Note: This was written in response to a topic on my message board, but the topic was locked before I could post it. The news media are all asking the question though, "Who's to blame for the devastation of this hurricane?" and that's not the right question to be asking right now.
I think the important question is not "who's to blame for this tragedy" but rather "what is going to happen next". Should the levees have been stronger? Probably. But in the same breath, if a city is sitting in the shadows of levees for years and years, building them up as they need in order to hold back the water that would naturally have completely overtaken them by now, they are asking for trouble. No matter how strong you build it, it won't be strong enough, eventually something will take it down. It's just a matter of time. Is it a tragedy? Yes it is. Is it unexpected? Not completely. People have been predicting it for years. Joe and I were doing some research last night.
So the question is, what are they going to do next? And the answer is, they're going to build up those levees again, they're going to pump all that water back out of the city, and they're going to build it again. It's going to cost billions and billions of [federal/taxpayer/MY] dollars in clean-up, and to make the levees strong enough, and to rebuild an entire city, and to insure all the idiot people who want to live in an area that sits below sea level and is sinking and would have been underwater a long time ago if not for the big walls that are holding the lake and the river out of it. And then in 50 years another big storm will come along and the same thing will happen all over again.
I guess it's the arrogance that annoys me. I personally feel that at this point we should just count New Orleans a loss. A tragic loss. A devastating loss. Not something I would ever have wished on anyone. But now it's time to move on. For much less that the enormous sum of money that it's going to cost to clean up and rebuild New Orleans as it was, we could build an entirely new city in a more cost-effective, safer, above-sea-level location. But we won't do that, because we think we can outdo nature.
Get the people out. Feed them. Give them somewhere to go, some way to contact their families. That's what we need to focus on right now. This isn't anyone's fault, like the tsunami wasn't anyone's fault, you can't do much about nature. Eventually it will win. And I'm saying, once the people are out of New Orleans, let the city lie. Rebuild somewhere else. Somewhere inhabitable. Somewhere it actually makes sense to live in.
Anyway, what do I know. I live in Buffalo, where all we get is snow. :P