Think Progress has an excellent Katrina timeline, with citations.
It’s been a strange few weeks. The beginning of fall is, seemingly, a time for tragedy. The only difference this year is that the tragedy isn’t personal in nature. I alternate between being grateful, and feeling a little guilty for it.
I think some of the things on that timeline are a little disingenuous. The levee being topped is not the same thing as the levee being breached; most of the predictions before the fact seem to refer to the former and not the latter.
Otherwise it’s a good reference to have.
That’s true, but there’s no mention of the how the pumps were expected to withstand the hurricane — I’d be interested to know what the predictions of that were. Also, John Martin suspected that a factor in the levee breaches was the presence of water on both sides of the levee — not a common occurance, obviously, and I don’t know if they were engineered to withstand that.
Meanwhile, I was brought up a bit short by this:
Doesn’t it seem likely that if you don’t own a car, most of your friends, family, and neighbors don’t, either?
Also, and then I’ll stop blabbering on about this, four of the nine parishes — including St. Charles Parish, which I think was the hardest hit? — didn’t have shelters.