Not to be overlooked is the REALLY KEY point upon which this all turns...
Your aerial shots and collating of vital levee related info demonstrates a compelling reason for Governor Babineaux-Blanco, and Mayor Nagin {assuming they were privy to this knowledge on the misuse of public monies and the dangerously deteriorated state of the levees} to have engaged in preventing independent outside organizations - governmental and private - from entering the storm zone with full access.
Once the storm and its subsequent surges, etc... have passed, it is s simple matter of explaining to the public that the levees failed, and engaging in pointing the finger of blame at the Federal government, and the Corps of engineers...
"Oh - you can't blame us - this damage was caused to the levees by a storm surge of unexpectedly immense power. the levees were in good condition before, but we were begging the Bush administration for money to improve and strengthen them - we just knew sooner or later we would have a storm like this. That we were overwhelmed is all their fault!"
With your assemblage of data - you have effectively preemptively put the lie to that entire line of reasoning, just as two other FReepers "busted" Nagin and Blanco on their lies about their response versus the Federal government's response, by creating fully functional, and easy to follow timelines chronicling the progression of events, non-events and misstatements from the very beginning - using publicly sourced media, to boot.
Once again, FReepdom outscoops the SlimeStreamMedia!
A.A.C.
AmericanArchConservative wrote:
"Once the storm and its subsequent surges, etc... have passed, it is s simple matter of explaining to the
public that the levees failed, and engaging in pointing the finger of blame at the Federal government, and
the Corps of engineers..."
They're already doing this. Experts speaking to the Times Picayune have already claimed that the storm washed away whole sections of levees out east of St.Bernard. Blanco or Nagin also mentioned numerous levee failures out there during the pre Fed flap.
Your right about the implications of this too, and it can't be emphasized enough that the levee "failures", and the corruption surrounding the levee boards over decades, the whole corrupt machine down there, is the main reason for all of Blanco, Landrieu, and Nagin's seemingly inexplicable failures through the whole process.
To those of us who have been scratching our heads with every press conference in the Live Katrina threads, I assumed this would be obvious, but that was a mistake on my part. Without actual open discussion on that critical point here, will almost certainly be lost on many others.
Thanks for pointing it out.
There's still at least one major unanswered question yet to see daylight.
Why did recently refurbished levee sections, and ONLY recently refurbished levee sections in the London and 17th Street canals fail?
You can't pin this on the storm itself, not when the entire rest of the levee systems surrounding downtown stood up to the task.
You also can't hide bad construction work from the guys who actually got their hands dirty putting it up. Somewhere, somebody knows what went wrong, probably a lot of somebodies. The more attention that gets focused on this, the more likely one of them is to talk and when he does, this whole corrupt mess starts crumbling from the foundations up.