Either way, we should at least discuss the rumor as a rumor, because the idea -- which was born shortly after the city of New Orleans was flooded -- is spreading rapidly.
The question comes down to this: Were the levees deliberately destroyed?
From a conspiracy-oriented web site, and take it for whatever it might be worth:
SECOND UPDATE: Monday Sept. 12, 2005 @ 8:23 AM ABC News Video with Ear Witness to Explosions and states emphatically "They blew this levee"...The video in question, which I have not yet seen, is here.
New Orleans, LA -- Divers inspecting the ruptured levee walls surrounding New Orleans found something that piqued their interest: Burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall! One diver, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, saw the burn marks and knew immediately what caused them. When he surfaced and showed the evidence to his superior, the on-site Coordinator for FEMA stepped-in and said "You are not here to conduct an investigation as to why this rupture occurred, but only to determine how best to close it." The FEMA coordinator then threw the evidence back into the water and said "You will tell no one about this."At that point, the diver went back down to do more inspection of the levee. On the second dive, he secreted a small chunk of the debris inside his wet suit and later arranged for it to be sent to trusted military friends at a The U.S. Army Forensic Laboratory at Fort Gillem, Georgia for testing. According to well placed sources, a military forensic specialist determined the burn marks on the cement chunks did, in fact, come from high explosives. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity said "We found traces of boron-enhanced fluoronitramino explosives as well as PBXN-111 embedded in the debris.
This would indicate at least two separate types of explosive devices." The levee ruptures in New Orleans did not take place during Hurricane Katrina, but rather a day after the hurricane struck. Several residents of New Orleans and many Emergency Workers reported hearing what sounded like large, muffled explosions from the area of the levee, but those were initially discounted as gas explosions from homes with leaking gas lines.
I have no idea who put together this page, accessed via the dreaded Rense site. The graphics are undeniably helpful. About the levees, we read:
Katrina hit on Sunday, it was a day later, the levees broke in three places -- along the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal, and the London Street Canal. (Map where levees' broke)So far, we are still mired in the land of rumor. Alas, the Rense contributor shows signs of being an old-fashioned anti-Semite. (Michael Brown's real name, we are supposed to believe, is "Bronski." Jew-haters often make a game of assigning such "real names" to people they don't like.)
There were explosions heard, but officials say they were transformers blowing up.
Another far-from-certain source for the "explosions were heard" rumor can be found in this usenet post from one Cameron McLaughlin:
My neighbors are lifelong New Orleanians. Most of their family has evacuated to here, but one nephew who had a broken leg was trapped in New Orleans and was only able to leave a few days ago. I talked to his uncle today about these allegations that the levee was deliberately blown. His nephew was nearby and confirms that residents heard a series of explosions before the levee "failed".Along the same lines, we have what purports to be eyewitness testimony (published on the "Alex Jones" site, which some may not consider the most reliable of sources)...
Another deliberate act of sabotage was the opening of floodgates in another location that was announced in advance by radio. Such an act to sacrifice a poor neighborhood in order to spare an expensive one is not unprecedented in New Orleans history.
10:57 Raw transcript of comments by NOLA evacuee : "The 17th street levee was bombed by the Army Corps of Engineers to save the more valuable real estate in the city... to keep the French Quarter protected, the ninth ward was sacrificed... people are afraid to speak out... everyone who was near there heard the bombings... they bombed seven times. That's why they didn't fix the levees... 20 feet of water. Gators. People dying in water. They let the parishes go, not the city center. Tourist trap was saved over human life.Alas, we still don't have a single named eyewitness in all of this. Which means we're still skulking through the land of rumor.
For a different approach to the problem, try this Indymedia post:
Why is there a 21 hour discrepancy between the storm surge and the collapse of the levees?The writer goes on to make a few points that are, at the very least, worth kicking around:
Why did pumping station #6, according to a statement made by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin during an interview with Matt Lauer on the August 29th edition of the Today Show, fail in the lower 9th ward, which also happens to be the section of New Orleans which is the deepest part of the city? Why did the Industrial Canal levee break near the 9th ward a few hours later?Also worth noting: The 17th Street and Industrial canals that broke underwent construction earlier this year. You'd think new construction would strengthen, not weaken, those areas.
It's interesting that both the failure of pumping station #6 and the Industrial Canal levee occurred within hours of each other within the same geographic area.
The breakdown of pumping station #6 would have gradually allowed the flooding of the 9th ward and force it's residents to flee to the second floor and roofs of their houses.
The immediate flood of water from the breach of the Industrial Canal levee a few hours later would have easily drowned everyone who was unlucky enough to still be inside of their home in the lower 9th ward and waterlog every single one of those houses up to the roof. By the time the water is pumped out the city, all of those waterlogged houses will have to be condemned and torn down.
In light of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent eminent domain decision on private property, the City of New Orleans can easily condemn all of those destroyed properties and seize the land under eminent domain when the city is rebuilt. Of course with most of the residents of the 9th ward ending up dead, there's no one left to reclaim the properties or to fight back against city hall. Very convenient for anyone wishing to seize that property.
The Indymedia writer also asks:
Why was a barge parked next to the area of the Industrial Canal levee breach, especially when everyone knew a Category 5 hurricane was approaching the city?A comment on the afore-mentioned site offers a few nuggets worth pondering:
Notice it was three CANALS.Another blogger exploring this line of inquiry is someone named "America's patriot." He too notes the 21-hour discrepancy...
Notice it was ZERO real levees, all CANALS, the LEAST LIKELY water controlling system to breach spontaneously, preposterously long after the storm surge.
THIS WAS SABOTAGE.
The 9th ward is build on what used to be a swamp.
Imagine New Orleans like a shallow cereal bowl. The 9th ward would be at the center.
There would be no reason to breach the the canal.
The city had already survived intact.
The areas attacked were not "levees."
They were seawalls lining canals. Seawalls have two or three foot thick concrete with steel face.
They just don't get tired and collapse, any more than the 911 buildings did.
The storm surge that could have hurt the levee system had passed without problem hours earlier.
THIS WAS SABOTAGE.
Hurricanes DO NOT, never have and never will create "secondary storm surges". There's only one storm surge, the main surge while a hurricane makes landfall.So far, the only mainstream acknowledgement of this rumor comes from Chicago Tribune columnist Edward Voci: "The New Orleans levee system could have been punctured by rental trucks stuffed with explosives."
A secondary storm surge is about as believable as a magic bullet.
And what would be the purpose of such destruction? One reasons would be to give Bush some outside force to blame as the economy crumbles. On the local level, the power elite seeks the ability to remake New Orleans with fewer -- well, you know. Fewer of the wrong kinds of people. The commentary has been surprisingly open:
The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.The shorthand term for this phenomenon is class warfare. Republicans continually remind us that class war is a terrible, terrible thing -- except, of course, when they practice it.
The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."
All of which brings us back to the rumor: Were the levees -- or canals -- blown intentionally? Frankly, the evidence provided thus far does not convince me.
But I'm more than happy to throw the question open for further discussion.
22 comments:
A couple of points:
See the TalkingPointsMemo site's Timeline, for a link to a news article that cites a National Guard timeline. The NG Timeline places the rupture of the 17th Street Canal Flood Wall at 3 a.m. Monday, 8/29, three hours before the hurricane even made landfall. [A call to the Army Corps of Engineers at 5 a.m. Monday appears to confirm that account.]
The major Industrial Canal breach appears to have occurred at about 8:30 a.m. Monday, 8/29, when the St. Bernard Parish NGuard Barracks suddenly flooded within 15 minutes (see the Nola.com article quoting a NG member, from a day or two ago).
I checked out your Trib "columnist" Edward Voci. His comments were in a Letter to the Editor - NOT a column.
Do you know sonething I don't?
Bob Boldt
ok. anonymous is right ... well, i don't know about the time, exactly, the times picayune reported the break at about 11 when a reporter saw what was going on. same with industrial canal.
both breaks occured early monday -- or rather, at least the overtopping started then. no one's quite sure if there was a break first, or an overtopping that eroded the levee and caused the break -- and it could have been different in each case.
and why did it take so long to flood? because it takes a while for a city to flood from levee breaches. it wasn't a storm surge, per se, but just more water. and it WAS flooding all day on Monday, but it was also raining ... hard to tell if the water was rising or not.
finally, pump station no. 6 is at 17th street, not the industrial canal. it flooded the 7th ward. and it's about 80 years old. just a bit antiquated.
one more thing ... regarding why would the canals breach ... well, the canals' real purpose is to move water in case of a flood. so in the event of a storm like this, they get the overflow -- and the levees on the canal are the least equipped to take care of a storm Katrina's size. the levees on the lake and river get far more attention.
the floodwalls, by the way, are no where near 2-3 feet thick etc. take a look at the pictures. it's pretty clear. they're actually there to protect the levees.
also ... about the barge ... nobody yet knows if the barge was in the canal when the storm hit or if the storm blew it in. there were a lot of barges blown around that day, some even got lodged in canals.
There's a story about this today at NOLA.COM, though much less sinister.
Link at:
http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_tporleans/archives/2005_09_13.html#079207
Conspiracy theories were inevitable. The real nuts will say that secret weather-control technology created or steered the hurricane. The anti-Semites will blame the Zionists. The LaRouche people will blame the British.The Illuminati will come up.Actual evidence will be lacking.For a real conspiracy theorest a little bit of evidence is better than a lot. A collection of rumors is even better.
There are a several reasons why the levee could not have been blown up by BushCo:
1) The disaster cut short his vacation, and nothing is more important to Bush than vacation.
2) It stalled, at least temporarily, further tax cuts, worth approximately $70 billion a year to Bush's base (the estate tax, for one). While Dubya might well destroy New Orleans to give his base $70 billion a year, it's inconceivable he would put the place under water to keep them from that $70 billion. After all, nothing is more sacred to these people than redistribution of the national wealth.
3) Halliburton aside, the gains to Bush and the Bush base are so nebulous (and dubious) that it's difficult to believe that even *this* crowd would venture on such destruction, particularly as his ratings sink, and the whole affair exposes staggering incompetence, venality and stupidity, not least his own. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" -- does that sound like a premeditated response? No one could be that good (i.e., stupid).
4) If the Bush crowd was apt to stage a calamity on U.S. soil, and incur the risks and costs of doing so, they would be far more likely to put together a terrorist attack, which would have more reaching political benefits.
So why not put all this nonsense aside?
(my guess) Because the original plan in August was most likely to set off a small suitcase nuclear device that would have taken out 30,000 people in South Carolina during one of those scheduled military exercises scheduled last month. and this was planned. So they decided on the Hurricane scenario destroying NWO instead which has deflected criticism away from the Iraq war, "able danger" story, Carl Rove stuff, etc.
However, these rightwing extremists best plans got rebuffed by freelance ragtag group of ex-special ops/navy seals folks who have had enough of 9/11 disasters and ensuing coverup.
If Bush's ratings go much lower, if there is a call for impeachment, if the economy goes into a super depression, then these same fanatics will attempt this nuclear scenario on US soil again, this time closer to Chicago or possibly even Los Angeles, whichever they can get away with doing without being stopped. Then a nuclear war with Iran would be next.
*looks at last comment* sheesh, buddy, you forgot to take your meds.
who owned the property where the levees broke? it would be more suspicious if they broke in a remote area instead of a public area. did the levees break at night?
Disastrous politics
Mark Alexander (archive)
September 23, 2005 | Print | Recommend to a friend
As residents in coastal Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama continue to piece their lives back together, there are two persistent questions about Hurricane Katrina at the forefront of acrimonious political debate this week.
First, there is the lingering question of who is responsible for the lack of planning, preparation and infrastructural improvement in the days, weeks, months and years leading up to the hurricane. This all-important question, however, has spawned a concerted effort to focus on the sluggish federal response as a diversion. (As a resource for this question, see the Katrina Consequential Timeline)
Clearly there were bureaucratic failures by FEMA -- but that is the nature of the beast, and no amount of reform, other than decentralization, will change that. The most productive thing President George Bush can do to alleviate the bureaucratic abysses is to eliminate it. As noted in this column last week, "As a first measure, the President should fire every senior executive service lawyer in DHS, FEMA, DoD, et al. The entire federal bureaucracy is hamstrung by legalities."
As for the question of accountability in New Orleans, by now, everyone on the planet knows that most of New Orleans, with the exception of the original city settlement, has been developed below sea level -- surrounded by expanding levees intended to protect it from Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and the Gulf. Those levees, designed to withstand a category three hurricane, were never upgraded to withstand a category four or five hurricane, though clearly such a storm was inevitable.
On a good day, New Orleans continuously pumps water out of the alluvial bowl created by its levees, though building structures there continue to sink. In the event of a category four or five hurricane, however, 80 percent of the city would be swamped, and every politician from the city's mayor to the state's governor knew it. But the Big Easy is a party town -- a gambling destination -- and the city's leadership wagered the city against odds of a big hurricane.
In the years prior to Hurricane Katrina, there were numerous factors that precluded the strengthening of New Orleans' levees. The primary burden for inaction lies with generations of corrupt Louisiana politicians, from the Huey Long dynasty forward. Despite the city's continued below-sea-level expansion, these crooked and negligent pols paid little regard to levee strength, even in the face of repeated warnings about their inadequacy. There were also successful legal challenges brought by environmental groups who blocked the expansion and hardening of levees in an effort to protect the neighboring wetlands. Indeed, New Orleans' hurricane-defense system -- such as it was -- would have been greatly improved by the Army Corps of Engineers had it not been for environmental lobby lawsuits in both 1977 and 1996.
In recent years, Louisiana has received more federal taxpayer-funded Corps of Engineer grants than any other state and has received more levee funding under the Bush administration than it did under the Clinton administration. However, that funding has been limited by massive boondoggle infrastructure projects like the 700-percent cost overrun for Ted Kennedy's Big Dig -- $16 billion American tax payers spent on 7.5 miles of Boston highway that could have been spent on NOLA levees, but we digress.
The funding New Orleans did receive was often diverted by the city's Levee Board to other projects. For example, the Board spent $2.4 million of levee funding on a Mardi Gras fountain near Lake Pontchartrain, and $15 million more on overpasses to riverboat casinos. All the while, a big storm was on the horizon.
On Monday, 29 August, after a few days of evacuation flip-flops, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents emerged midday to the realization that Katrina's worst winds had landed to the east. Although Katrina was now tearing into Mississippi and Alabama, New Orleans had -- or so it thought -- dodged the bullet.
As waters continued to rise against levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain, there was some concern that Katrina's massive rainfall might yet overtop the levees. However, it appears now that the levees were not overtopped. In fact, there is compelling evidence that the floodwalls failed structurally in two locations -- which would not have happened if they had been built to specifications. (Contrary to assertions by Nation of Islam agitator Louis Farrakhan, the levees were not "blown up" in order to divert flood waters from "white" to "black" parts of the city.)
Simply put, somewhere there is a contractor, and a whole cadre of well-grafted inspectors, who are accountable for the structural failure of the levees. Finding that contractor will be one of many serious tasks facing congressional investigators in the coming months.
As you recall, in the immediate aftermath of the levee failure, Democrats were waving accusatory fingers and demanding an "inquisition commission." They were hoping for colorful headlines blaming the Bush administration and, by extension, anyone on a Republican ticket in the upcoming election year. Then, when Republicans joined in the call for investigations, Democrats quickly backed down and, indeed, refused to take part altogether. Upon reflection, they determined that an inquiry into factual communication, material distribution and evacuation failures after Katrina would instead bury Louisiana Democrats -- from buck-passing New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (see his evacuation plan) to lachrymose Governor Kathleen Blanco to hysterical Senator Mary Landrieu.
Truth be told, congressional investigators need only do one thing to get to the bottom of the floodwaters in New Orleans -- follow the money.
Rep. Tom Davis, chairman of the Select Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, said this week that his investigation will "move ahead" with or without Democrats. Rep. Davis, who also chairs the chamber's Government Reform Committee, said, "At the end of the day, we must come together for good, hard fact-finding." But, he noted, Democrats "could tie up the process forever, and losing time is losing information." (Of course, the Demos will obstruct the investigation, claiming it is a Republican cover-up.)
Perhaps the committee's first witness should be Bill Nungesser, a former Levee Board chairman who tried to reform the system. Mr. Nungesser says of the levee failure, "Every time I turned over a rock, there was something rotten. I used to tell people, 'If your children ever die in a hurricane, come shoot us, because we're responsible.' We throw away all sorts of money." (In other words, Louisiana Democrats had looted New Orleans long before Katrina hit.)
Rotten indeed, which leads us to the second pressing question about Hurricane Katrina this week: Who's going to pay for what -- and how?
President Bush has proposed a massive reconstruction effort that will ultimately cost perhaps $200 billion both in hard-dollar reconstruction costs and soft-dollar tax incentives, enterprise zones and the like. The President also called for modest cuts in other government programs to offset the reconstruction costs, anticipating that congressional Republicans would follow suit with more aggressive proposals for cutting other department budgets.
On that note, House Republican Study Committee chairman Rep. Mike Pence announced "Operation Offset" Wednesday, a proposal to cut $500 billion over the next decade. "We must begin now, as the American people expect particularly Republican majorities in Washington to do, to make the hard choices," said Pence, who anteed up $16 million earmarked in the just-passed highway bill for his district's roads and infrastructure. Pence was quick to add that cutting all the pork out of the massive $284-billion highway bill (about $120 billion) would offset only about half the Gulf Coast reconstruction costs, and that there would have to be substantial cuts across the board in other bloated programs.
In a remarkable move, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was quick to comply, announcing that she would return $70 million of the $129 million in highway-bill earmarks that she'd grabbed for her district.
Speaker Dennis Hastert warned, "We all know that we have a fiscal responsibility throughout this process. We want to make sure that taxpayer dollars are being used for their intended purposes and not being misspent."
Rep. Tom Tancredo added his concern about how reconstruction funds will be used: "The head of the FBI in New Orleans just this past year described the state's public corruption as 'epidemic, endemic, and entrenched. No branch of government is exempt.' The question is not whether Congress should provide for those in need, but whether state and local officials who have been derelict in their duty should be trusted with that money."
Undoubtedly, the potential for fraud is as massive as the reconstruction effort, and some of this "cost offsetting" is tantamount to dumping unconstitutional pork from one plate to another.
Amid all of this rancorous debate about who's to blame and who will foot the bill, the plight of those on the Gulf Coast who actually lost family members, homes and businesses somehow gets lost. Those at ground level are not worrying about political agendas. They're busy trying to provide for their families. Or perhaps they're searching through the rubble, trying to find fragments of family heirlooms and photographs. It is for them that we continue to pray every day.
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