[dirtboy]

Dirtboy, please remember that as a windstorm, Katrina's effects on New Orleans were minimal. The overwhelming majority of damage came from a flood that resulted from the failure of man-made structures.

So friggin' what? Are folks any less dead because they were killed by flooding instead of winds?

If you had a Cat 5 coming right at you with 30 hours before landfall and you had access to a car, wouldn't you get the hell out of Dodge? Heck, Katrina took out NOLA with the weaker side of the storm. Had Katrina hit NOLA with the dirty side of the storm, the death toll could have been at least ten times worse.

[Romulus]

Please calm down. My family and I did evacuate for Katrina. Given the Cat 5 status on Sunday morning, it seemed the only prudent choice. But the storm was a weak Cat 3 at its closest approach to NOLA. As I said, wind damage was mostly trees and roofs, not flattened structures. My point, in case you're interested, is that in NOLA people died because levees and floodwalls whose design and construction were the responsibility of the Federal government failed at loads well below their design limits.

Those who were trapped or otherwise harmed by floods suffered becasuse they'd relied on the Federal government to provide the safety it had undertaken to provide and had assured us was in place.

Please try to get pas the demographics and politics of New Orleans, dirtboy. We are American citizens too. We pay taxes too. We have a right to take our government at its word, and if that government fails us through negligence and incompetence we take it badly when our more fortunate fellow citizens blame us for the disaster.

Had Katrina hit NOLA with the dirty side of the storm, the death toll could have been at least ten times worse.

Had Katrina hit with the dirty side of the storm, the levees would have been overtopped. The flood would have been a true natural disaster and no one would be pointing the finger at the Corps of Engineers. But under the circumstances as they played out, we have a right to demand that the US government remedy the mess it made, while not being held up to scorn and contempt from political thugs whose idea of sport is kicking someone when he's down.

[ichabod1]

If you had a Cat 5 coming right at you with 30 hours before landfall and you had access to a car, wouldn't you get the hell out of Dodge?

I did, I didn't, and many of those who did died stranded on the roadways. In Houston.