President George W. Bush took responsibility on Tuesday for any failures in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and acknowledged the storm exposed serious deficiencies at all levels of government four years after the September 11 attacks.

I don't want to meme CNN's homepage so I'm linking a different copy of this story. This is important. It means the Administration has acknowledged that the federal response wasn't rapid enough and will work to address the problem going forward. Its the best sort of answer you could expect.

Bush - I am responsible.

Dagmar wrote:

NEW ORLEANS is battered and submerged today. But it will rise again because it is — and always has been — the single most important cog in the nation's economy.

I've seen some pretty irrational things said to justify expense reports for seasonal junkets to conferences, but this one really takes the cake.

The last time I checked, choked highways and swamp don't exactly make for a manufacturing or shipping paradise. Mississippi can pick up the slack on this just fine.

I'm going to have to go with Dagmar on this one. While I enjoyed reading George Friedman's historical perspective on the importance of New Orleans, the article I'm linking here provides a more modern perspective.

Our cities may have grown up around shipping and transportation, but this isn't the 1700s anymore. Modern cities are successful due to an interplay between culture, captial, and eductional institutions, not transportation routes.

New Orleans has two of those, but you need all three to make it work, and so the city has been in decline for quite some time, and this event is likely to hasten that decline. All of those poor people in the city, and the corrupt institutions there, are all symptoms of a community which exists in a place after the economic pillars that made it healthy have eroded away. (See Detriot...)

The fact that NOLA is fun and interesting doesn't make it economically viable. Its not a place that ends up on the list of places you'd be likely to move. There are people who'd like to live there, but they are people like Anne Rice and Trent Reznor who don't need to live in close proximity to a normal industry.

The tourist industry will return, but the resulting city is apt to look more like Savanna then a top U.S. metro area. It might have better prospects in the extreme long term (decades) but its too early to tell.

NOLA SOL

A lot of really good pictures in this series from someone who stayed in the French Quarter through the disaster.

Kodakgallery.com: NOLA Slideshow

I think everyone is still frustrated that it took so long for the calvary to arrive once the levee broke.

However, the real problem is obvious in retrospect. They knew NOLA couldn't handle a major storm. The Hurricane seasons have been getting worse in the past few years due to a shifting Atlantic temperature cycle. This was a high probability event. Other countries have built effective public floodworks that prevent these kinds of disasters. We should have built one. The blame for failing to do so is bi-partisan.

Unfortunately, this country is now in a permanent election year, and so the partisan attacks have begun in earnest. The left says its all Bush's fault and that historically documented Atlantic cycles are caused by Global Warming. The right is shooting back at the state and local governments (which are run by Dems) while simultaneously failing to admit that anything might have been done wrong.

I've been trying to avoid memeing anything blatently partisan. I'm sick of what the political discourse in this country has turned into. Ya'll are all full of shit. EVERYONE (this means YOU) is at fault for failing to advocate a proper public works project. Shut the fuck up and give the Red Cross some money.

Now, having said all of that, if you haven't seen Kayne West's rambling comments on the NBC Katrina Telethon they are a must see, in high res if possible, if for no other reason then the look on Mike Meyer's face!

The link here is to a rap song about the flood that remixes his comment. Its good. I really like it. So I'm memeing it. If you really like Bush you might not like it. Unless you are able to ignore petty bullshit and see the truths in people's frustrations inspite of how they might articulate them.

Swam to the store, tryin' to look for food
Corner store's kinda flooded so I broke my way through
Got what I could but before I got through
News say the police shot a black man trying to loot

Boing Boing: Katrina: Kanye remixed: George Bush Don't Like Black People.

The Dutch case is one of many in which low-lying cities and countries with long histories of flooding have turned science, technology and raw determination into ways of forestalling disaster.

London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on the Adriatic. Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on stilts as emergency havens for flood victims.

"They have something to teach us," said George Z. Voyiadjis, head of civil and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University.

Good story on flood control technology. Its a few days old. I should have memed this earlier. Check it out now before the NYT puts it behind their insipid barrier.

In Europe, High-Tech Flood Control, With Nature's Help - New York Times

HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

This weather report was put out about 20 hours before Katrina hit land. Ted Koppel says his team thought it was a hoax and tried to get it confirmed.

August 28 2005 10:11 AM CDT NOAA Bulletin - Wikisource

As oil field workers report natural gas bubbling from broken pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Department of Energy predicted Wednesday that tightening supplies this winter could increase household expenditures for natural gas by about 70 percent, compared to last winter.

Natural gas hike of 70% possible

But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.

Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.

Anne Rice...

Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? - New York Times

Gasoline, diesel, anti-freeze, bleach, human waste, acids, alcohols... the floodwater is tea-colored, murky and smells of burnt sulfur. A thin film of oil is visible in the water....

...there do not appear to be any choices other than to pump the water into Lake Pontchartrain or the Mississippi River.

"...it's going to kill everything in those waters."

The water will leave behind more trouble -- a city filled with (toxic) mold.. Most of the buildings will have to be destroyed...

The secondary effects are going to be nasty. They are already warning of E.Coli in the water. New Orleans is essentially a tropical region. It used to have a Malaria problem. Presently rare mosquito based illnesses may start spreading out of the area...

CNN.com - Toxic water. Toxic Mold.

The North Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico regions can expect increased hurricane activity in the next 10 to 40 years.

The number of major hurricanes has more than doubled in the last six years. The increase is part of a long-term climate shift that is likely to persist for several decades,

From 2001.

Major Hurricanes Predicted to Increase in Years Ahead