Now all of a sudden it's the goverment's fault that people decided to live in areas which were below sea level, and risk , then experience the extreme hardships that those decisions resulted in. QUOTE]
What many fail to realize it that much of this area was NOT below sea level when our parents or grandparents moved here years ago. The land has been steadily sinking and eroding away due to actions taken by the feds which are too numerous to list here. National oil companies dug hundreds of canals through our wetlands which brought in saltwater intrusion and eroded away millions of acres of land that protected the area, between the New Orleans area and the Gulf. New Orleans is 50 miles closer to the Gulf than it was 75 years ago due to these actions.
Our main flooding came from the destructive actions of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet channel which the feds built here in the 1960s against fierce protest. This was a multi-million dollar pork barrel project that the huge majority of people in the area did not want and which has done nothing but lose huge sums of money over the years. Warnings, protests and court actions over the years to get this canal closed before it flooded the area fell on deaf ears. This one canal, which serves no useful purpose whatsoever, caused all the flooding in St Bernard Parish where 100% of the homes were underwater, many of them well above sea level, and it caused almost all of the flooding in Orleans Parish. Though the purposes this canal was built for were never utilized, and only one business in the area has much use for it, and it alone has caused billions of dollars in damages to the area, the feds have still not said if they will close it and it remains open to flood the area again in the next major hurricane.
Though virtually 100% of the people in the area want this destructive canal closed, no amount of protests and lawsuits have been able to convince the feds to close it and no one except one small business benefitting from it.
Blaming New Orleanians for New Orleans flooding is like blaming the victims of the Trade Towers for being there when the planes hit because they knew it was the prime terrorist target in the world.
Though I have never lived in New Orleans, I have lived in it's suburban area for 61 years and I know New Orleans is far from being a perfect city and has attracted many of the worst class of people over the last half century. The estimated 10,000 looters who looted basically every place in the city, stealing billions of dollars in goods, loading it in their cars, then running away to other cities to hide and do destruction there, have caused the image of New Orleanians to be disgraced throughout the world, and this has caused many to believe that there are nothing here but poor worthless bums and thieves who don't deserve to be helped. But every major city (and minor ones too) have a certain percentage of these types.
And to make matters worse, the news media has only shown the oldest, poorest, part of the flooded areas of the city. The truth is that the oldest, poorest parts of the city did not flood because they were built on the highest ground. All the newest and most expensive subdivisions are the ones that flooded, including the Lakeview area where all the upper-income white people lived who paid 90% of the property taxes that kept the city operating.
The Downtown and French Quarter areas, which are all the tourists ever see, are all back to normal and in full operation for our Mardi Gras season which is in full swing now, so if any of you have been wanting to come down and join the world's largest? celebration and eat the world's best food, the door is open.
EDITED (after last post) IH3444 I was busy writing this lengthy post while you made your last post. No apology is necessary because many just believe what they hear in the media. People who have lived in an area for generations tend to not leave their family, friends and roots to move elsewhere in fear of a calamity hitting. Do people move out of California from fear of earthquakes, or out of the midwest for fear of tornados, or out of New York for fear of blizzards? Yet, these are natural disasters. The thing that sets Katrina apart in the New Orleans area is that 90% of the damage was caused by man-made projects that the local population could not control and they choose to stay and fight for what was theirs and file lawsuits and protest in the hope that these canals could be closed before the Big One.
