improperly maintained levees. The 17th Street Canal was built on mush, basically--a fact the contractors had tried to point out in the 80s when they built the levee. The Army Corp would not increase funding to build the levee properly. This was during the Reagan Error, when the country began its current disintegration. The problem on the 17th was made worse by constant dredging which undermined the foundation of the levee. Proper maintenance of the type George Bush and the current Republicans slashed from their budget would have detected and corrected this problem before Katrina hit. It was the 17t Stree Canal Levee that broke, under 15 foot waves that did not top the levee and which the levee was designed, by federal law, to withstand, that caused the flooding of downtown New Orleans, and crippled the city and the hospitals and the police force and everything else.

The more dramatic levee failure, the Industrial Canal Levee that broke and helped flood the Lower Ninth Ward, has not been fully explained yet, but the flooding and the levee failure to the East of the Industrial Canal was much different. Some of it was due to proximity to the Coast, some to the poor design of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal that also caused extensive damage during Betsy. That Canal should have had proper flood gates built decades ago, but again the federal government just didn't give a damn, and the state of New Orleans is too poor, to fund it. That's where the majority of lvies were lost. Many of those lives, and much suffering, could have been spared if the rest of New Orleans hadn't flooded by a completely preventable failue of the 17th Street Canal levee.

So the hurricane wasn't Bush's fault, and much of the flooding was due to decades of federal neglect and federal theft, by both parties. But the loss of life AFTER the hurricane and the complete lack of federal effort in rebuilding New Orleans is the fault of Bush and his deliberate neglect. He withheld aid for several days to teach Blanco a lesson for not declaring martial law before the hurricane (never been done, no reason to do it then), and the National Guard that Blanco would have normally called up was out of the country fighting a vanity war for Bush.

Bush didn't send the storm, but he made it far, far worse than it should have been. Not that he's the only one to blame. But it was under his wash, and not even the most blinded Republican can pretend that Clinton, Gore, Father Bush, or even a failure like Reagan would have handled it as badly. He will NEVER be forgiven on the Coast, even if some Republicans in the rest of their country overlook his guilt.