Here in New Orleans, we are very excited to have the Roosevelt back in business. My brother was chef there for a spell and we’ve attended countless functions there. It is a grand property.

The article said: ‘New Orleans is now getting back on its feet after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.”

Please don’t spread that myth. We find it very offensive.

ur outfall canal floodwalls fell down without even being overtopped by storm surge water (at less than half their design loads) because of negligent engineering in the design of those floodwalls’ foundations by engineers employed with the US Army Corps of Engineers as reported in the official levee failure investigation reports and reported to Congress by Corps leadership in June of 2006 and as decided by US 5th District Judge S. Duval in January 2008.

i.e. it was not a ‘natural’ disaster! The classification is ‘MAN MADE’! – human error, engineering mistakes. New Orleanians deserve vindication on this issue.

The levee failures and subsequent flooding were NOT because of our corrupt local levee boards and politicians or because of weak soil, barges, wind, rain, land elevation, levee heights, maintenance, subsidence, budgets, democrats, republicans, crime, an act of God, school buses, our culture, environmentalists, neighborhood groups. It wasn’t even caused by FEMA, our Sewage and Water Board or our state’s Department of Transportation, or our poverty, lack of education or any of the other red herring issues very successfully promoted by so many. It was not the fault of flood victims.

Blaming levee and floodwall failures on Katrina is like saying a bridge collapse was because of traffic. Would you blame the drivers?

The levees did not fail because they were ‘overwhelmed’. Federal engineers made lots of big stupid mistakes. Our disaster was the worst engineering catastrophe in the history of North America and the engineers that designed and built and were responsible for those failed levees are the same engineers tasked to rebuild our storm surge protection system. And, the federal government gives us no choice (and never did), but to accept the Corps’ work. Locals were only supposed to mow the grass.

When reporting on the effects of our flood catastrophe, please don’t blame it on Katrina. The engineering structures we depended upon failed us. Please don’t be a flood victim hater looking for ways to hurt and insult us.

The debate is over really. There are the levee failure reports, the report by Corps’ leadership before the US Congress and the decision by the federal judge all confirming the exact reason for the floods – New Orleans was short-sheeted by the USCAE – engineering negligence. Everything else is a red herring. But in many ways you are correct about the debate – there still exists a lot of confusion, myths and misinformation amongst the general public.

Before Katrina, the last time our levees were tested by a significant height of water from storm surge was during Hurricane Betsy in 1963, and that same floodwall designed and built by the Corps, to protect the Lower Ninth Ward, failed and many died. In 1965, Congress passed a flood control act mandating the USACE to provide N.O. a storm surge protection system, but after 40 years, the Corps didn’t complete the job. What they did complete was riddled with very poor engineering design.

Also, before the Corps channeled the Mississippi River between massive river levees and prevented the deposit of annual sediment from the river into our wetlands south of New Orleans, those wetlands served as a very effective storm surge buffer where each mile of wet land reduced storm surge in New Orleans by almost a foot. And, over the past 70 years the Corps has permitted oil, gas and pipeline companies to dredge 8000 miles of canals throughout our South Louisiana wetlands causing a lot of salt water intrusion, killing cypress swamps and fresh water marshes and directly causing massive loss of those wetlands. As if that weren’t bad enough, they also gave us the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a deep water canal that is a straight shot from the Gulf to New Orleans – we called that the Hurricane storm surge super highway.

People tend to focus on levee height, but that wasn’t the problem during Katrina, at least not west of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, which is where you find the Roosevelt and the heart of the city.

During Katrina, the floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals fell down before storm surge water reached within four feet from the top of the floodwalls because the sheet-pillings supporting the walls were only driven to 17.5 feet below sea level. Levee failure reports indicated the sheet-pillings would have had to have been driven to about 60 feet below sea level. In my neighborhood, everyone knows you have to use 30 foot pilings as a foundation under our rinky dink homes in this super mushy soil where we live. It is impossible to fathom why a competent civil engineer might think 17.5 foot long sheet-piles would be long enough to support a floodwall much less hold back the lateral force of a column of water.

Immediately after Katrina, before the next hurricane season, by Congressional mandate, the Corps put temporary gates at the mouths of these outfall canals to prevent storm surge water from entering the canals and potentially breaching these pathetically designed floodwalls again. Currently, the Corps has this complicated policy to try to ensure that during a storm, or even a heavy rain event, our Sewage and Water Board is prevented from pumping enough rain runoff water into the canals to avoid the water rising up these levees high enough to even touch the bottom of the walls for fear they will fail again. With life and death enthusiasm, we are trying to get the Corps to fix our outfall canal problems the right way instead of their much cheaper but much more dangerous solution.

We were scarred to death that the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal’s floodwalls were going to fail during Hurricane Gustov last year. That canal still cannot be closed off to storm surge. Just days prior to Gustov’s passing by New Orleans, the Corps stiffened those walls with huge sand baskets where they were most concerned about failure, thank goodness.

Had the Corps’ floodwalls not failed during Katrina, New Orleans would have only suffered relatively minor wind damage, very very few might have died and New Orleans would have been out of the news within a week.

There are so many myths about New Orleans and New Orleanians.

Do people know that 90% of the metro area evacuated before Katrina? It was the most successful evacuation of a metropolitan area in this country’s history. Could their city do as well?

Do they know that the Lower Ninth Ward is but only 2 of the 140 square miles (in just Orleans Parish) that flooded when flood control structures fell down.

Do they know that 70% of New Orleans home owners had flood insurance? – a rate higher than almost anywhere else in the country.

Do they know that the flood, proportionally, killed just as many rich, middle class and poor as well as black, white, Hispanic and Asian New Orleanians? The only demographic that suffered more than the rest were our elderly who suffered the worst, by far. Did you know many thousands of New Orleanians died in the months after the storm from stress and depression, and are still dying?

Do they know that 50% of New Orleans is above sea level?

Do they know ships must travel 96 miles upriver from the Gulf to reach New Orleans? – we are not a ‘coastal’ city. – 96 miles upriver!!!

Do they know the Corps is mostly responsible for the loss of our wetlands that use to serve as a storm surge buffer for New Orleans?

Do they know that New Orleans has a higher percentage of residents that remain lifelong residents of their home town than any other major metropolitan area in the US?

Do they know the vast majority of New Orleanians are honest, hard working, tax paying, law abiding US citizens and deserve their respect?

Why do outsiders believe these myths?

The myths seem to stem from journalists parachuting in with preconceived notions and lazy but flowery language and they typically reported it all wrong. Countrymen and politicians used our problems as partisan political fodder. New Orleans and its residents have been ruthlessly slandered like no American city has ever experienced. Lazy media reported a ‘natural’ disaster and too many of our countrymen feel we deserved our disaster and should even be denied the right to exist. It is plenty enough to hurt your feelings. Our fellow US citizens, even folk from all over the world, don’t care that all the misinformation has seriously disillusioned and disturbed so many.

Furthermore, in an effort to regain public confidence in their competence, and keep their funding uncompromised, and maintain their prominence and power over their industry, the US Army Corps of Engineers has sponsored very successful PR campaigns in an effort to feed the myths and shift the blame from them and try to have history recorded incorrectly. They have not yet lost that battle.

My family home marinated in salt water up to the ceiling fan blades for weeks. It took us 27 months, but we rebuilt our home elevated above the Katrina flood line. My neighborhood is 60% re-inhabited. We keep life jackets on the coat rack and a pirogue on the porch because we have no confidence in the engineering forced upon us by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

My family was chased out of Nova Scotia by the British in 1765 and have lived here since and will likely live here for another 250 years. I feel like a fish out of water anywhere else. I’d be willing to live on a houseboat if necessary. This is the only place where I own property and cannot afford to move elsewhere even if I wanted to. My work is here. My life is here. We ain’t leaving.

Please do not promote the myth that Katrina caused our losses. It was the worst engineering disaster in the history of North America that caused our losses – and closed the Fairmont.

Thanks for asking and best regards,

Ray