As suggested earlier, my dad will be handling New Orleans election updates this evening. You can watch the returns here as they come in. The polls close in just over 20 minutes.

The NOLA runoff election is a week from today and, as predicted, it looks to be a Barnburner. / Here’s a recent-stories Roundup.

NOLA.com/Times-Picayune:

With a week to go, the New Orleans mayoral runoff between incumbent Ray Nagin and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu is looking like a nail-biter. And while the money race appears to be already decided strongly in Landrieu’s favor, in the three weeks since the primary the mayor has at least regained some steam.

Reuters:

…Many pundits had written Nagin off after he was criticized for a shaky initial response to the disaster and some racially charged remarks. But the former cable executive vaulted to the lead in the April primary with 38 percent of the vote, gaining large support from the black community.

After that campaign, analysts again said the mayor was in trouble, pointing out that 21 of his rivals took a combined 62 percent of the vote. That may have also been premature.

…”I haven’t done a poll, but personally I think the election’s very close,” said Ed Renwick, a Loyola University political science professor. He says he now believes many of the white voters are still undecided.

Most of ballots cast by Caucasian voters in the April 22 primary were divided among Lt. Gov. Landrieu (2nd place, 29% of Total vote), Audobon bigwig Ron Forman (3rd, 18%), and conservative Republican Rob Couhig (4th, 10%). Forman quickly endorsed Landrieu in the runoff. But Couhig has endorsed Nagin, finding him the more Business-friendly of the two contenders left standing. Again with the NOLA.com/Times-Picayune:

…Gaining the support of Couhig could well bolster Nagin’s efforts to seek support among the GOP set. While registered Republicans in New Orleans are few — just 12 percent of registered voters — they are believed to be a key demographic in the runoff.

However, a few hours after Couhig cast his lot with Nagin, Landrieu landed the backing of the Orleans Parish Republican Executive Committee, which could blunt the impact of Couhig’s support for Nagin…

While election returns cannot be analyzed along party lines, observers have said that most Republicans likely voted for either Couhig or Forman, a favorite of the city’s business elite.

…”It’s the white conservative vote that is up for grabs, and if Couhig can move some of those votes over to Nagin that would be very helpful to Nagin and will hurt Landrieu,” said Ed Renwick, director of Loyola University’s Institute of Politics.

…However, Renwick said it will be difficult for Couhig to steer many of his voters into the Nagin camp, in part because he believes most Couhig voters were turned off by the mayor – and because Couhig himself ripped Nagin repeatedly in debates and commercials.

I’m standing by my Primary-night prediction for next Saturday’s outcome. / However, I wouldn’t be Shocked to wake up next Sunday morning with egg on my face. Little breakfast in bed. :> Courtesy of Hizzoner. :| Make mine Scrambled if you please, Ray. :) Actually there’d be One thing (at least) Good about a Nagin re-election. It would very probably occur via a further blurring of the Racial lines in the NOLA voting patterns. In April the Afro-Am vote went very heavily for the Mayor ~ but Not monolithically; Landrieu pulled an appreciable & significant chunk, as Presumably (?) he will again on May 20. Now if Ray gets to his 50% +1 by drawing white conservative Republican-oriented voters who had supported Couhig or Foreman but can’t stomach Mitch son of Moon :) ~ well, like I Said, that’s Good. Sociologically and so forth. Y’know.

The AP says it’s a Polite campaign. Well. By N’awlins standards anyway. ;> (The boldfaced part of the 2nd paragraph obligates me to say here: Hi Brendan. Add your own belushian “But, NOOOOO! ” :)

May 13, 2006
NEW ORLEANS - For a city where politics can resemble a French Quarter burlesque show, Mayor Ray Nagin and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu are running a surprisingly gentlemanly race for mayor.

Landrieu, for example, could criticize Nagin for not evacuating the city ahead of Hurricane Katrina, for ranting and bursting into tears as New Orleans descended into chaos or for saying God wants New Orleans to become a “chocolate city” once more.

And Nagin could portray Landrieu as a white interloper in a city that has had a black mayor for nearly three decades, and blast the career politician and his well-connected family for failing to fix New Orleans’ high crime, poor schools and declining population before Katrina.

While the two candidates in next Saturday’s election may have implied some of those things, they haven’t come right out and said them. And that might be the right approach in a city where many voters seem weary and preoccupied with rebuilding their lives.

“The reason you don’t see the level of attacks is because voters just don’t have the appetite,” said longtime political analyst Silas Lee. “The city is devastated, and people want answers and not vacuous attacks.”

More than eight months after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin outlined an evacuation plan for his city on Tuesday.

Heh.

You’d think this development might remind Nagin’s constituents, who will decide on May 20 whether to re-elect him, that he didn’t seem to have an evacuation plan in place last August. I repeat: this is a guy whose lawyers were literally researching the legal ramifications of mandatory evacuations 36 hours before Katrina hit, even though the threat of a catastrophic, city-destroying hurricane had been anticipated for years. This is a guy who had to be interrupted during dinner and urged to call the National Hurricane Center on the Saturday night before the storm, apparently because he wasn’t in constant communication with them all along (?!?). This is a guy who, against all reason and logic (and contemporaneous urging on this blog), waited until 24 hours before landfall to order an evacuation, despite reams of studies showing that it would take 72 hours to empty his city. This is a guy who had no apparent strategy for helping people without private transportation get out of the city, even though everyone knew that thousands of such people existed, and even though his city had hundreds of school buses at its disposal that could have been used to carry those people out of the danger zone. (It’s useful at this point to remember that, in the true worst-case scenario, nearly all of those homes in the Ninth Ward would have been entirely underwater, and nearly all of those people who took shelter in their attics would have drowned long before they had a chance to take shelter at the Convention Center and blame the feds for taking so long to bring them aid.)

Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that Nagin had “no apparent streategy”; his strategy was to tell those people: “Go to the Superdome, which we think can withstand the winds, but we’re not really sure. There won’t be electricity, running water, a functional sewage system, or adequate food or water, but you’ll probably be better off there than in your homes. Probably.”

As I said before, it’s absolutely unbelieveable to me that the residents of New Orleans are seriously considering re-electing the mayor who fiddled while their city drowned. If Nagin wins, I think we will officially be able to declare, once and for all, that accountability is dead in this country.

All that said, it’s truly excellent that New Orleans now has a better plan in place, especially with the official start of hurricane season less than a month away. In particular, I’m happy to see that Mayor Nagin has learned from his mistake in not getting help from Amtrak. Under the new plan:

“Amtrak trains will also be used for evacuation purposes, which we’re really excited about,” Nagin said.

The new plan “relies more on buses and trains and eliminates the Superdome and Convention Center as shelters.” Good. Another excellent and important development: “In the future, evacuees will be allowed to bring pets with them [on evacuation buses] as long as they have some type of cage to safely put them in.” That won’t just save animal lives, it will save human lives, because some people simply will not leave their pets behind, no matter the danger.

But although this new plan sounds great (assuming they actually implement it when the time comes, unlike their previous plan, such as it was), it’s truly a tragedy that they didn’t have an adequate plan last August — and it’s not forgivable on the basis that “hindsight is 20/20.” As I said, the threat of a storm like Katrina (or far worse) was long anticipated and feared, and New Orleans’s previous “plan” was self-evidently inadequate. Its inadequacy didn’t just become apparent because it didn’t work; the plan, as implemented, obviously didn’t deal with the serious problems that everyone knew existed. If the plan’s flaws only became apparent to the general public in retrospect, that’s because officials lied about the plan to hide its flaws. City officials get credit for doing a good job with the traffic problems — the contraflow worked very well — but they did absolutely nothing of significance to help those without private transportation.

I realize that my harping on this point, more than eight months later, may rub some people the wrong way, seeing as how New Orleans has seemingly learned from its mistakes, and the “blame game” is out of fashion these days. But I’m sorry, I believe in accountability, and I just can’t forgive that easily when the mistakes manifestly should never have been made in the first place, and those mistakes had very serious consequences, including the deaths of scores — maybe hundreds — of people.

P.S. Bayou View has a good post about the new evacuation plan and the future of the Gulf Coast.

(more…)

the Wrap-up: actually they Did. :) Garbledly; but they Said it.

the Prediction: on May 20 they Say it in One voice, not Twenty-one. Ray’s Watch is ending soon. Change of Shift: the weary Mayor is scheduled to be Relieved. The Mitch Watch begins: 53% - 47%.

Sadly :( but Predictably, it’s all along Racial Lines. (But on second, more Hopeful, thought: No. Not “all.” Lt. Gov. Landrieu, as in his past candidacies, demonstrated considerable appeal to African-American voters. / Excellent.)

(more…)

With 400 of 442 precincts Unofficially reporting to his Office, the herculean, heroic & foreDoomed LASOS Al Ater posts that [scroll down] Hizzoner now stands at 38%, to Mitch-son-of-Moon-brudder-of Mary’s :) 29%, to Audobon Boy’s 17%.

Looks like Nagin vs Landrieu on May 20.

Ohhh but it’s Going to be Fierce.

UPDATE: with 100% of precincts Unofficially reporting to LASOS, the Top Three finishers, and their %’s, are the Same as above. ( #4, Robert Couhig, a Republican, pulled 10%.) // The total Unofficial vote for Mayor is 108,133, which at approximately 37% of the reported approximate Returnee-plus-Diaspora 290,000 Eligible is Not Bad at all, Considering.

Congratulations to Frontrunner Ray Nagin; and to Runoff Qualifier Mitch Landrieu. [Also to his lovely Sister the Senator, whose local Popularity I’m sure made all the Difference. :] May 20 will Tell the Tale.

WWL-TV and WSDU will have live streaming coverage of the New Orleans election results tonight as they come in, according to WXNation. I’m not sure whether the Louisiana Secretary of State will have live returns, but NOLA.com will.

I’ll be out with friends, this being Becky’s and my last night in Buffalo, but if you want to know my opinion of the election, just click here. Warning: profanity is involved.

Today is Nonpartisan Primary day in N’awlins. (Nonpartisan Election day is currently scheduled for May 20 [**but see below] . The Runoff. / Yes but runoff between Whom?)

Note: various other offices besides Mayor are Up too ~ including Orleans Parish Assessors (from 7 Districts), contests which NOLA.com / Times-Picayune reports have become Important and Hot due to the huge significance of post-Katrina property-assessment valuations. / NOLA.com will carry live updated results after 8 p.m.

[but Prior to then, any politiconerdy irishtrojans who might inadvertently drudge up any unethically-leaked unreliable Exit Poll data, and/or illegally-released misleading actualvote Early Returns, sleazily published upon any unspeakably evil sirenshrieking blogsites are cordially required to post them here as Updates. Thank you. :]

I won’t Blockquote it but I highly recommend this report on the Election Officials’ herculean & heroic but nonetheless foreDoomed efforts to insulate the vote against the inevitable Litigation by the Politicoes. Yes, it’s the Sacred’s Last Stand against the Profane. :) See especially the Jesse Jackson stuff. [**Prediction: in the unlikely event that Ray Nagin finishes 3rd or worse today, some Court somewhere will Further postpone the already-delayed May 20 runoff to allow more time for the unmeritorious Lawsuits to be heard. / Do you Know what it Means to Miss New Orleans. ;]

Dateline yesterday, today’s New York Times reports:

…Nobody knows how many people will show up to vote here on Saturday and whether most will be black, as in elections for a generation, or white. Nobody knows exactly how many people are in the city. A white mayor may rule at City Hall for the first time in nearly 30 years, or maybe not.

“We don’t know the racial composition of the electorate,” Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans, said. “We don’t know the racial composition of the evacuees.”

…For all the confusion, there is general agreement on the three leading candidates, Mayor C. Ray Nagin, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and Ron Forman, a local businessman. The latter two candidates are white, and if they are the winners on Saturday, it will represent a significant upheaval in the city’s power structure.

As many as 200,000 of the city’s 290,000 registered voters may be living outside New Orleans. Most are probably black, as were two-thirds of the 20,000 who already voted, according to the secretary of state’s calculations. The low participation indicates to Ms. Howell that most evacuees will not be voting. Having failed to delay the vote in court, many civil rights advocates have argued for weeks that the cumbersome absentee process would disenfranchise black voters.

…In an unusual move, Louisiana’s secretary of state has come from Baton Rouge to take charge of the vote.

There will probably be confusion on Saturday, but so has there been throughout an electoral season that feels grafted onto the city’s overriding preoccupation — whether New Orleans has any future at all.

[> “unusual”, to be Sure / “probably”, Indeed :) ~the guestblogger :]

…No candidate addressed what many said was the central issue, whether some flooded neighborhoods should be rebuilt. Over and over, voters interviewed this week — especially white ones — said they were looking for someone who would take a stand, and break with the past.

…The fault line is race. Most black voters are rallying around Mr. Nagin, expressing hurt over the scorn now aimed at him by former white supporters. The attacks on Mr. Nagin, derided by many whites as indecisive, flip-flopping and refusing to acknowledge that some neighborhoods might be too vulnerable to rebuild, are taken personally.

A bastion of black political power is seen as slipping away with the city’s changed demographics, and Mr. Nagin, not previously popular with most black voters, is regarded as the only defense.

“I don’t know nobody else but Nagin,” said Clark Joiner, a black construction worker in the Marigny neighborhood. “He didn’t do nothing wrong. He’s got a little plan. People just need to let him go along.”

Mr. Nagin “did all he could do,” Bishop B. L. Goss Sr. said in one of the old black Uptown neighborhoods on the river. “Nagin couldn’t have done no more than what he did. Let him stay there and finish what he did.”

Others here, weary of the trash, the ruined houses and the businesses teetering on the edge of collapse, do not relish that prospect. “All I see is indecision on the part of Nagin,” said Lance Wesa, a French Quarter jeweler who is white. Mr. Wesa said he might have to close his store for the summer.

“It’s a terrible time for this city,” Paul Poché, who is white, said as he watered his luxuriant garden in Bywater. “We’ve got to get it together, see what we can make out of the ruins. If the help’s going to come, it’s going to have come from somewhere else. Because this place is a wreck.”

Read the whole thing.

Prequel :) — for Archivally-minded readers :), here are R.N.E.W. Parts I, II, III and IV. Despite the deliberately-misleading Come-hither series Title :> they are far more about Elections (i.e. the Sacred) than Politics (the Profane :). But this Present Part is regular red meat to all you ravening carniverous Politicoes out there :), who might Also See Katrina: the mother of all reapportionments for a Background refresher.

OK, here we Go: the mayor of New Orleans may well be a political genius on his way to re-election. ;>

…to the astonishment of some who had assumed that his missteps and post-Katrina despair would doom his reelection bid, Nagin the laughingstock is also counted as a front-runner as voters head to the polls on Saturday.

Nagin and others credit his post-storm performance for his standing, and many still fondly recall him telling federal authorities to “get off their asses” as the city slipped into chaos. But one of the reasons for his recent appeal, and by some estimates the most powerful force in this historic election, is race.

“People had written me off — because of Katrina, because of some remarks I’d made,” an upbeat Nagin said after a recent campaign event in the city’s Algiers section. “But now the poll numbers are waking people up, and here I am standing and getting stronger as time goes on.”

…While black and white voter turnout on Saturday is difficult to predict, many here are assuming that the number of black and white voters will be about equal. Before Katrina, about two-thirds of the city’s voters were black.

When he was elected in 2002, Nagin won large majorities in the city’s white neighborhoods, but lost in majority black precincts. But then he was running against another black man, Police Superintendent Richard Pennington.

Now that Nagin’s two chief foes are white, including Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, brother of Sen. Mary Landrieu, his racial appeal has shifted. Even as his white support drifts to his challengers, some of those black voters who spurned Nagin four years ago are embracing him, political analysts said.

…”The black voters seem to be coalescing around me more quickly than the white voters,” said Nagin, a former cable television executive who before the storm was viewed as a savvy City Hall reformer by many here. “It had to happen. I was the only guy who stood up during the crisis when people were suffering at the Superdome and the Convention Center. Afterward, I was the only one who basically spoke to their hopelessness about being spread out across the country. So there’s a connection there I just have to build upon.”

Nagin said some of his prominent white supporters who now appear to be backing other candidates had been “a little opportunistic. They assumed, like everyone else, that I was going to go into the toilet.”

His two leading challengers, according to polls, are Ron Forman, chief of the Audubon Nature Institute here, and Landrieu. If none of the 23 candidates receives a majority of the vote, the top two finishers will face each other in a runoff scheduled for May 20…

Well, the only Saturday outcome that seems a safe bet is that the Runoff is going to Happen. / No wait, check that. Also that Litigation will ensue. :) The Complaints: Disfranchisement of the NOLA diaspora. Rigged voting technology. Early Voting and Often. Heavy Decedent Turnout. Millions Of Ballots Thrown Out. Powerful groundbased laserbeams targeting the Satellite Polling Stations. My Foot hurts. Frauuuud. :> Oh but it’s going to be Fierce. :)

Read the whole thing. Btw if elected, Ron Forman (the Audubon guy :) will be the formerly-Big Easy’s first Jewish mayor of Any race. :)

The National Hurricane Center announced today that it has discovered the 28th tropical storm of 2005, more than six months after-the-fact. As the Tropical Cyclone Report (PDF) for “Unnamed Subtropical Storm, 4 to 5 October 2005″ explains:

As part of its routine post-season review, the Tropical Prediction Center/National Hurricane Center (TPC/NHC) on rare occasions identifies from new data or meteorological interpretation a previously unnoted tropical or subtropical cyclone. The TPC/NHC re-analysis of 2005 has revealed a short-lived subtropical storm near the Azores Islands, which increases the record count of tropical/subtropical storms during 2005 to 28.

The NHC adds: “Operationally, it was treated as a non-tropical low. Post-storm analysis, including AMSU data that were not available in real time, indicated that the system had sufficient tropical cyclone characteristics to be considered a subtropical storm for 12-18 h.” The Storm Track offers a slightly different explanation for why the storm wasn’t “operationally” identified: “Like many of the storms last season, this system was located far outside the normal tropically active realm and was therefore overlooked.”

The Unnamed Storm’s short life occurred in between the formation dates of Hurricane Stan (October 1) and Tropical Storm Tammy (October 5). As such, if the Unnamed Storm had been identified in real time, it would have been named “Tammy,” meaning Tammy would have been “Vince,” Vince would have been “Wilma,” and Wilma — the strongest hurricane in the history of the Atlantic basin — would have been “Alpha.” Yup. The Storm Track elaborates:

Hurricane Wilma — which struck Cozumel, Mexico and then Southern Florida after becoming the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic — should have been named Alpha! Yes, the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic should have been named with a Greek letter, and that irreplaceable Greek letter should then have been retired. Some people may be happy such a media circus was avoided. However, one can’t help but wonder if this will be a clear signal to the World Meteorological Organization that perhaps it is time to reconsider the Atlantic tropical cyclone naming system.

It’s entertaining, in light of this, to read my first post about Wilma, announcing its formation and then stating:

If another tropical storm forms between now and the end of the hurricane season (November 30), it will be named Alpha, and we will proceed from there in the Greek alphabet. Imagine if a really bad hurricane forms, and its “name� has to be retired! The Greek alphabet would never be the same! ;)

Imagine, indeed. Wilma, if it had been named “Alpha,” would have been that “really bad hurricane”!

Under this alternate-reality scenario, the all-time record for the number of tropical cyclones in a season would have been broken on October 17, when “Alpha” (Wilma, in our reality) formed. That meants my October 22 blog post about the formation of the real Alpha, which was quoted in the Washington Post’s October 23 article about me (”It’s official: . . . ALPHA BECOMES THE TWENTY-SECOND NAMED STORM OF THE SEASON AND BREAKS THE ALL-TIME RECORD FOR THE MOST ACTIVE SEASON ON RECORD . . . I’ve been talking about this possibility for months, and it has seemed virtually inevitable for weeks, but I’m still sort of stunned that it’s actually happened”) would have been far less dramatic; I would have been blogging about the ho-hum formation of “Beta” rather than the historic storm that broke the record and forced us to dip into the Greek alphabet for the first time ever.

Additionally, if Wilma had been Alpha and Alpha had been Beta, all my talk about “Wilmalpha” would instead have concerned “Alphabeta” — Alphabet for short. :)

Last but not least, the final tropical storm of the season — which, incredibly, formed on December 30, Becky’s and my wedding day (a wedding gift to the weather nerd, Glenn Reynolds called it — should have been named “Eta,” not Zeta. “Zeta” should have been the name of the weirdest storm of the season, the “impossible storm” that “completely lost respect for the governing laws of thermodynamics” and caused the National Hurricane Center to give up — the storm that was, in this reality, known as Epsilon.

To be clear, none of the names will actually be changed. The Unnamed Storm will remain unnamed. But it’s interesting — for giant nerds like me and Bryan Woods, at least — to think about what might have been.

Not that this is remotely a surprise, but it’s now official: Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan and Wilma have been retired from the Atlantic hurricane name list. (Hat tip: Jon Schoenwetter.) That’s yet another record for the incredible 2005 hurricane season: the most names retired in a single year. They’ll be replaced in 2011 by Don, Katia, Rina, Sean and Whitney. The Storm Track has more.

In a related story, another cyclone is nearing Australia. (Hat tip: Melanie Dickson, our resident Aussie.) Australia is new Gulf Coast, apparently.

 
[UPDATE, 8/22/06: For the latest, up-to-date commentary on Spike Lee’s film — which I was in — please visit my homepage or my Katrina category.]
 
 
In an article in — of all places — the Irish Times, Spike Lee offers some insight into the Hurricane Katrina documentary he’s working on, for which he interviewed me back in January. No surprises, really, in terms of where he’s apparently going with it:

“I’m doing a documentary now on Hurricane Katrina, and that’s going to deal with another issue: class. America for a long time prided itself on being a classless society, but that’s bulls**t. That’s a crock.”

HBO is financing the documentary, When the Levees Broke, and will broadcast it on August 29th, the anniversary of the day the hurricane hit New Orleans.

“We feel it’s going to be the definitive statement about a landmark moment in the history of the United States of America, and how this country turned its back on its citizens. It’s evident to me that the people down there did not matter to the present administration - poor black people, poor white people, and they’re not a concern on the agenda for that administration. Over four years of Bush has really changed things. It’s been a nightmare. People don’t look at America any longer the same way they used to do, as a beacon of democracy and all that stuff ”

Lee is particularly incensed at the response from US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to the emergency. “While people were drowning in New Orleans, she was buying shoes on Madison Avenue, and then she went to Spamalot, the Monty Python show on Broadway. Her ass - excuse me - Miss Rice should have been down there in New Orleans and not on Broadway that weekend. It was coming up to the Labour Day weekend and a lot of people were on vacation, but they should have cut their vacation short.

“New Orleans is a great city, the most unique city in America. We just got back from shooting there at Mardi Gras. We’ve been making the film since September. I wanted to follow it up because a lot of people got the misinformation that it was Hurricane Katrina that brought the devastation. After Hurricane Katrina passed by, people came out of their houses and it was bright and sunny. The wind wasn’t blowing.

“It seemed that New Orleans had dodged the bullet. There was wind damage and stuff, but then the levees broke. That was what brought the devastation and put 80 per cent of the city under water.”

Although he has shot a great deal of footage already, and has access to a mass of archive material, Lee says: “We want to get some of the administration on camera to talk about it, although I just don’t think Miss Rice is going to be interviewed by me.”

Where my thoughts and observations fit into his movie’s message, if at all, I have no idea. I just hope my core belief about the government response — that it was incompetence, not malice, and that it was a failure at all levels of government, not just the feds — comes across accurately (or perhaps I should say, doesn’t come across inaccurately).

Apparently in response to a post asking New Orleans residents when they evacuated ahead of Hurricane Katrina, a NOLA forum commenter named “maxxman” writes: “I also left on Saturday. From what I was reading on http://www.brendanloy.com/ and on http://www.wunderground.com/blog/SteveGregory/show.html I could see Katrina was going to be huge.”

The fact that I, of all people, helped convince even a handful of Louisianans to evacuate is better than all the other accolades my Katrina coverage has gotten.

The vast majority of my weather-related posts between July 2005 and March 2006 have not yet been categorized. Due to technical difficulties, I was using Blogger instead of MovableType or WordPress during that period of time, and thus, my posts were uncategorized. I am in the process of editing my archives and categorizing those old posts, but it will take a while.

Is the Army Corps of Engineers setting New Orleans up for another catastrophic flood?

An expert panel monitoring reconstruction of New Orleans’s hurricane-protection system warned federal engineers last month about the presence of weak, sandy soils in a newly rebuilt levee, the panel’s leader said yesterday, escalating a dispute over the soundness of the government’s rebuilding effort.

Raymond Seed, an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, also disclosed new details about what he described as serious flaws in the Army Corps of Engineers building practices. …

“A growing chorus of experts are trying to tell you that there may be some significant concerns with regard to the materials” used in rebuilding the levees, Seed said in a letter to Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the Corps’ commander. “These same levees eroded catastrophically during Katrina, and were the principal source of the massive flooding” of neighborhoods east of downtown New Orleans. …

Seed’s group, an engineering panel funded by the National Science Foundation, and a separate Louisiana panel of experts have questioned the reconstruction effort, saying the Corps is misleading state residents into believing the levee system will be safe by summer.

In the letter, Seed said he and another Berkeley engineer personally observed Corps contractors constructing a section of the levee using “clean, fine grained sand, which is highly erodeable.”

The Corps disputes the claims. (Hat tip: WXnation.)

Not like this is remotely a surprise, but we now have indisputable video evidence that Bush lied when he said of Hurricane Katrina, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Not only did plenty of people anticipate it, but he was one of those people. (Hat tip: various people, including Kim Stone, Ed Joyce and Becky.)

Now, you can argue all you want that the feds did all they could, pre-landfall. But clearly, Bush felt sufficiently insecure about the response that he felt the need to make that asinine statement about the levees in the first place. And he deserves to be called out on the carpet for it, regardless of anything else.

Perhaps the even more important point, though, is this clear refutation of the argument that the NHC was somehow giving government officials the “all clear” when their computer models began to show that the storm might go east of the city (which it did, but the levees failed anyway because of shoddy construction by the Army Corps of Engineers). Max Mayfield quite rightly hedged his bets:

The National Hurricane Center’s Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun.

“I don’t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern,” Mayfield told the briefing.

The government, at all levels, needed to be prepared for the worst, and wasn’t. Period. (This is especially disturbing since, in reality, the worst didn’t happen. They weren’t even adequately prepared for the second- or third-worst-case scenario, let alone the worst!)