Spurious comments from our federal government about Katrina
There is a good op-ed piece in today’s Times Picayune by Jarvis DeBerry about the misconception of Katrina by the American public. I encountered this with my cousins from Miami, who believe, as does my renegade ex-brother-in-law, that New Orleans was hit by a natural disaster. Wrong. As DeBerry so eloquently puts it:
“There are Americans across this country who are resistant to the idea that what happened here in New Orleans was something other than a natural disaster: It was nothing more, they believe, than a low-lying city getting swamped by a huge storm surge. We have science on our side, but there’s a segment of the population that believes that scientific conclusions hold no more weight than their gut feelings or the pablum that talk radio feeds them.”
The fact is that “The United States Army Corps of Engineers built the New Orleans’ flood protection, and more notably, the Army Corps of Engineers has admitted that what they sold to the city as a fllood protection system was “a system in name only.”
The ignorance is astounding.