Debunking Katrina Myths

The required reading list for following dinner-table conversation in the Fouro Sr. household didn't include newspapers much. It consisted of magazines, lots of them, in those pre-cable, pre-internets days of the late 60s and 70s. National Geographic, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Sci Am, and the occasional Mechanix Illustrated and, of course, Aviation Week & Space Technology. So, like an old friend, Popular Mechanics comes through with a very cool extended piece on Katrina's catastrophe, including (surprisingly) a debunk of many of the social breakdown "facts" like mass rape, looting and devolution that so many seemingly wanted desperately to be true. The engineering and possible fixes are all covered along with plenty of cool graphics.

PM is hardly a progressive rag. In the calm after the storm they say "FEMA is not a first responder." That's true, disaster is local first and they point out that localities and states did a better job than they got credit for. But given the week's notice of Katrina by the NWS and NOAA, the storm was a dry-run opportunity to see if new procedures and all the assurances of DHS and policy-makers that they had things in hand were true. Katrina, and Rita, were watery equivalents of rogue nukes. With all the scare-mongering about the magnitude of bio, chem, and nuke threats, the point remains that large-scale events are not well-prepared for by those who win elections by telling us that only they, and not their opponents, can protect us.