[Mb-civic] Repairing Levees, Getting the Water Out - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Repairing Levees, Getting the Water Out
As Copters Drop Sand to Fill Breaches, a Police Officer Surveys What's 
Left of His Old Neighborhood

By Peter Whoriskey and Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 3, 2005; Page A21

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 2 -- On the canal's west side, where the levee was 
intact, a small clutch of gawkers perched on the flood barrier, oohing 
and aahing as heavy-lift helicopters thudded overhead to drop immense 
white bags filled with sand into the 300-foot gap that Hurricane Katrina 
had carved in the opposite flood wall.

On the east side, New Orleans police Officer David Hunter chugged 
quietly along in his motorboat looking for refugees and pointing out the 
sights in the Lakeview neighborhood where he once lived. His own house, 
submerged nearby in 20 feet of water, was "inaccessible," he said.
  
Federal, state and local officials struggle to provide relief to New 
Orleans, where tens of thousands of refugees from the aftermath of 
Hurricane Katrina remain stranded with rapidly diminishing supplies of 
food and drinking water. Meanwhile, the official death toll in 
Mississippi climbed above 100.

"But there's my friend Sal's house -- been on the force 30 years." He 
pointed at a tile rooftop and dodged as a stoplight went by at eye 
level: "On the right is the Basin bar. I'd buy you a beer, but I don't 
think it's open."

This is the epicenter of one of the biggest natural disasters in U.S. 
history -- an ordinary middle-class New Orleans neighborhood framed by 
Lake Pontchartrain and the 17th Street Canal, whose levee was breached 
Monday morning when Katrina's storm surge pushed the lake into the canal 
until the floodwall gave way.

The Army Corps of Engineers learned that the levee had broken early 
Monday even as the storm hit, but it was impossible to do anything about 
it before lake water cascaded unimpeded into the below-sea-level city 
for 36 hours, turning a really bad storm into an unimaginable 
abomination. There was no public announcement that the levee had broken 
until late Monday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/02/AR2005090202226.html?nav=hcmodule
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