Judge: Feds liable in Federal Flooding of Greater New Orleans

[infrogmation]

"It has been proven in a court of law that the drowning of New Orleans was not a natural disaster, but a preventable man-made travesty," the attorneys said in a statement. "The government has always had a moral obligation to rebuild New Orleans. This decision makes that obligation a matter of legal responsibility." -- CNN story

Here in Greater New Orleans, where people routinely talk about "the Federal Flood" and refer to the MRGO Canal as "the Hurricane Highway", the news isn't the facts of the case, but rather the judge finding legal liability.

If I understand the ruling correctly, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has legal immunity from being sued for damages from the failure of their mis-designed and mis-built levees, but not for the fact that the MRGO Canal channeled deep sea storm surge right into the heart of the city. This point alone is enough to make them culpable for the majority of the flooding of the Greater New Orleans area in 2005.

Times-Picayume story

On Bloomberg

On UPI

WDSU, with link to PDF of lawsuit

For those interested in details of what happened and why concerning the great flood, I reccomend the book Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow. It also makes the point that rather than Greater New Orleans being unique in vulnerability, bad decisions by political and business interests have created no shortage of other engineering disasters waiting to happen.
YouTube video of one of the co-authors and members of levees.org at a reading/discussion at Octavia Books.

Comments

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

Good.

Comments from Harry Shearer

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

"UPDATE (THURSDAY A.M.): Mainstream media, deep in Palin and health-bill mode, largely ignore this ruling. Maddow (who at least covered it): ruling "suggests that Hurricane Katrina was in part a man-made disaster". The ruling didn't suggest Corps culpability; it declared it. As for "in part", that's an interesting phrase, because federal law didn't allow the judge to consider the Corps' culpability (admitted, nine months later, by the Corps' own commander) for the failures along the flood-control structures. As for npr, Robert Siegel last night said "I know the people in New Orleans don't regard the damage inflicted by Katrina as an act of God so much as an act of Government negligence...what's their argument?" Nice in-depth work, Robert. Their "argument" might more properly be called the findings of two exhaustive, independent forensic engineering investigations of the disaster. The co-author of one of those reports called what happened to New Orleans "the greatest man-made engineering disaster since Chernobyl". Google is your friend, npr."

New Orleans: Where Accountability Failed, Liability Follows (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/new-orleans-where-account_b_363239.html) Harry Shearer, Huffington Post