ABC News Footage of Lower 9th Ward Levee Breach

This ABC news footage is very short and brings up the urban legend that the Lower 9th Ward levee was blown up to save richer neighborhoods. Before I present the video I want to present some facts to keep in mind while watching it. It’s named the “forbidden video” but it should be named the “how urban legends get started” video.

People often don’t comprehend that the strongest forces in the world belong to nature. People don’t have a real feel for the amount of energy of the water held back by the levees. They don’t have a real feel for the amount of energy of a raging hurricane. The forces involved are astronomical.

The forces the levees were built to withstand are extremely high as well, even though the levees failed after Katrina. There are still unanswered questions about exactly how all the engineering failures occurred, but one question is easy to answer. The levees were not blown up. The banging noises people heard were from the levees breaking as the structures gave way.

Let’s do a comparison of the energy released by a hurricane and the energy released by the first U.S. atomic bombs:

“Little Boy”, a Uranium-235 fission bomb, was dropped on Hiroshima and yielded the equivalent of 12 -15 kilotons of TNT.

“Fat Man”, a Plutonium-239 fission bomb, was dropped on Nagasaki and yielded the equivalent of 20 - 22 kilotons of TNT.

A hurricane on average yields the equivalent of 12,000,000 (12 million) kilotons of TNT per day.

That means it would take 800,000 “Little Boy” bombs or 545,455 “Fat Man” bombs to equal the amount of energy produced by a hurricane in one day!

Let’s do a few more comparisons to give everyone a really good picture. The rate of energy released by a hurricane in one day is also equivalent to:

70 times the world energy consumption of humans

200 times the world-wide electrical generating capacity

Exploding a 10-megaton TNT-equivalent nuclear bomb every 20 minutes (there are 1,000 kilotons in one megaton of TNT)

There is no way even a well-placed bundle of dynamite could do the kind of damage the New Orleans levees sustained. The video presented next contains an urban legend of legendary proportions.

Video posted on YouTube by chokes01.

See more pictures in theSee more pictures in the Hurricane Katrina Picture Book by Jeffery Morgan

Read Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne.

References:
Wikipedia on Tropical Cyclones
Wikipedia on Nuclear Weapons Yield

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Vaccarella Family During/After Video

This is what it’s like to be in a strong hurricane in an area where there’s a lot of storm surge.

The Vaccarellas stayed in their home in Meraux, LA, in St. Bernard Parish (county) east south east of New Orleans. The eye of Katrina came ashore just a few miles west of this location. St. Bernard Parish was one of the most severely devastated areas because it was just east of the eye of the storm and you can see in the video that two-story houses were submerged up to their roofs in storm surge water. It looks to be 25-30 feet of storm surge.

People reported that the water came into their houses and went from the floor to the roof in about 3-5 minutes. This is why we keep axes in the attic. If you have to evacuate in a hurry to the attic, you have to be able to chop a hole to get out and onto the roof so you can be rescued. If you’re trapped in the attic you could drown from rising water or suffocate from lack of ventilation.

Video taken by Vaccarella Family during/after Hurricane Katrina and posted by askwestley on YouTube.

See more pictures in the Hurricane Katrina Picture Book by Jeffery Morgan.

Read Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne.

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“Hold Onto Love” Slideshow

This slideshow was posted on YouTube by Tara3121.

This is a video to shed some light and encouragement during one of the greatest natural disasters we have ever witnessed. Music by American Idol finalist and gospel recording artist George Huff featuring “Hold onto love”.

More than two years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas; all many people still have to hold onto is love and hope.

Thank you, Volunteers. You are making the difference in rebuilding lives and communities.

See more pictures in the Hurricane Katrina Picture Book by Jeffery Morgan.

Read Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne.

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Limbaugh and Hannity Can Sit On It

Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were quite silent about building in disaster-prone areas in California after the wildfires while they were extremely negatively vocal about it after Hurricane Katrina.

It’s all in the spin

Louisianians, Mississippians and Alabamans were frequently told by said assholes on their radio shows that we should have known better than to build in flood-prone areas and that New Orleans needed cleaning up anyway. I heard them say such things with my own two ears several times over the past 2 years, and I have stopped listening to their shows entirely. If this is what compassionate conservatism is I must be a flaming, bleeding-heart, enabling liberal. They’re long on conservative and extremely short on compassion, unless the definition of compassion has changed recently.

These two talking heads can’t seem to wrap their pea-brains around the fact that some Americans are very poor and that not everybody can just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What’s worse is they have tens of thousand of other Americans buying it. It’s easy to pull yourself up when you have millions of dollars and tens of thousands of people praising your every word and worshiping the ground upon which you walk. Most of their listeners are either in a similar boat or jumping boats quickly to get in their boat.

Some are more equal than others

Hannity and Limbaugh often quote “I worked my way to where I am today”. Well, they had a head start over southern blacks. They went to good schools and graduated from college.

Their ancestors weren’t slaves and their white complexions protected them from racial hatred and discrimination. Their ancestors came to this country by choice. Many southern black people’s ancestors came to this country in chains against their will.

Not only were they not discriminated against, they actually had/have quite an advantage because they are white males in a time when being a white male is still a great advantage. Even with the decades of laws and programs to assist minorities and women to become equal to white men, we’re still not equal. Just look at our paychecks if you don’t believe me.

Rush and Sean, you’ve lost one listener. I hope more people with real compassion will also stop supporting you two cold-hearted jerks.

See more pictures in the Hurricane Katrina Picture Book by Jeffery Morgan.

Read Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne.

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California Wild Fires & Hurricane Katrina

I’ve been purposefully silent about any comparisons between Hurricane Katrina and the California wild fires. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions or be disrespectful of the people of another state who are going through a disaster. Many Californians came to Katrina-affected areas and volunteered to help us in our time of need. Many still come here to help us continue to rebuild. I am and will always be thankful for their help.

Similarities to Katrina

  • People fleeing wild fires had to evacuate their homes with little notice.
  • Many people’s homes burned to the ground and they lost everything they couldn’t take with them.
  • They have to deal with FEMA.
  • Partisan politics are involved in their aid and recovery.

Differences from Katrina

  • The wildfire, while large, were still of a much smaller magnitude than Katrina.
  • The nature of the disasters was entirely different. Recovering from fires is far different than recovering from hurricanes.
  • The affected people were middle class, upper middle class, or wealthy. Many people affected in the Gulf Coast region were extremely poor.
  • Affected people had their own transportation and didn’t have to rely on state-provided transportation to evacuate. In Louisiana, no transportation came to evacuate the people who didn’t have their own.
  • Evacuation shelters were actually safe areas. There was no safe place in New Orleans where thousands of people were left to drown, suffer and/or die.
  • Only 20 civilians died as a result of the wildfires in California. 1600 people died in Louisiana and Mississippi as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
  • Outlying developments in affluent areas of Southern California were affected in the wildfires. A major U.S. city was affected in Katrina.
  • People were permitted to return to their homes within days instead of months to assess damage and begin rebuilding.
  • People were not evacuated to other states or spread to the four corners of the United States with no choice of destination.
  • Most people affected by the wildfires had proper homeowners insurance to cover their losses. Many in New Orleans didn’t have insurance or didn’t have the right kind of insurance (flood insurance) and their losses were not covered.
  • 80% of those who lost anything to everything to Katrina didn’t qualify for the SBA loans that were supposed to help them rebuild (myself included).
  • California had a Republican Governor at the time of the wildfires. Louisiana had a Democrat Governor when Katrina struck.
  • The President of the U.S. did not bad-mouth the California Governor on TV worldwide.

DIFFERENCES DISCUSSED

The wildfire news during the earliest reports sounded like commercials for how great California is to its residents and how well it took care of them, unlike Louisiana. It sounded to me like the media was being very tightly controlled by the government early on to keep a very positive spin on FEMA and the federal response to the California disaster. The phrase “FEMA’s lessons learned from Katrina” was used so often I think it must have been queued to every teleprompter and news feed throughout California.

The same rage seems to be going back and forth in the Southern California newspapers about building in disaster-prone areas and then expecting protection.

Hurricane disaster survivors just don’t seem to receive the same level of attention as wildfire survivors. There are still people living in FEMA trailers in Florida after Hurricane Charlie hit in 2004. I haven’t heard or read a thing about FEMA trailers in California. Maybe I’m missing the news. Hurricane recovery is slower by years than recovery from wildfires as well.

Infrastructure Failures and Rebuilding

It’s the same and yet it’s different from New Orleans. The areas of Southern California that burned were not inner city areas. Los Angeles didn’t burn.

There is no infrastructure in place to prevent wildfires from burning large areas so there was no infrastructure failure. There are procedures that could be followed to reduce the amount of natural fuel available, and in effect construct fire buffer zones around developed areas. There isn’t enough money allocated to do the controlled burning required to make such zones.

But in Louisiana, 80% of the largest, most populated city in the state flooded. The levee and flood control systems that were supposed to protect the city from such an event failed. There are many reasons why they failed, man-made and natural. But the biggest issue is it failed in a storm that it was supposed to have been built to withstand, a category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a category 3 storm when it made landfall.

The system failed in another category 3 hurricane in 1965, too. Hurricane Betsy was a category 3 storm and a lot of New Orleans flooded. The difference is there were fewer people living in New Orleans in 1965 than in 2005, there were far fewer surrounding wetlands filled in and developed, and there were a whole lot more wetlands between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. There was also no CNN.

Forty years of subsidence and erosion have brought New Orleans 2 feet lower below sea level and 2000 square miles closer to the Gulf of Mexico. It takes 4 linear miles of wetlands to absorb one foot of hurricane storm surge. A thirty foot storm surge requires 120 miles of wetlands between the Gulf and a populated area to keep the surge from hitting the populated area. One-hundred twenty miles of wetlands haven’t surrounded New Orleans in a very long time.

Los Angeles doesn’t get closer to the wildfires. It gets farther away as the years pass and the developments around it spread, removing natural fuel sources.

Poverty and Affluence

The California wildfire disaster brought to light the affluence of the residents affected.

Hurricane Katrina brought to light the poverty of the residents affected and shined a beacon on the depth of poverty in America that so many people just can’t seem to believe exists.

Well, wake up, America! There are people in our own country who are just as impoverished as in any third-world country.

Maybe we should consider aiding our own citizens before we aid third-world countries. It would cost less and bring a minimum living standard we all would consider to be decent to every American. If we spent half of what we spend on aid to foreign nations on our own poor citizens we could have a truly rich and prosperous country from which to give generously. What does the current situation say about us as a whole? We’re a bunch of hypocrites.

Discrimination

Discrimination is still alive and well in the south in case you had any doubts about it. It’s getting better, but it will still take several more generations to wipe it out completely. I don’t think racial hatred and discrimination will end within my lifetime or even my son’s lifetime. I’m very sad to say that, but I believe it’s true. I hope I’m wrong.

What will eventually happen in both regions of our nation speaks loudly of the class divide in America. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and much of the middle class is only a few paychecks away from slipping into poverty.

How are we as a nation going to deal with disaster recoveries? I hope better than we have in the past.

See more pictures in the Hurricane Katrina Picture Book by Jeffery Morgan.

Read Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne.

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