The American Spectator

The latest from the excellent Bob Marshall of the Times-Picayune (a former boss of mine, by the way) shows more proof that the floodwall failures in N.O. were the fault of the feds, namely those at the Corps. Tell me again how the devastation in Lakeview and Gentilly and Broadmoor and Mid-City is the fault of the locals? Meanwhile, a friend of mine, a reporter now in Ohio who has never lived in N.O. and therefore has no local bias, reported this to me yesterday: actually, i just bought the old flood maps from FEMA so i could see what parts of the city are in the flood plain. i think that most were not because of the levees.

So, to quote one of the official investigators: “So, yeah, this was a human failure, not a natural disaster.”

Yet the White House’s goofballs at one point wanted to help rebuild only 20,000 of 200,000 damaged houses because the rest supposedly were victims, in effect, of their own bad judgment. Yeah, right. Not exactly. The fact is that many, many of the victims had every reason to believe they were safe from a Category Three storm, and that they were not effectively in a flood plain at all. The feds have a responsibility here, which they haven’t lived up to.