Before Katrina hit I heard SEVERAL reports predicting this EXACT scenario!

[Proud2BAmurkin]

I heard predictions of MASSIVE FLOODS and NO becoming a TOXIC SOUP way before the hurricane hit. Now these incompetent assholes are saying "no one could have predicted"

BULLSHIT

[Beaverhausen]

1. and last year when one of those hurricanes looked like it was headed there

they also talked about how bad it would be for NO to get a direct hit.

Who DOESN'T remember that?

[DBoon]

3. The same people who didn't remember the hijacked French jet

that was going to be crashed, full of fuel, into Paris.

That was 1997 or so. The French commandos boarded the plane before it could fuel and put an end to a potential tragedy.

[jimshoes]

2. These are not the kind of people

you want running things, yet they are running things. This has to change. They are like an only child who denies crayoning on the wall.

[milkyway]

4. Here's a link to the National Weather Service statment Sunday a.m.

http://kamala.cod.edu/offs/KLIX/0508281550.wwus74.html

It is horrific in its description of the impending destruction of New Orleans. Here's one of several DU discussions of it on Sunday:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4487021

[shance]

5. Things look more and more likely there was weather manipulation.

How did Katrina jump from a one to a five in such short time?

[AnnieBW]

6. Warm Water in Gulf

Warm water in the Gulf of Mexico fed it.

[AnnieBW]

7. Check What Sen. Landrieu Said in June..

In this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4516781&mesg_id=4516781

[tx_dem41]

12. Meteorology 101....it happens.

Its not some MIHOP thing. :eyes:

[Junkdrawer]

8. There are four famous "worst case scenario" natural disasters:

1.) Cat 5 hurricane into NOLA

2.) Eruption of Mt. Rainier

3.) Eruption of Yellowstone

4.) San Andreas Earthquake

How can anyone say: "no one could have predicted" it? :shrug:

[muwriter]

17. Add "Large New Madrid Earthquake" to that list.

Would kill more people than anything other than Yellowstone.

[necso]

9. I have actually seen

a program on PBS (or perhaps more than one -- it is the useful information that I try to remember -- not the packaging) that discussed the vulnerability of NO to flooding, because it is below sealevel and is protected by levees from both the river and the lake -- both of which are higher. (Levees, BTW, can be natural or man-made, or somewhere in between. Some rivers tend to create natural levees, and reinforcing these can be useful.)

Of course, expecting Americans to know the geography of their own country (or even that water flows naturally to lower elevations (relative to sea level), when presented with the opportunity) would be asking a bit much. (The pumps in NO that the media keeps mentioning, however, should furnish some clue as to the vulnerability there. My community, for instance, has no such pumps, since we don't have to pump water out of our community -- and have no reasonable expectation of needing to do so.)

Any worthwhile disaster response plan should have considered this extreme vulnerability (and somewhat unusual one -- that is, having a (an American) town largely below sealevel and surrounded by higher bodies of water) and either ruled out the practicality of dealing with levee breaks -- or created plans (preferably tested and refined plans) and positioned resources for dealing with levee breaks. (Levee breaks are something like enemy breakthroughs (of your defensive lines). In both cases you attempt to seal them off while they are still small -- and in both cases you should plan to have the resources available to do so.)

(One would also expect disaster response plans to include provisions to completely evacuate the city -- including the many poor, elderly, disabled and ill -- and to make available and distribute (prepositioning is best -- but even with this, supplying additional should be planned for) necessarily supplies of all kinds to the stranded, restore and maintain order, etc.)

And, of course, widening and raising the levees has been discussed for years. But this was never done -- and if there were practical, instantiated plans to seal levee breaches, then I am seeing no evidence of them.

But you could hardly expect a gaggle of (today's) bottom-line-fixated clowns in the services part of the federal government to get serious about disaster planning -- these are avoidable costs in the short term. And you don't get ahead in today's (American, at least) business culture (and climate -- which now more or less includes the government) by pushing for such things.

[necso]

10. Oh, and even my

tiny community has (a modest amount of) prepositioned disaster stores (or so I have been led to believe -- and I have seen a container supposedly filled with such). (And my neighbors and I have made some rather elaborate preparations of our own.)

It is well known in the disaster preparedness/response community that access to (and getting around in) disaster areas can be poor, or even impossible, for some time after the event. And if this lesson needed reinforcement, then the major earthquake in Japan a few years ago was more than enough to do so.

[zulchzulu]

11. When I worked at WWL in 1991, we did a documentary about this eventuality

I have a copy on VHS and am tempted to digitize it. We won a regional Emmy and the documentary was sold to the Discovery Channel

It was basically about how a hurricane could hit Lake Pontchartrain and put over 20 feet of water in the city. It seemed so far fetched at the time, yet also seemed possible.

I never thought that the day would come in my lifetime.

[Walt Starr]

13. National Geographic PREDICTED IT in October 2004 edition!

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/

[The Jacobin]

14. I watched something about a year ago on TV

Discovery channel, I think that talked about the problems New Orleans would have in this scenario.

[Wizard777]

15. I was watching a documentary on the Nat. Geo. Channel on this.

The day before Katrina hit. They didn't have any predictions though. Not a single Quatrain. But they did have computer graphics of a Cat 5 hurricane slaming into NO. They showed the levees over flowing. Tens of thousands of deaths.

[CabalPowered]

16. For the record, Saturday is the day they should have started preparing..

One look at that monster on Saturday and I knew NO was in serious jeopardy. The forecast projections are more accurate than ever and it was well known that a catastrophe would unfold if a major hurricane hit NO.

[tx_dem41]

18. They did....they got 1 million out of 1.3 million people out of ...

the city on basically two roads.