Post Katrina - Whose to blame?

It has almost been a year since Katrina brought her fury ashore in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and left a disaster of epic proportions in her wake. New Orleans received the most in both aid and publicity of their plight and probably because it was the largest city in the disaster zone.

Parts of the city remain uninhabitable, with clouds of mosquitoes, festering sludge and stagnant water, dilapidated houses and buildings, and a rescue and rebuilding effort in tatters. Who is to blame? The Mayor? FEMA? The President? The Governor? The French for being foolish enough to build a city on top of a swamp?

All of them, including the homeowners for not leaving the city. I understand the plight of many and how they were caught in the seemingly endless and empty-filled promises of assistance and fervently believe that once help is offered the agencies have a responsibility to provide that help and not take a year to do it. However, in looking back it’s important to realize the many mistakes that were made which will hopefully prevent us from making them again.

The French were / or should I say ARE the biggest idiots of all. Nobody with even the slightest amount of common sense would in their right mind build a city on top of what is basically a swamp. Of all the dumb things they could have done, this is the biggest. Swamps are by their very nature unstable, and with New Orleans sitting approximately 8 feet below sea level, you would think that someone would have stood up and said "This is crazy! We are asking for trouble here." Nobody did, and now we can see the result - billions upon billions of dollars in reconstruction costs which at the end will simply put us back at the same point we started at.

The Army Corps of Engineers for the most part is a solid organization that does their job and does it right; HOWEVER!, after spending this past year dealing with engineers, I have come to the conclusion that most of them have spent little time reviewing disasters and preparing for them. One aspect of software design and engineering that is beat into the heads of mush at every college and university is that you TEST, TEST, TEST, and TEST the TESTS. You look for problems; you consider every possible point of failure and make adjustments for each one of them. If a programmer can get it right, I fail to see why an Army Corps Engineer cannot. Their planning of the levee system and shipping channel was a complete disaster and had they considered and double checked their own work and that of their contractors they could not have possibly missed the problems that were inherently built in.

Hours before Katrina came ashore, Mayor Ray Nagin had at his disposal, hundreds upon hundreds of city and school buses which he could have used to ferry the residents out of harms way. Did he do it? Nope, he sat on his ass and played the blame game. Now, what I cannot for the life of me figure out is why after this debacle, the residents of New Orleans in their infinite wisdom reelected this fool. Nagin may be a nice guy, I have no issue with that; however, his inept handling of this tragedy borders on the criminal. He ** LEFT ** people to die whereas if he would have simply used the brains that G-d gave a horse he would have saved hundreds if not thousands of people.

FEMA - What can one say about this organization besides that it should be dismantled, everyone fired, and reorganized. Federal Emergency Management Agency should be renamed "Federal Emergency MISMANAGEMENT Agency. They screwed everything up from not preparing for the oncoming storm, to wasting hundred of millions of dollars, to making unfilled promises in a political attempt to cover up their own ineptness. I understand that the FEMA director is a political appointment, but come on Mr. President, this idiot had trouble managing horses let alone a Federal Agency.

The Governor of Louisiana completely and utterly failed in her job. I am not sure if Katrina was more than she could handle or if she simply froze? Either way, she failed and because of that failure people died. There is nothing else that can be or should be said.

I lay far less blame at the feet of the President, he has staff to handle these agencies and problems and he cannot personally respond to each and every single one; however, he committed hundreds of millions of dollars in reconstruction money (which I believe was a huge mistake), and then failed to deliver it. One tenet of Judaism is to not make promises and commitments unless you are willing and able to deliver on them. PERIOD. Helping others is a Mitzvah and it is an important part of Judaism, but that does not require you to throw good money after bad.

Rebuilding New Orleans in the same fashion as before will only result in 10, 50 or a hundred years from now our grandchildren having to face the same type of disaster we are paying for.

The best thing that could happen at this point is to bulldoze the city under, return it to the swamps and give every homeowner $200,000.00 to move elsewhere. It would be cheaper and more efficient use of our tax dollars. The delta would eventually restore the area to its natural setting and we would not have to worry about the destruction of a city called New Orleans again.