The Sky Is Blue And Water Is Wet
Mark Schleifstein of the News Orleans Times-Picayune writes that reality has been accepted: Corps’ operation of MR-GO doomed homes in St. Bernard, Lower 9th Ward, judge rules
In a groundbreaking decision, a federal judge ruled late Wednesday that the Army Corps of Engineers’ mismanagement of maintenance at the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet was directly responsible for flood damage in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina.
MR-GO acted like a fire hose against the floodwall and battered it down. That has been shown in every study conducted after Katrina. The wall of water that wiped out the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf coast funneled into the MR-GO and slammed into the floodwall that wasn’t built or designed for such an assault. This problem has been known about since 1988, but nothing was done.
New Orleans didn’t sustain much damage at all from the storm itself, because the eye passed to the East of the city. It was the failure of the levees and floodwalls that killed hundreds and destroyed neighborhoods.
The government will certainly appeal this ruling, because accepting responsibility for their screw-ups is not in their nature.
6 comments
The baffling thing is that it’s not their money, so why are the bureaucrats so hidebound about refusing to accept responsibility here? It is not as if any bureaucrat has ever been fired for mismanaging a project, after all. Reassigned to other duties, perhaps, but in this case the bureaucrats responsible for the mismanagement are long-retired so… what is going on here?!
– Badtux the Baffled Penguin
.-= last blog ..Thursday morning dream pop =-.
The Corps is part of the DoD, and Rumsfeld refused to accept responsibility for anything. The Corps aren’t trigger pullers, so he didn’t even want them associated with the DoD. He’s the one responsible for not releasing the military to assist New Orleans, even though there was a landing assault ship right off the coast that had purposely followed to the storm in to help people. While people were drowning, its helicopters and hovercraft were prevented from acting. While people were dying in nursing homes and hospitals, there was a 600 bed facility on the USS Bataan sitting off the coast. While Coast Guard pilots were exceeding flying time, hundreds of military helicopters were within 250 miles, grounded by Rumsfeld.
Yeah. I did a series of blogs at LM about that insane debacle. Just one more proof that life means absolutely nothing to them. And people vote for them. If it were up to me, I’d round up everyone who voted for them and drop them in the middle of the Atlantic and tell them that if they can swim back, they can live in the USA. The problem with amazingly stupid moronic people, is they generally get others killed.
Rumsfeld wasn’t very popular with the ground crews who busted their butts to turn around aircraft after returning to base. The aircraft had been deployed out of the area when the hurricane approached, and then flown back sooner than normal in anticipation of being needed for rescue work.
Everything was ready, and then they slept on the flight line waiting for the call that never came.
The helo drivers were really pissed when someone reported that it was too dangerous because of reports of ground fire. Shooting at a Special Ops helo would only happen once. It’s not like people didn’t shoot at them in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld and the entire crew were sociopaths. They belonged in prison, not power. The people who voted for them just couldn’t connect the dots and figure out that they were the problem, not the solution.
Rumsfeld should have been given a bullet decades ago, before he recruited Cheney.
As for the potential dot-connectors… I think you give them too much credit! 😉
… You can see why I had a few psych eval’s during my milint career. 😉 I’m told I have a far warmer personality these days! Does it show? 😆 Truth is… these days I talk or make an opinion about what should happen to them, 30 years ago, I’d have quietly figured a way to just make it happen. Whether I executed the plan would have depended on some variables and my mood the next day, which rarely changed back then. It did occasionally approach merely ‘cool’, rather than sub-zero.
I still have serious problems suffering fools, and it’s NEVER ‘gladly’! 😉
Those two guys had no true connection to the rest of humanity. They were totally lacking in empathy. It is amazing to find two individuals so totally devoid of any shred of morality; I don’t think they even understand the concept. They have no doubts because they assume that everything they do is right, by virtue of it being their idea.
If someone has been around a while they know the cost of fools.