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Ms. Hollie went to Algiers RiverFest last weekend, and took some good pix of The Indians

Speaking of New Orleans pix, "W Magazine" apparently has a spread about New Orleans. I havn't seen the magazine, but some pix are on line. (I could do without the fashionista stuff, but enough local stuff to be worth a look.)

Harry Shearer's suggested headline summarizing the Federal involvement with the Katrina disaster from the ACOE levees to FEMA trailers: "Government Floods City, Then Poisons Survivors"

Speaking of Federal incompetence, Dear Leader Bush is the poster boy: Historians agree: Worst President Ever

"Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world's goodwill. In short, no other president's faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large."
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The flooding of New Orleans was caused by: Incompetent design by the Army Corps of Engineers.

From article in today's Times-Picayune:

"This is the largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States. Nothing has come close to the $300 billion in damages and half-million people out of their homes and the lives lost. Nothing this big has ever happened before in civil engineering."

"That miscalculation was so obvious and fundamental, investigators said, they "could not fathom" how the design team [...] could have missed what is being termed the costliest engineering mistake in American history."

So. It wasn't that the storm was worse than the city's protection system was supposedly designed to deal with.

It wasn't that some corrupt SOB local contractor or politician massivley skimped on mateials to line their own pocket (which had been my guess).

It was that the ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS screwed up the design from the start.

Somehow, I thought they had some idea of what they were doing, and could get it done. Isn't this the organization that built the Panama Canal? Built logistical support under the most extreme conditions allowing victory in WWII?

Or are people more familiar with the Corps than I unsurprised at this massive level of incompetence?

One of the sub-groups of the Krewe du Vieux is going as the "Coprse of Engineers" this year, outfits a combination of Engineers and Grim Reapers.


full Times-Picayune article text mirrored )

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