Prisonplanet | September 9 2005

By Steve Watson

When Katrina hit, it drifted 15 miles to the east of where forecasters said it would strike. Therfore it wasn't quite the monster described. The storm passed through with relatively minor damage, it was the the storm surge from the Gulf that caused Lake Pontchartrain to rise three feet and the subsequent flooding. Katrina hit early on Monday 29th August, the levees broke in three places - along the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal, and the London Street Canal. The main storm surge from Hurricane Katrina washed into Lake Pontchartrain at around 7AM on August 29th when the counterclockwise motion of Katrina was pushing water from the Gulf of Mexico into the lake.

(Click here for a Map )

Some are questioning the
timeline of the levee failures, suggesting that there was a 21 hour
discrepancy between the storm surge and the collapse of the levees .
This is not the case. The first levee broke just a few hours after the hurricane hit on the same morning.

This
confusion may have arisen due to the fact that Homeland Security Chief
Michael Chertoff has said that the levees broke overnight between
Monday-Tuesday, and theat he was not informed of this til midday Tuesday.

The
breach of the 17th Street Canal levee resulted in the failure of a
crucial pumping station nearby, according to a statement made by New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

However, it seems that this exact scenario was expected and ignored. In an interview with New Orleans radio station local radio station WWL-AM, Nagin revealed how irate he was that this had been allowed to happen:

Nagin:
You know what really upsets me, Garland? We told everybody the
importance of the 17th Street Canal issue. We said, "Please, please
take care of this. We don't care what you do. Figure it out."

WWL: Who'd you say that to?

Nagin:
Everybody: the governor, Homeland Security, FEMA. You name it, we said
it. And they allowed that pumping station next to Pumping Station 6 to
go under water. Our sewage and water board people ... stayed there and
endangered their lives. And what happened when that pumping station
went down, the water started flowing again in the city, and it starting
getting to levels that probably killed more people. In addition to
that, we had water flowing through the pipes in the city. That's a
power station over there. So there's no water flowing anywhere on the
east bank of Orleans Parish. So our critical water supply was destroyed
because of lack of action.

It has emerged though that some kind of work was carried out on the 17th Street Canal levee. Reports have suggested that the funding was not there to complete the job, but some work had been done:

"The
Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006.
But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to
finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street
Canal, site of the main breach on Monday."

Of course we know that it was the White House that slashed funding for such projects in order to pump more money into the war in Iraq.

According to the New York Times,
Dr. Shea Penland of the Pontchartrain Institute was surprised because
the break was "along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have
an earthen levee, it had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick."

It also seems that the broken section of the Industrial Canal levee was having "construction" work done on it recently.

New York Times Science reporter Dr. Andrew Revkin has stated
of the 17th Street Canal that "officials and [Army Corps] engineers
said that after they had found the widening gap in the concrete wall on
the eastern side of the canal, they had no quick-response plan to
repair it."

Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the corps, said

"plugging the gap was a lower priority." The corps is directed by FEMA.
"It is FEMA who is really calling the shots and setting priorities
here,"

Alfred C. Naomi,
a senior project manager for the corps, was quoted in the same article
as saying "there were still no clear hints why the main breach in the
flood barriers occurred along the 17th Street Canal, normally a conduit
for vast streams of water pumped out of the perpetually waterlogged
city each day and which did not take the main force of the waves
roiling the lake. He said that a low spot marked on survey charts of
the levees near the spot that ruptured was unrelated and that the
Depression was where a new bridge crossed the narrow canal near the
lakefront."

This would
refute the speculation that a dip in the retaining levee or walls might
have allowed water to slop over and start the collapse. So we have an
unexplained crack in several feet of concrete. FEMA decided not to plug
it and let the water flow until a US city was flooded and thousands had
drowned.

Dynamite? History repeating itself?



Many locals have come forward to suggest that the levees were breached
on purpose by the authorities. Resident Andrea Garland, now re-located
to Texas, wrote in her blog:

"Also
heard that part of the reason our house flooded is they dynamited part
of the levee after the first section broke - they did this to prevent
Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently they used
too much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater. So now I know who
is responsible for flooding my house - not Katrina, but our government."

This
scenario is not so crazy as it sounds, in fact this exact thing has
happened before in the same city. In 1927, the Mississippi River broke
its banks in 145 places, depositing water at depths of up to 30ft over
27,000 square miles of land.

The
disaster changed American society, shifting hundreds of thousands of
delta-dwelling blacks into northern cities and cementing the divisions
and suspicions that benign neglect has ensured remain today. New
Orleans’ (mainly white) business class pressurised the state to
dynamite a levee upstream, releasing water into (mainly black) areas of
the delta. Black workers were forced to work on flood relief at
gunpoint, like slaves.

Two
parishes, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, which had a combined population
of 10,000, were destroyed. Just before Katrina, these parishes had
about 10 times the 1927 population. Both parishes are now under many
feet of water.

This information is covered in depth in a book by John M. Barry entitled Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it Changed America, 1997 which has incidentally become heavily in demand after Katrina.

Furthermore,
levees were also intentionally broke after Hurricane Betsy struck New
Orleans in 1965, admittedly with less of an impact. The tactic of
breaking the dikes is not uncommon, as this CNN report on China's floodplains highlights.

Engineers
have now punched holes in several levees in parts of New Orleans where
flood levels were higher than the water in drainage canals leading to
Pontchartrain, in order to let water flow out.

Did
the authorities decide to sacrifice the poor folks and blow the levees
in order to save the French Quarter of New Orleans which houses the
richer residents, the lucrative historical buildings and thousands of
businesses?

Explosions?

There were reports of many explosions heard in New Orleans, officials say they were transformers blowing up. Total Information Analysis has reported a claim by intelligence expert Tom Heneghen that 25 earwitnesses cited explosions immediately before the levee breach.

Similar reports are now appearing in many web blogs:

"He also mentioned that right before the mass flood there was a loud sound like an explosion." - News from St. Bernard

"I'll
tell you the worst thing I've heard and I heard it from my mother. She
said she heard several blasts - big booms - right before the levees
broke. Several blasts and then all the water came pouring in." - aangirfan

Although
these are obviously not authoritative sources of information, it is
interesting to note how many local people are reporting this. So
interesting in fact that the mainstream has picked up on it in places.

The Washington Post reported on the comments of a retired school teacher:

"Mullen
has a schoolteacher's kindly demeanor, so it was jarring to hear him
say he suspected that the levee breaks had somehow been engineered to
keep the wealthy French Quarter and Garden District dry at the expense
of poor black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward -- a suspicion I
heard from many other black survivors."

The Globe and Mail is also carrying a similar story.

ABC World News Tonight
carried a report which contained an interview with a local, who
described how a flloating barge had rammed the levee. The man seemed
convined that the levee was purposefully broken. A transcript of which
has appeared on the net:

David Muir: “Was
it solely the water that broke the levee? Or was it the force of this
barge that now sits where homes once did? Joe Edwards says neither.
People are so bitter, so disenfranchised in this neighborhood, they
actually think the city did it, blowing up the levee to save richer
neighborhoods, like the French Quarter.”


Muir to Edwards as they stand on a bridge: “So you're convinced-”

Edwards: “I knows it happened.”

Muir: “-that they broke the levee on purpose?”

Edwards: “They blew it.”


Muir: “New Orleans’ Mayor says there's no credence to this.”

Mayor Ray Nagin:
“That storm was so powerful and it pushed so much water -- there's no
way anyone could have calculated -- would dynamite the levee to have
the kind of impact to save the French Quarter.”

Muir concluded:
“An LSU expert who looked at the video today, says that while the barge
may have caused it, it was most likely the sheer force of the water
that brought the levee, along the lower 9th ward, down.”

The mysterious barge story has also been reported

by many other local residents. "The evacuees who witnessed the barge
striking the levee also want to know why the major media is not
covering this story."

The London Observer carried an intriguing story of a man named Correll Williams, a 19-year-old meat cutter. The article states that:

"Williams only left his apartment after the authorities took the
decision to flood his district in an apparent attempt to sluice out
some of the water that had submerged a neighbouring district. Like
hundreds of others he had heard the news of the decision to flood his
district on the radio. The authorities had given people in the district
until 5pm on Tuesday to get out - after that they would open the
floodgates."

So it's clear that barriers WERE being broken in an attempt to protect areas of the city.

Some
final intruiging footage reveals a journalist questioning former
President Bill Clinton as to why many locals feel that the levees were
purposefully broken. This was during the press conference with Clinton
and George Bush Snr announcing their combined "relief effort" for New
Orleans. Ignore the first 15 minutes of sickening joking and
backslapping between the two and skip to the last minute of footage.
Upon hearing the question Clinton appears to be surprised and then
simply walks off.