In a fairly stunning column for the NYTimes (that I’m not allowed to repost in full) a New Orleans native and novelist named John Biguenet reveals that not only is the ruined city not happy with Federal response to Katrina, but that chances are good it will have legal recourse:
Listen to David Vitter, Louisiana’s Republican senator, who, writing in the Washington Post last week, tried to make clear to President Bush what actually happened here: “Most of all, he [the president] has to understand that the great majority of New Orleans’s catastrophic flooding occurred because of breaches in levees that were not overtopped by water but that failed from below because of gross design mistakes made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.” But so far, the president has failed to grasp that an agency of the United States government is responsible for the destruction of a major American city, and, of course, for the deaths of hundreds of citizens.
Mr. Vitter has been described by the National Journal as the most conservative of the Senate’s seven Republican freshmen, so the Bush administration cannot dismiss such an assessment as partisan. Mr. Vitter’s conclusion is supported by a string of forensic engineering studies and documents that confirm that the design failures were identified in 1990 by the Vicksburg office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but ignored. And it suggests that the country may soon face an extremely expensive day of reckoning.
For New Orleans, this legal recourse may be the only silver lining to Hurricane Katrina, given that charity is fast running out, and that according to Don Powell, appointed coordinator of the Gulf Coast recovery effort last fall, "There are many, many needs that the federal government cannot cover."
Kit Stolz 