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12/08/2005:
"Pompeii on the Mississippi"
NEW ORLEANS -- Three months after the epic flood, we are specimens of congressional torture. Network celebrities who swept through for disaster backdrops are gone. The suffering in the Superdome and Convention Center is old footage. Torturing a city is tougher coverage for soft newsbodies.Galatoire's restaurant will open in January. Come for Mardi Gras. Catch a night parade. Tour our dead neighborhoods. See Fats Domino's dead home. Picnic on the levee of our Pompeii.
boston.com
Report from the Devastated Front Lines of the Lower Ninth Ward - New Orleans
...We spoke to many people. Most seemed to be in shock. All were polite and grateful. This neighborhood has flooded many times because of breeches in the levee in the Industrial canal nearby.
The people were told a barge broke the canal. Several people related the same story that early in the morning, they heard an explosion. Then the water poured in--before the rains came.
Many believe the levee was dynamited to drain the canal into the Lower Ninth Ward rather than the wealthier neighborhoods. This is not paranoia. The levees have been dynamited before for just that reason. In the 1920s the levees were intentionally dynamited to save other areas of New Orleans and many people still suspect the same thing happened in the 1960s when there were many unexplained levee breaks.
Ridge to FEMA critics: 'Stop whining'
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge says critics of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Hurricane Katrina response should "quit whining."
Ridge's outspoken comments are the first time he has responded in public to criticisms of the way FEMA was incorporated into his new department in 2003.
"They ought to quit whining about what happened in the past -- that had absolutely nothing to do with what happened in Katrina," he told United Press International.
