The levees may arguably be what we have heard the most about on the news in terms of the main thing that went wrong. You were constantly hearing the levees broke and the water came rushing into the city. The levees were put in place to protect New Orleans from flooding because New Orleans is a city very prone to floods considering it is below sea level. So then next question is why did the levees break? Weren't they built to withstand exactly what had happened? Well some people down in New Orleans knew that those levees wouldn't be able to hold against a really strong hurricane such as Hurricane Katrina. One of the accounts from City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina give a very interesting story. Chapter one starts off by talking about "The Storm" which you assume is Hurricane Katrina until you get about 5 paragraphs into the reading. At this point it is said "The year is 1965. The storm was Hurricane Betsy." The levees were overtopped and breached during that storm as well causing countless amounts of damages and taking many lives. From this reading we get a look into the past in particular an event that was very similar to Hurricane Katrina but that happened 40 years ago. This just shows you how vulnerably New Orleans is and that it has been through a lot of hurricanes in its past and I am sure that Katrina won't be the last.
The article They Saw it Coming by Mark Fischetti has some interesting facts about what people in New Orleans were trying to do to help better prepare the city's levee system against something like Hurricane Katrina. "By the late 1990's, scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of New Orleans had perfected computer models showing exactly how a sea surge would overwhelm the levee system, and had recommended a set of solutions. The Army Corps of Engineers, which built the levees, had proposed different projects." But the government was not listening to what the people in New Orleans were saying about the levees not being good enough. A disaster is what it took to get there attention.
When the levees broke they caused problems that no one had taken the time to think about. For instance from The Frontline documentary The Storm the Army said they lost 15 high water trucks with communications supplies when the levees broke. Also 500 school buses were flooded, these are the vehicles that are used for evacuation purposes. In the video they said that the National Guard spent 24 hours trying to save themselves before they were able to send people out and help the public. That may not seem like a long time but 24 hours during a disaster is a very crucial amount of time that can not afford to be lost. So if you don't have enough vehicles to evacuate people of course it is going to take more time and more trips to evacuate everyone. That is just leaving people in harms way for a longer amount of time which is going to lead to casualties.
There are plenty of cases and studies that were done over time to show that these levees were not prepared to handle a hurricane of category 3 or more. But because the government was not making New Orleans and its safety a top priority nothing got done in terms of upgraded or fixing the levee system that was in place. Scientists were offering many different solutions if only someone was willing to implement them. In the article I mentioned earlier, They Saw It Coming(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02fischetti.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1), they listed some of the alternative ideas that were being proposed but none of them were ever put into effect as we all know.
As you can see the levees breaking obviously caused more water to rush into the city and spread quickly but what you might not have known was how much information they had about the levees and that they were something that needed to be fixed. The levee break also affected the rescue time because it was "unexpected" and the National Guard was dealing with saving their stuff first. What happened in New Orleans was terrible and will never be forgotten, let us just hope that we can learn from all the suffering that they went through and that we can better protect New Orleans and all other vulnerable cities.
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