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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.

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.

And, once again, even a "weak" Cat 3 is nothing to sneeze at when you live below friggin' sea level.

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.

Except that the surge from Katrina was NOT Cat 3, but Cat 5. The surge in Mississippi exceeded that from Camille. Katrina was a huge storm and put in motion a tremendous wall of water well before it weakened.

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.

Which is stupid on many levels.

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.

— Didn’t Greenpeace sue the Army Corps of Engineers to halt the upgrade on the levee system back in the 1990s?

no one would be pointing the finger at the Corps of Engineers

Reason number 1,279 why I'm not in charge of anything:

If I was in charge of the Corps of Engineers, I would tear down the god damned levees and PULL OUT! Build your own god damned levees you ungrateful wretches!