Could you please read “The Creeping Storm”, an article written in Civil Engineering Magazine, http://www.pubs.asce.org/ceonline/ceonline03/0603feat.html

In it, Al Naomi, the Corps of Engineers levee manager for SE Louisiana pointed out that in order to bring the levees up to Cat 4 or 5 standards could take 30 years. The preparatory study would take six years and cost $8 million.

If this was San Francisco after an 8.5 magnitude earthquake and the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge were in ruins, if airport runways, waterlines, and gaslines were ruptured, there would likely be similar conditions. And similar complaints.

Guess it doesn’t matter that those “funds” have been earmarked since 1965 and that not one Congress - Dem or Rep - bothered to appropriate it.

As usual, you twist the facts to suit your ridiculous worldview.

I take it the fact that local news papers have penned nine different articles about the fact that tens of millions were stripped from levee development for the war effort is easy to ignore. Man you’re unbelievable.

We’re talking about 90,000 square miles of devastation. And what’s happening in New Orleans could not have been prevented with any amount of planning. We may be taling about 3 times the number of buildings underwater (perhaps as many as half a million) not to mention there is nothing that government can do - any government - when so many need so much in so short a time.

Access to people in an earthquake is relatively easy compared to gaining access to needy people with 10 feet of water in the streets.

If every disaster worker who will be in New Orleans by Sunday was there on Monday afternoon after the hurricane went through there would have been a chance - just a chance - that things wouldn’t have been as bad as they are. But the fact that it’s taking 6 days to get these people in position should tell you that we would have needed a psychic to divine mother nature’s intentions to have a chance to head off the humanitarian disaster.

Well that’s just a crock. In Kobe 1995 an earthquake left 102,000 buildings collapsed and fire burned 7500 homes, killed 5250 people and left 400,000 homeless. Japan is certainly an industrialized civilization.

There other disasters of this magnitude in Iran, Turkey, Italy, Mexico, and elsewhere. Contingency plans are based on assumptions that almost always prove inaccurate. That is no excuse for not having a plan. Planners in the city , state and federal governments could look to the Kobe disaster and countless others to anticapate these problems and have a plan developed and ready to be implemented.

Today’s dose of NIF - News, Interesting & Funny … It’s Stop the ACLU Thursday, and Katrina Relief Day!