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. :)

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!)

The magazine Popular Mechanics declares the House Republicans’ report on Hurricane Katrina “riddled with poor logic, internal contradictions and exaggerations.” Fair enough; I haven’t read the report in full, so perhaps that’s true. But when you dig into PM’s criticisms, it becomes clear that “poor logic,” at least, is something the magazine’s editors are apparently quite familiar with.

PM says the House report “consistently blam[es] individuals for failing to foresee circumstances that only became clear with the laser-sharp vision of hindsight.” Hmm. Well, as someone who has gotten a considerable amount of attention for foreseeing a number of those circumstances contemporaneously, not just in hindsight, I feel that I should respond.

Basically, the magazine’s conclusions are crap.

Popular Mechanics quotes the House report’s statement that: “Fifty-six hours prior to landfall, Hurricane Katrina presented an extremely high probability threat that 75 percent of New Orleans would be flooded, tens of thousands of residents may be killed, hundreds of thousands trapped in flood waters up to 20 feet, hundreds of thousands of homes and other structures destroyed, a million people evacuated from their homes, and the greater New Orleans area would be rendered uninhabitable for several months or years.” PM then states:

This statistic is referred to often, and refers to computer modeling of a direct Category 5 hurricane landfall in New Orleans. However, it’s also a distortion. According to the data the Committee itself examined, 56 hours prior to landfall, Katrina was a relatively weak Category 3 storm, heading west in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next few hours, it began its turn north, but where the storm was going to make landfall along the Gulf Coast was any weatherman’s bet (the average 48-hour margin of error is 160 miles). In fact, it was not until the next day, Saturday, that it became more of a certainty that the hurricane was heading toward New Orleans. Furthermore, hurricane forecasters and emergency managers tell PM that until about 24 hours before landfall, hurricanes are too unpredictable to warrant the sort of blanket evacuation orders the report describes.

That last statement is absolutely fascinating, considering that all of the studies in the years before Katrina indicated that it would take 72 hours to successfully evacuate New Orleans. So, according to the “hurricane forecasters and emergency managers” that Popular Mechanics inteviewed, I guess we shouldn’t even have bothered.

Look, it’s absolutely correct that, at 56 hours out, it wasn’t “certain” that Katrina would strengthen to a Cat. 4-5 system, or that she would hit New Orleans. Hell, none of that was “certain” at 48 hours out, and the track remained “uncertain” even at 24 hours… 12 hours… 6 hours out. So if the House report says it was “certain,” the report is wrong.

But in terms of assessing whether evacuations should have occurred earlier, the lack of “certainty” is entirely irrelevant, because it is completely and utterly impossible for ANY hurricane forecast to EVER be “certain,” particularly when we’re talking about several days before landfall. Thus, evacuation decisions must ALWAYS be made on the basis of “uncertain” information. This is pretty basic stuff, and I’m not sure what PM finds difficult to understand about it.

In this particular case, the threat to New Orleans 56 hours before landfall — although admittedly “uncertain,” indeed not even a better-than-50% probability — was virtually as grave as the threat could ever possibly be at 56 hours out. The forecast track was aiming almost directly at the Crescent City, and it was a “high-confidence forecast” — i.e., one in which the steering currents are strong and well-understood, and the computer models are all in good agreement. Thus, if we accept Popular Mechanics’s premise that this forecast was too “uncertain” to justify evacuation at that point, then it follows logically that all 56-hour forecasts would be too “uncertain”; evacuation could NEVER be justified so far before landfall. The magazine’s unnamed “hurricane forecasters and emergency managers” seem to explicitly confirm this.

But how can that be? Early evacuations are absolutely crucial when major cities are threatened, because of the length of time that evacation takes — and this is even more true when the major city in question is New Orleans, mandating the need to evacuate almost everyone, instead of just selected regions of the city (because far more people in New Orleans are affected by the latter portion of the phrase “hide from the wind, run from the water”). Another reason more time is needed for a New Orleans evacuation is the well-understood problem of poor people without the means to evacuate; more time was needed to round them up and get them out of town, using those ultimately drowned school buses and such. For these and other reasons, it was universally understood before Katrina that 24 hours was NOT enough time to completely and effectively evacuate New Orleans.

So basically, I’d really like to know what “hurricane forecasters and emergency managers” this magazine is talking to, because I’m calling b***s***.

The magazine goes on to say:

The death tolls listed in the congressional report presuppose: A) certainty that the storm would hit New Orleans directly, and B) certainty the storm would strengthen to a Category 4 or 5. Neither of these propositions was certain 56 hours prior to landfall.

Again, if the report really does presuppose “certainty” of those things, that’s obviously stupid. However, why should “certainty” be the standard, anyway? In other words, what is Popular Mechanics’s point, exactly? The magazine seems to believe that there are only two options: either something is “certain,” or it couldn’t have been anticipated except in hindsight. But that’s ridiculous! Obviously, our disaster planners need to be prepared for uncertain, and perhaps statistically unlikely, but reasonably plausible worst-case scenarios. It’s no defense at all to say, “Well, we weren’t certain things would go badly.”

Nobody can deny that there was a realistic, reasonable, plausible possibility on Friday and Saturday that Katrina would strengthen to Cat. 4-5, and that it would hit New Orleans. And everybody knew what a calamity that would be, if that were to happen. Isn’t that more than enough to firmly establish that we needed to be ready for the worst? Again, why is “certainty” the standard? Why is it considered an unfair application of “hindsight” to suggest that officials should have more adequately prepared for the “uncertain” but realistic prospect of catastrophe?

The House report may be riddled with errors, but it appears to me that Popular Mechanics’s report is even worse.

(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

UPDATE: Welcome, InstaPundit readers!

It has been suggested in comments that “by [my] reasoning, every city and town on the coast should evacuate whenever a hurricane is potentially (number of evacuation hours) from hitting.” That’s absurd, and my own blog archives disprove it. Was I calling for wholesale evacuation, 48-60 hours in advance, of Mobile, Alabama? Of Biloxi, Mississippi? No, even though I acknowledged that those cities were, at that point, just about as likely to get hit as New Orleans, statistically speaking. So why was I so selective in calling for evacuations? Because New Orleans is a special case. Everyone knows this. More importantly, everyone knew this, long before Katrina.

There’s a reason FEMA, circa the year 2000, listed a hurricane landfall in New Orleans as one of the three most likely U.S. catastrophes (along with a major earthquake in San Francisco and a terrorist attack in New York City). It’s not because New Orleans is the most likely major city to get hit (that distinction would probably go to Miami), it’s because unlike anywhere else in the country, the entire city is in danger from catastrophic flooding. Thus, whereas in other places, only the shoreline and low-lying areas need to evacuate (”hide from the wind, run from the water”), in New Orleans everybody has to evacuate, which makes it essential that evacuations occur as early as possible. This is precisely why I, and so many other people, were contemporaneously calling for immediate evacuations as early as Saturday morning. Indeed, I was already urging people to leave Friday night, on the assumption that the mayor would order everyone out on Saturday.

Another reason early evacuation of New Orleans in particular is essential: when the flood happens, it doesn’t recede for weeks, leading to all the disgusting problems we saw in the aftermath of Katrina (toxic chemicals and oil slicks in the water, corpses floating around, etc.). This, too, was anticipated years in advance. That’s unlike any other storm-surge zone, where the water comes in, then recedes fairly quickly. In New Orleans, it’s all the more crucial to evacuate because the conditions will remain horrible for a long time after the actual storm, and, if you survive the storm (quite unlikely in a true direct hit; thank God Katrina wasn’t), you won’t be able to get around because of all the (toxic) water surrounding you. As it was, at least a lot of the city was still above water; not so if Katrina’s path had been 30 or 40 miles to the west of where it was — a variation which is impossible to confidently predict until the very last few hours before landfall, long after the evacuation window.

One valid point was made in response to my argument, and that is that the contraflow worked better than expected. It didn’t take 72 hours, as expected, to evacuate the city. People weren’t stuck on the roads. That’s true, thank God. (It’s a risk the mayor absolutely should not have taken, since it could easily have proven otherwise; he didn’t have any valid reason to think things would go so well. But he lucked out.) However, the fact remains that, although it’s true that many people chose to stay (in some cases because of mixed signals from the mayor; I heard tourists on TV on Saturday saying they would have left if the evacuation was mandatory, but because it was only voluntary, they didn’t — and then by Sunday it was too late, rental car agencies were running out of cars, etc.), there were still plenty of other people who couldn’t leave… and those drowned school buses, and other effective local evacuation plans, could have gone a long way to getting them out. But it would have taken more than 24 hours to coordinate all that. Also, if the mayor had ordered a mandatory evacuation 24 hours earlier, the message would have been a lot more unequivocal at an earlier time, and I guarantee you a lot more stragglers would have left voluntarily.

It is frankly mind-boggling to me that people defend the lateness and inadequacy of the evacuation. If Katrina has been as bad as she almost was, tens of thousands people would have died. As I explained in an earlier post:

As horrible as the catastrophe has been, please realize that it actually could have been far worse. What occurred was not the long-feared “worst-case scenario,” which involved not a levee breach equalizing the water level in Lake Ponchartrain and “Lake New Orleans,” but rather a storm surge over-topping the levees and causing the water level in “Lake New Orleans,” hemmed in by the still-intact levees, to rise substantially higher than the water level in the lake. If the storm had wobbled a meteorologically insignificant 20 or 30 miles to the west, and/or had not weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 4 at the last minute, that scenario would have occurred, and instead of a slowly developing 10-20 foot flood, New Orleans would have suffered a rapidly developing 30-40 foot flood. (Jackson Square would have been underwater, whereas in the real-world scenario it remained high and dry.) The whole thing would have happened Monday morning, and at the same time as the city was rapidly and massively flooding, the devastating winds that demolished the Mississippi coastline would have been tearing New Orleans apart instead. All of those attics where people took shelter would have been either submerged or shattered to bits. The French Quarter would have been swamped, instead of mostly surviving the flood. Second-floor generators in hospitals might well have drowned. Bottom line, there would be a lot fewer refugees and a lot more corpses.

If that had happened, would y’all still be saying that I’m being unreasonable in expecting New Orleans’s local government to evacuate the damn city in a timely fashion when a clear and present mortal danger is on the doorstep? Honestly, look yourself in the mirror and ask whether you’d be calling for Nagin’s head if 50,000 had died on his watch. If so, and yet you’re defending the late evacuation now, then you’re the one engaging in “20/20 hindsight.” On Saturday, when he chose not to order a mandatory evacuation, the worst-case scenario was still absolutely within the realm of realistic possibility. (It remained so until mere hours before landfall.) So he needs to held responsible for the extremely dire consequences that almost happened on his watch, in addition to those that actually occurred. We’re idiots if we give him the benefit of “lucking out.”

Oh, one last thing. To those who say they’re sick of “finger-pointing”… I understand where you’re coming from, I really do. But how and when, exactly, do we hold officials accountable for their gross failures, if “finger-pointing” is going to be considered verboten after a tragedy like this? One man’s “blame game” is another man’s legitimate exercise in holding democratically elected officials accountable for their actions. (And on the latter point: Ray Nagin is up for re-election in a few months. I certainly think it’s appropriate to point out his utter failure in the run-up to Katrina, in light of the fact that his constituents are about to decide whether to keep him around for another four years.)

A leaked draft of a House report on Hurricane Katrina, due to be publicly released Wednesday, concludes: “We are left scratching our heads at the range of clumsiness and ineptitude that characterized government behavior before and after this storm. … If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not. Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for prime time.”

Yup. (Hat tip: Andrew.)

More:

Unheeded warnings, poor planning and apathy in recognizing the scope of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction led to the slow emergency response from the White House down to local parishes, a House investigation concludes.

The 600-page report by a special Republican-dominated House inquiry into one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history concluded the federal government’s response to Katrina was marked by “fecklessness, flailing and organizational paralysis.”

It said President Bush received poor and incomplete counsel about the crisis unfolding on the Gulf Coast and that late state and local evacuation orders added to the confusion at the federal level.

“Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare,” said a summary of the scathing report obtained Sunday by The Associated Press.

“At every level — individual, corporate, philanthropic, and governmental — we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina,” the report concluded.

“In this cautionary tale, all the little pigs built houses of straw.”

The late evacuations did more than just “add to the confusion at the federal level”; that appears to be a bit of spin by the AP, not the report’s authors. The report makes clear that the latest evacuations added to the death toll:

Mandatory evacuation in the New Orleans area either came too late or were never made, leading to incomplete evacuations, deaths, horrible conditions for those awaiting evacutation.

Again: Yup.

Also, about the president’s “poor and incomplete counsel“:

About 56 hours before Katrina made landfall, the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center cited an “extremely high probability” that New Orleans would be flooded and tens of thousands of residents killed.

Given those warnings, the report notes Bush’s televised statement on Sept. 1 that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” and concludes: “Comments such as those . . . do not appear to be consistent with the advice and counsel one would expect to have been provided by a senior disaster professional.”

Indeed. Bush could have gotten better advice from this blog than he was apparently getting from his people.

To the list of ridiculous quotes from inept federal officials, I would add: “government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur” and “Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane situation.”

Anyway, I’m glad the report apparently spreads the blame around. House Democrats boycotted the investigation because they felt it would be a partisan whitewash, but, reserving final judgment until the full report is released, it appears at first blush that the Republicans have done an admirable job of criticizing the responsible parties at all levels, without fear or favor. (As well they should; oversight is their job, after all.)

The fact is, this ought not be a partisan issue at all, any more than it ought to be a racial issue. Blanco and Nagin are Democrats; Bush, Chertoff and Brown are Republicans; Nagin is black; the rest of them are white. So what? They all screwed up. Badly. Bravo to the Congressmen for bluntly saying so.

Following up on my earlier post about the many Gulf Coast who are still officially listed as “missing,” MSNBC reports:

Nearly six months after Hurricane Katrina, more than 1,300 bodies have been found, but the real death toll is clearly higher. How much higher, no one can say with any certainty.

Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for, and some of them — again, no one is sure how many — were probably washed into the Gulf of Mexico, drowned when their fishing boats sank, swept into Lake Pontchartrain or alligator-infested swamps, or buried under crushed homes, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana medical examiner.

Cataldie noted that coffins, disgorged from the earth by the floodwaters, have been found great distances from their graveyards, and “if we have coffins that have washed 30 miles away, I can assure you there are people who have.”

“The likelihood is there are people we will not find,” he said. …

The remains of 1,079 people have been recovered in Louisiana; an additional 231 were found in Mississippi. But Louisiana officials have information on roughly 300 people whose loved ones are desperately searching for them…

“I have people trying to close estates. I have lawyers calling me. I have people calling me, saying, ‘Do you have my momma?’” Cataldie said.

The list of those reported missing to the Find Family National Call Center, run by state and federal officials in Baton Rouge, has about 2,300 people on it. Some have already been found but have not been taken off the list because family members have not notified authorities. Others are on the lam, wanted for a crime or child support payments.

But it is the others who have not been seen or heard from by family members that Cataldie worries he will never have answers for.

As I mentioned before, this is similar to what happened after 9/11, both in terms of the bloated missing-persons list and the fact that some bodies will never be found. But this situation is probably somewhat worse, in terms of the ability to eventually identify all the victims accurately, because of the vastness of the area and the larger number of poor people affected. There is simply going to be less of a “human paper trail,” if you were, than there was with the vast majority of 9/11 victims.

Former FEMA director Michael Brown, who earned my everlasting ire when he spouted utter absurdities like “Katrina was much larger than we expected” and “Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane situation” and “[we thought] the water would drain away fairly quickly,” is now doing a heck of a job laying the blame elsewhere, unloading on Homeland Security in his testimony before Congress.

Actually, I suspect that Brownie is quite right when he says that “the policies and decisions that were implemented by DHS put FEMA on a path to failure.” But I’m not about to let Brown off the hook just because he’s playing the victim here. Was he scapegoated? Yes. Was he also an incompetent failure in the Katrina response? Yes. There’s a lot of that to go around: Brown, Chertoff, Bush, Nagin, Blanco, etc.