Friday, September 02, 2005

I awoke today to NPRs coverage of the disaster(s) in New Orleans (specifically the new shoot-to-kill order regarding looters, who have been shooting at rescue helicopters and anyone in uniform). I can't believe that just a few days ago I heard the same commentators saying "The results of the storm were much less severe than first feared..."

Yesterday TheLimey was telling me what he heard on the radio regarding the cutting of levee funds prior to this (funds diverted to Iraq, I've heard rumored?). I have found a lot of references to this in the blogosphere, but if someone can find an official source let me know, because I want to read it for myself now and see what's what.

I also want to see that book predicting exactly this disaster, whose author was featured on an interview on NPR yesterday.

Dangit! Why wasn't I listening to the radio yesterday?

5 comments:

argotnaut said...

There was also an article in Scientific American about four years ago that predicted such a scenario. If you google around you'll probably find a reference to it.

liz said...

Darn; just before I began subscribing to it.

I did hear more on the radio about the today, but not the exact material I was looking for.

argotnaut said...

Here's the SciAm article.

Tim said...

Now that Katrina has hit New Orleans, I'm sure there will be a ton of investigative articles coming out. However, John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein won awards for their five part series in the Times-Picayune called Washing Away, back in 2002.

Not only is that probably one of the best articles on the problem (pre-Katrina), but the two writers are continuing to write about what happened, as recently as last week.

liz said...

Yep, I guess I was silly to think it wouldn't be all over the place after a while.

Really quite sickening that it went unheeded for dumb reasons.