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August 23rd, 2007
05:23 pm

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Take a boat to the land of dreams
"By midnight on Monday, the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody."

The charge is devastating: That, on August 29, 2005, the White House withheld from the state police the information that New Orleans was about to flood. From almost any other source, I would not have believed it. But this was not just any source. The whistle-blower is Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.

I'd come to van Heerden about another matter, but in our talks, it was clear he had something he wanted to say, and it was a big one. He charged that the White House, FEMA and the Army Corp hid, for critical hours, their discovery that the levees surrounding New Orleans were cracking, about to burst and drown the city.

Understand that Katrina never hit New Orleans. The hurricane swung east of the city, so the state evacuation directors assumed New Orleans was now safe - and evacuation could slow while emergency efforts moved east with the storm.

But unknown to the state, in those crucial hours on Monday, the federal government's helicopters had filmed the cracks that would become walls of death by Tuesday.

Van Heerden revealed:
"FEMA knew at 11 o'clock on Monday that the levees had breeched. At 2p.m. they flew over he 17th Street Canal and took video of the breech."

Question: "So the White House wouldn't tell you the levees had breeched?"
Dr. Van Heerden: "They didn't tell anybody."

Question: "And you're at the Emergency Center.'
Dr. Van Heerden: "I mean nobody knew. The Corps of Engineers knew. FEMA knew. None of us knew."

more here.

Some you tube memories

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Comments
 
[User Picture]
From:[info]swordswallower
Date:August 24th, 2007 01:02 am (UTC)
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Jesus Christ.
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From:[info]oulangi
Date:August 24th, 2007 01:18 am (UTC)
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Yes. My reaction exactly.
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From:[info]empink
Date:August 24th, 2007 02:19 am (UTC)
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GOD.
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From:[info]oulangi
Date:August 24th, 2007 03:30 am (UTC)
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They'd like to think so :/
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From:[info]sashenka
Date:August 24th, 2007 02:52 am (UTC)
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It's a little depressing how unsurprising this is to me. To have it confirmed, though, is pretty shocking. Fucking sick.
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From:[info]oulangi
Date:August 24th, 2007 03:34 am (UTC)
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I think we're just so worn down by the depraved indifferences of this administration that the part of the brain that reacts to horror is overloaded. At this point if CNN broadcasted live pictures of Bush raping Katrina refugees with puppies on the White House lawn we'd likely shrug tiredly and say, "yeah It figures"...
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From:[info]pyratejenni
Date:August 24th, 2007 03:45 am (UTC)
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Someone tell me again this administration isn't evil. I could use a good laugh.
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From:[info]ereshkigal
Date:August 24th, 2007 03:56 am (UTC)
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Sadly, it doesn't surprise me at all. Then again, these people have proven time and time again that the only lives they care about are their own.
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From:[info]cruel_illusion
Date:August 24th, 2007 03:58 am (UTC)
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Right now I'm watching Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, something I find whenever I want to be reminded that I should be outraged over what happened. How ironic that I then stumble over your link to this.. Two years later so many of us are still trying to recover. Fuck the federal government.
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From:[info]missdaisy
Date:August 24th, 2007 04:01 am (UTC)
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Christ. This surprises me not at all. The contempt of this administration for the vulnerable is epic.
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From:[info]maureenlycaon
Date:August 24th, 2007 05:30 am (UTC)
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*grits teeth in rage*

If this is for real . . . ahh, fuck, this admininstration has gotten away with so much already. It will get away with this, too.

If only we could have a nice revolution, with heads on pikes . . .

(Note to Secret Service: just fucking KNOCK. This trailer is worthless, but I have to live in it until I have a job.)
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From:[info]khym_chanur
Date:August 24th, 2007 06:41 am (UTC)
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The answer: cost. Political and financial cost. A hurricane is an act of God - but a catastrophic failure of the levees is a act of Bush. That is, under law dating back to 1935, a breech of the federal levee system makes the damage - and the deaths - a federal responsibility. That means, as van Heeden points out, that “these people must be compensated.

That still doesn't make sense. As summarized, the law says nothing about "and the government has to be aware of it before-hand to be liable". I could understand it being due to gross negligence/incompetence, but there still hasn't been given a reason as to why they'd do it on purpose.
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From:[info]auctasinistra
Date:August 24th, 2007 07:45 am (UTC)
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You know, this is beyond what even I thought (not that it's at all beyond belief), and I knew on MONDAY exactly what was going to happen (just like anyone knew who has the faintest idea about New Orleans and the fact that for decades it's been one inevitable storm away from catastrophe) ... and ... I'm feeling my blood pressure going up even remembering how fucking LONG it took ANYONE to do anything, when they all KNEW IN ADVANCE exactly what was going to happen. Jesus. I was intolerable around the newspaper for that whole week, while everyone was going "Oh, how sad, how tragic," because I was constantly railing "Why the FUCK weren't there already people ready to go in and help on MONDAY? Goddamned Indonesia had help to its people faster than we did, and that was an unexpected catastrophe." It's eclipsed only by the Iraq war in the lineup of absolute calumnies for which our church-loving fundamentalist president and his people will, I hope, one day answer before a righteous God. (And I'm not even religious)


Arghghggh... my blood pressure does NOT thank you. (But I do). Apologies for the capslock but thank God people haven't forgotten what an appalling miserable inhuman excuse for leadership we've had for the past seven years.
From:[info]rhiannonmr
Date:August 24th, 2007 11:36 am (UTC)
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First response? Was; why am I not surprised. Second response is those damned things! I can't call em human, they aren't. Honestly I am outraged at this because I used to hang out in NOLA and since Katrina and the news coverage, all I can think is they let this city die.
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From:[info]testpilotpete
Date:August 24th, 2007 03:36 pm (UTC)
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Interestingly enough there were police/private security people patrolling the more affluent areas (up and down Prytania, St. Charles, certain parts of the F.Quarter) when the evacuation warning went out, urging people to stop boarding up and to start packing up the SUV and Mercedes. I was there and saw this. Yet -- people in the 9th ward weren't so much as given a second glance. The poor and elderly in nursing homes, etc. were also neglected. If they got out, they got out. If not, there's no big loss there. I'm Af.Am and there is a huge schizm in NOLA along class lines too, though the racial one was the most glaring because of Katrina.

That is the attitude of this administration, which is of no great surprise, of course. The lives lost and the losses of the survivors in the hardest hit areas of New Orleans were simply negligible in the grand scheme of things. However, I've gone on about this at length from time to time in my own journal and won't belabor the obvious point in yours.

Thank you for sharing this.
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From:[info]gobsmacked
Date:August 24th, 2007 07:06 pm (UTC)
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I'm not surprised one bit. And I'd also like to say that although people often comment negatively on Kanye West and his "George Bush doesn't care about black people" I've always had a feeling he was onto something - and I normally think that West is an irritating egomaniac.

Here's a link you might find interesting, to a story about a Canadian filmmaker who made comparisons between the treatment of the vulnerable after Katrina and after the 1927 Mississippi floods:
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/248998
When the Mississippi flooded its banks in 1927, as many as 1,000 people were killed, 160,000 homes were destroyed and thousands of square miles of crops were submerged underwater. It was the poor African-American sharecroppers who bore the brunt of the disaster, many of them forced at gunpoint to shore up the straining levees.
Many others were placed in refugee camps, where they endured horrific living conditions.
The floods also had a significant impact on American history. Until that point, blacks had been loyal Republican voters because the GOP was the party of Abraham Lincoln, but switched allegiances to the Democrats due to Republican mishandling of the disaster. It also caused a massive migration of African-Americans to the north
Alan Mendelsohn's award-winning High River Blues, airing on Canadian History Television channel on Wednesday August 29th. I can't find anything on any US Channels.
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From:[info]rudemistress
Date:August 25th, 2007 05:15 pm (UTC)
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I've grabbed the link and cross-posted the info to my LJ.
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