But we also have to understand this natural disaster--and yes lay blame right now where it belongs--with Bush, Congress, and Homeland Security which has crippled FEMA.  And we also have to be educated as to the background of "messing with water" so as to help us criticize and hold accountable those who have ruined New Orleans now, and to propose reasonable solutions that cannot be called "liberal, antiwar" solutions.  We need to go for the throat here.

The greatest natural disaster to hit the US before Katrina was the great Mississippi flood of 1927--and the tale of what is happening today in New Orleans is a haunting reminder of how we respond to disaster as well as the lessons we should have, but never seem to learn.

'Rising Tide' (John M. Barry, 1997)describes many things, but of relevance now is the engineering of the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico--the winning out of one strategy over another, which in 1927 as today, led to the country's biggest natural disaster, one that was made catastrophic by man's "intelligent design".

On the engineers, "There were two basic, and to some extent, contradictory approaches that engineers historically embraced to protect this valley (Mississippi) from floods: levees or outlets.  Levees confined the Mississippi; outlets released it.  Levees represented man's power over nature; outlets represented man's accommodation to nature..."  Guess which side won out?

An extraordinary large scale storm in April 1927 sent large scale amounts of water down the Mississippi River.  All up and down the river levees were breached.  Except New Orleans.  To save New Orleans in 1927, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had to intentionally breach a levee upstream of the city.  That breach flooded the homes of thousands and thousands of black people.

In some cities, the blacks were forced at gunpoint and without rations to repair some levees and to distribute food and water supplies.  Martial law was declared and the army moved in.  So many people lost their lives it was a national disgrace.  And changed the political landscape forever, forcing mass migrations.

In New Orleans, for whites, they stayed on the second floors of hotels and their homes.  For black communities, they were allowed to sleep on the levees or crowded into warehouses.  Tents finally arrived after many weeks but were unfloored; cots didn't arrive until later so refugees still slept on soaked ground.

The levees that engineered the river and the gulf of mexico; the land use that destroyed the buffers of trees, wetlands, inland waterways and outlets; the knowledge and lessons absolutely forgotten.

And in the last few days, the levees protecting New Orleans broke, this time because of benign and deliberate neglect by Bush and Congress.  A poster here wrote about the "Dutch Response" to Katrina--"who was patrolling the levees, ready to respond in a moment's notice?"

And an evacuation of New Orleans has been ordered, but they are leaving behind the black people. Looks deliberate to me.  And the soldiers are moving in with supplies and guns and water and guns, and orders to shoot looters (looking for water?), and its beginning to look a lot like 1927.

This will rock the landscape for the Bush administration--the breach that caused all the lies and mistruths to come tumbling out, the American tsunami of 2005.  But my heart cries out, how many more people have to die for this indescribably heartless, greedy, drunken administration, its cronies, and enablers? Update [2005-9-3 3:41:1 by DrKate]: The New Orleans Convention Center, and all of downtown New Orleans, has just been sealed off--no one leaves or gets in. No medical. Like I said, it's like 1927 and people are dying right now.