Some of those statements have a grain of truth.  Our Democratic leadership did screw a lot of things up, Katrina was at one time a very powerful storm, about 10% of the New Orleans metro area was unable or unwilling to evacuate, the bridge was blocked, Nagin was re-elected, parts of New Orleans (though not all or even most) are below sea level, and the federal response is not what most people think it was.  If you have read Wizbang’s Hurricane Katrina archives, mostly by my fellow New Orleanian Paul, then you’re pretty well informed on the facts.  If you haven’t read them, I encourage you to do so.  He consistently provided far more accurate and comprehensive coverage than the press, which had more important aims than disseminating mere facts.

Nagin, for all his faults, made every effort to encourage people to get themselves to safety.  He was on every station begging people to leave, long before the order (New Orleans first ever mandatory evacuation) was made official.  We had surprisingly little time to do so.  The storm hit on Monday, August 29th.  Look at how the tracks shifted from Florida to Mississippi/Louisiana over the course of Friday, August 26th to Saturday.  Most people had no reason to expect to evacuate until they woke up Saturday morning.  Overall, the metro area mobilized quickly, and the evacuation was a huge success.  Yes, I’m well aware of the Superdome and Convention Center fiascos.  I know people who were there.  But don’t downplay the fact that a million people bugged out of a city with only three major evacuation routes in less than 48 hours.  That’s a success by any reasonable standard.

Should Nagin have followed the official evacuation plan, including using school buses to get people out?  Of course.  I’m not saying the Democratic leadership of the city and state didn’t screw up royally.  They did, at every level.  Another case in point was the disgraceful Aaron Broussard, who broke down on Meet the Press after personally causing over $3 billion in damage to Jefferson Parish with his decision to send the pump operators hundreds of miles away instead of housing them with other essential personnel.  Then you’ve got Governor Kathleen Blanco, who waffled and blameshifted and whose “Road Home” program was a bureaucratic nightmare.  But re-electing Nagin was the right decision.  As Ed Morrissey pointed out in 2006, Nagin was the reform candidate.  His opponent in the runoff was Mitch Landrieu, Senator Mary’s little brother, son of former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu.  During the campaign, Mitch promised to bring the infamously corrupt former mayor Marc Morial, son of former New Orleans mayor Dutch Morial, into his administration.  Of the two, Nagin – a businessman and relative newcomer to politics – was the better choice in spite of his illegal Katrina gun grab and numerous other poor decisions.

Katrina actually weakened considerably before she hit.  Wind strength was way down, and while the storm surge was still powerful, New Orleans would have survived nicely had the levees not been “built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data“, as the Corps of Engineers admitted when they finally took responsibility for the flooding after nearly a year of obfuscation and lies.   They were aided and abetted by Congress which willfully hid evidence from the public until the furor died down.  And the Corps has evidently learned nothing, because even after Katrina they installed defective pumps and were caught using paper to fill flood walls joints.

As to federal money spent rebuilding New Orleans… aside from the fact that we’ve been pouring money into the federal coffers since the Eisenhower administration, receiving no offshore royalties for drilling while other states got 50%… and that 10,000 miles worth of navigation canals used to support the petroleum industry and benefit the entire country have weakened our natural wetlands protection against storms… and that 62% of the public relies on goods which pass through our port, which is as far upstream as it can be and still be a deep-water port, as well as the busiest and fourth-largest in the world, and the largest in the US…   we’re the second largest fishery in the country… and remember those gasoline price spikes after Katrina when our refineries were shut down?  Aside from those reasons why New Orleans should continue to exist, federal taxpayers have spent a lot less than you might think toward the rebuilding.

Second, the $110 billion that New Orleans supposedly got was a total sham.

Actually the $110 billion went to emergency response and administration for three storms, Hurricanes Rita, Wilma and Katrina across five states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The allocation includes almost $30 billion for FEMA’s response and Department of Defense expenses including the restoration of federal facilities. And almost $20 billion was flood insurance payouts to citizens collecting on their own private insurance claims.

Reason had an excellent article explaining the different effects Katrina had on Mississippi and Louisiana:

Mississippi suffered hurricane damage. In many areas, Katrina’s storm surge penetrated a mile inland, to the raised CSX railroad tracks, which act as a levee and broke much of the surge’s power, and washed away virtually everything in its path. Further inland, homes and businesses were flooded and damaged by 140-mph winds. The destruction was significant – but St. Bernard Parish and the New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward suffered more.

Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes in Louisiana were, by contrast, not victims of a traditional hurricane, but of poor government and central planning, which allowed massive but preventable flooding. In these areas, levees, floodwalls, and engineering projects designed to keep flooding out failed, and instead kept water in. For periods ranging from days to weeks, entire neighborhoods sat underwater, while antiquated city pumps slowly inched down the flooding. Mississippi was hit by a moderately sized hurricane, while Louisiana suffered from a flood of biblical proportions.

Most of us are not rent-seeking, freeloading, entitled jackasses.  Most of us evacuated.  Most of us came back and got out our chainsaws and started cleaning up without waiting for a government bailout.  We took in people who had lost their homes, we helped our neighbors, and just generally got on with the rebuilding.  In spite of the insane Kossack allegations that Republicans “killed” New Orleans, the city is getting back on her feet and in some ways is much better than before the storm.

Since Katrina it seems like the left plays up the “victims of the heartless GOP” narrative and the right plays up the “idiots got what they deserve for building there and electing Democrats” narrative.  So far this year the AP (serial Katrina liars) and Mother Jones are the worst offenders.  Narratives are convenient, but the truth isn’t so simple.

Treacher has some great comments on that phenomenon: A New Orleans resident speaks about the meaning of “during Katrina”. Because of my husband’s job, we had a permit to return home soon after the storm.

This photo was taken the day after that bad weather event at an intersection about five minutes from my house, but the flooding isn’t storm surge or broken levees.  It’s thanks to the phenomenally bad judgment of one Aaron Broussard, who sent away the pump operators as non-essential personnel.  Instead of just putting them up in the same places where police and other essential personnel holed up, he sent them hundreds of miles away.  This generated over three BILLION dollars worth of flooding, extending “Katrina” time for tens of thousands of people.  It’s ironic in the extreme that the left’s attack on Jindal for his statements about events in the storm’s aftermath – since confirmed by video of the late (great) Sheriff Harry Lee – are a mirror image of their uncritical, cheerleading acceptance of Broussard’s lies on Meet The Press.

But Broussard got a pass for ridiculous, easily disproved lies, while Jindal’s every word is carefully parsed. For my family, “Katrina” means Saturday, August 27, 2005 when we knew that the storm was coming and we had to evacuate, until a few months after the storm. During those months we lived in a more or less deserted city, and as Treacher’s correspondent noted, didn’t bother ourselves with niceties like speed limits. Depending on where we went, we carried guns. We lived off of our canned goods and on MREs. My chainsaw felt like a permanent appendage, and cutting wood seemed like the only way to get a reprieve from that indescribable Katrina smell. And for me, it Katrina wasn’t really over until the smell was gone and there were birds again.

Kathleen Blanco and C. Ray Nagin

I was amused to see this City Business poll:

Well, yes. Aside from the fact that Gustav isn’t really comparable to Katrina, we also learned a lot of lessons from Katrina, and had MUCH more time to prepare. (We weren’t in Katrina’s crosshairs until just a couple of days before the storm hit, but Gustav’s path was more or less straight at us for nearly a week. And finally, leadership makes a huge difference.

As City Business commenter Pat put it:

“What’s the difference? The governor worked with the Federal Government to do what was necessary in advance. Bobby Jindal was definitely in command as was the NO City Council so Nagin had no choice but to act like a leader!”
– Pat
posted on Wednesday Sep 3, 2008 at 9:56 AM

I have been frustrated with Jindal on several issues since he became Governor – even though, or maybe especially, because I’m a longtime Jindal voter.  But for this hurricane, he has done an outstanding job.  And his particular focus on restoring the wetlands (the current catch-phrase is “horizontal levees”) which we are losing at a rate of approximately one football field per hour, and on Corps of Engineers accountability for their canal dredging and dumping silt off the continental shelf (their poor performance isn’t just limited to building crappy levees) means that in the future we will suffer less damage from the storms which will inevitably come. I wouldn’t mind seeing Jindal run as Vice-President for Sarah Palin’s first term as President.

People in Sacramento should be particularly concerned.

The entirely preventable 17th St. Canal levee failure

Three years ago, I sat stunned and nauseated in Dallas and watched my city flood. There are a lot of myths about Katrina, largely created by the media which hypes everything beyond recognition, and aided and abetted by politicians on both sides of the aisle and at all levels of government for their own benefit. Here are a few facts that most people don’t understand:

• Katrina was not a Category 5 hurricane when it made landfall either in the New Orleans area or the Mississippi coast.  This is a “nuanced” detail because the storm surge didn’t just go away when the winds weakened, but it’s still worth mentioning.  It matters a great deal.
• Katrina did not hit New Orleans.  She hit St. Bernard Parish, which is near New Orleans to the east.  New Orleans endured Category 1 or 2 storm conditions.  Then she hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
• Some levees were overtopped, particularly in St. Bernard.  But the really big problems we had with levees breaking were not because those levees were overtopped and scoured away by flood water before breaking.  They broke because the Corps of Engineers did a crappy job designing and building them.
• The Corps of Engineers and Congress have done everything possible to cover that up.
• Most of New Orleans evacuated.
• There wasn’t much looting.
• Most of the reporting about looting, rapes, and murders was just wrong – partly because local officials were hysterical, and some were showing off for national media, getting their 15 minutes.
• The federal government illegally took guns from citizens who were entitled to have them.
• The rescue efforts by the federal government – especially the Coast Guard – should go down in history as one of the most amazing, successful efforts that’s ever been accomplished.
• Ray Nagin DID repeatedly tell people to get out of town in every way he could.  He wasn’t the incompetent villain then that people make him out to be.  (But since the storm he has become a corrupt disgrace.)
• Aaron Broussard personally caused nearly $5 billion dollars worth of avoidable damage in Jefferson Parish.
• New Orleans never got – and was never promised – $110 billion to rebuild.
• The money we did get was limited and regulated to death because of our reputation for corruption.  Which I’m not exactly complaining about because we earned our reputation, but you also can’t expect the same results Mississippi got – and they got a lot more money than we did, compared to the relative damage suffered – under those conditions.
• Most of the rebuilding so far has been done by individuals using their private insurance, and by churches and organizations that came to help.  The vast majority of us have not relied on government handouts.
• Blanco was and is a joke; deserving of no responsibility greater than teaching second grade.  Her “Road Home” program – complete with forms printed on oiled, waxed paper that must be completed with a ball point pen – made a bad situation worse.
• New Orleans is not in a bowl below sea level.  The truth about our geography is just not that simple.
• A good deal of why we are so vulnerable right now is because we’re losing over a football field of coastline an hour.  That is not our fault, and it IS preventable but it will make things uncomfortable for the rest of the country for us to fix it, which is why nothing has been done in the decades we’ve known about this problem.

My plans were to create a lengthy post, chock full o’ links and supporting details for all this, but thanks to Gustav I’m occupied in other areas.  As I’ve written before, plans change.  Not only are half my clients calling me, desperate for their websites to be updated and bulletin boards installed for emergency communication, but I have my own plans to make both to stay if possible, and if necessary to evacuate.  But all those facts are documented in my Katrina archives and in many other places on the web.  The bottom line is that most of what you “know” about Katrina is wrong.  If you never read another thing on Katrina, make sure you read this post at Wizbang:
The Katrina Video Congress Didn’t Want You To See

It’s the equivalent of taking the red pill.  And again – since we get this a lot – have a preemptive Gustav shush before you even start to say that New Orleans should just be abandoned.

[If the player doesn't work in Firefox 3, try IE - seems to work fine there.  I'll try to debug it later but I need to hit the stores while water and batteries are still available.]

__________________________________________

The jokes about Chocolateville keep coming… the latest is this mp3, inspired by Mayor Ray Nagin, based on the song Margaritaville. I don’t know who created it. Like the blue roof Christmas village display in the mall this Christmas, it’s all part of the character of New Orleans, and as the song says, it’s all good.

[MEDIA=1]

Here’s a map of chocolate New Orleans… for the readers who don’t live here, each type of chocolate corresponds with a suitable neighborhood, i.e. Godiva is the Garden District and uptown, White Chocolate is Lakeview, a predominantly white area, etc.

Here’s a preemptive shush for anyone who says, “Why don’t you idiots just get out of New Orleans?  What kind of fool builds in a bowl below sea level anyway?” Those arguments have been debunked here and in a number of places on the web, but here’s the Reader’s Digest version: the city originally was built above sea level and a fair amount of it, including my house, is above sea level.  But developers put subdivisions on cheap, outlying, swampy land as the city grew, and so portions of the city are an average of 1-2 feet below sea level.  Those areas should not have been reopened after Katrina, but I can’t control that.  As a voter and a citizen, I did everything I could to pressure politicians to make the hard decisions with regard to zoning and rebuilding, but the race-baiters won that battle.

Before Katrina it was a good forty years since we had a serious hurricane (Betsy) and since then the Corps of Engineers delivered poorly executed levees built on faulty designs, which even they grudgingly admitted – while assuring us we were protected.  And after Katrina, they colluded with Congress to hide evidence of what they did and are still lying to this day. New Orleans is by far not the only city protected by levees, and in fact Sacramento is in greater danger of catastrophic flooding than New Orleans.  Keep in mind, too, that about $3 to $5 billion of the New Orleans metro area damage was caused by this man’s poor decision to send the pump operators far away instead of housing them locally like other emergency personnel.

As to why we idiots don’t just leave – probably for the same reason people don’t leave the Florida coast, which gets pounded regularly, the midwest, which suffers catastrophic levee breaks periodically not to mention tornadoes, and California, which has earthquakes, riots, massive fires, and Nancy Pelosi.

The nation needs New Orleans, which is already as far upriver as it can be and still accommodate ocean-going vessels.  62% of the public relies on goods which pass through our port, which is the busiest and fourth-largest in the world, and the largest in the US.  We’re also the second largest fishery in the country – and without our support for the Gulf Coast oil industry, your gas prices will rise considerably.  Remember those price spikes after Katrina?  And as to the money for rebuilding – first, Louisiana is the only state that didn’t recieve offshore royalties for DECADES – since the Eisenhower administration we poured money into the federal coffers without receiving a nickel the way other states did.  Second, the $110 billion that New Orleans supposedly got was a total sham.

Actually the $110 billion went to emergency response and administration for three storms, Hurricanes Rita, Wilma and Katrina across five states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The allocation includes almost $30 billion for FEMA’s response and Department of Defense expenses including the restoration of federal facilities. And almost $20 billion was flood insurance payouts to citizens collecting on their own private insurance claims.

/preemptive shush

As for Gustav, I’m making my preparations both to stay and to go – we’ll know better by Sunday what, if anything, we need to do.  But if he does come here, I’ll remember that there are blessings in adversity and that Romans 8:28 is true in all circumstances, not just the ones I find convenient.

Added: I don’t know why comments and pingbacks were closed; this was intended to be an open trackback post.  That definitely wasn’t part of the preemptive shush.

It’s taken about three years, and the journey has been amazing. The testimonies of people giving sacrificially – so much so that several of the bankers said they had never seen anything like it, especially given how many people had to rebuild their homes and businesses at the same time they were giving to buy additional land and construct the building. We’ve been privileged to be able to serve people by gutting homes, mowing lawns, and helping them rebuild their houses in the neighborhood. We’ve reached out to the hurting and distraught – people who thought they lost everything, only to find the one thing they never knew they needed – a Savior.

Above all, Hurricane Katrina – in the midst of everything we lost – gave us the chance to do what Henry Blackaby’s Experiencing God course advises – to see what God is doing and join Him in his work. It’s been both awful and awe-ful. If anyone had asked us, we’d have said no, but I suspect now that we’re coming out on the other side, if you asked us, we’d all say that we’d go through it again because of the gains we have made in our relationships with God, with each other, and with the community we serve. And the best part is, moving in to the new building is just the beginning.

_______________________________

A Funeral for a Church – 11/2006

What are the typical components of a Christian funeral? There are normally stories about the loved one we’ve lost, prayer, a time of worship, tears, and laughter. It’s quite common for Christians to say, “It’s just a building – the church is really the people,” and while that is true, it fails to acknowledge that those buildings house memories of important times of our lives.

So Jacob set up a memorial, a stone marker, to mark the place where God had spoken with him. He poured a wine offering and olive oil on it.
(Genesis 35:14 GW)

Our church was a couple of blocks from the infamous 17th Street Canal levee break, and sat in about twelve feet of water for a week and a half. So we ultimately made the decision to knock it down. For this year’s Thanksgiving service, held in a borrowed church on a Saturday, we gave thanks for all the years that building served us, all the wonderful blessings we enjoyed in it, and for the fact that we will have a new building on that location in a few years. In many ways, it was the funeral for our church building. We looked at pictures, told stories, laughed, cried, prayed and worshiped.

It was in this building that I heard from God – really heard from God – about a sin that I had struggled with for a long time. I experienced real repentance. I understood how my sin looked to God. That was a life-changing moment that I’ll never forget. The first, but not the last.

In that building, hundreds of people came and went through the decades and they all have their own stories. Weddings, funerals, baptisms, salvations, church events of every type and most of all, God ministering to his people, through other people or through the Holy Spirit. Yes, it was just a building. But it held so much more than chairs, equipment, and resources. It was our church home.

A few guys from church managed to get some pictures while the area was still flooded – they got in through a hole in the roof.

After the flood waters went down, we were able to assess the damage – you can see the water line, and the mold that grew above it.

We actually gutted the old building while we decided whether to restore or rebuild, and we finally decided it all needed to go.

The new building will be bigger and better – and soon filled with memories of God’s grace.

The U.S. Justice Department says a former Army Corps of Engineers worker and a subcontractor have been indicted on bribery charges stemming from an investigation into levee work after Hurricane Katrina.

Judge: Corps Of Engineers Can Be Sued Over Katrina Flooding – New Orleans News Story – WDSU New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS — A federal judge said Friday that the Army Corps of Engineers can be held liable for flood damage caused by a “hurricane highway,” a navigation channel that is believed to have funneled Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge into the city.

The Corps of Engineers had argued that it was immune from liability because the channel is part of New Orleans’ flood control system. The law said the federal government cannot be sued if something goes wrong with a flood control project such as a levee, reservoir or dam.

Judge Stanwood Duval dismissed that argument. He said the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet was clearly a ship channel and not a flood control project.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers call the decision a victory for homeowners, who have suffered setbacks in their efforts to hold the government legally responsible for storm damage. They also said it clears the way for a trial on Sept. 8.

In January, Duval ruled that the corps was entitled to immunity over flood damage from levee breaches elsewhere in New Orleans.