It’s been just over a year since Katrina but somehow historian Douglas Brinkley managed to put together a very readable history of the week of the flood using voluminous interviews with key participants and victims of the flood. The nice thing to learn is that there were some heroes. Bush wasn’t. Nagin wasn’t. Chertoff and Homeland Security weren’t. Brownie and FEMA flopped. About the only federal agency that performed with excellence was the US Coast Guard which got right on it and saved thousands along with local volunteer first responders. Half of the New Orleans Police Department went AWOL, some in stolen Cadillacs. Other cops stayed on the job and performed admirably. Katrina was one of the worst national disasters in history and the Federal Government let the people of New Orleans down. The State of Louisianna gets mixed reviews and, after reading the book, one wonders how the craven mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, ever got reelected. Reading The Great Deluge, a real page turner, the suffering caused by Katrina is palpable. Keep a box of Kleenex close by. The descriptions of escapes, deaths, violence and bureaucratic obtuseness by participants in the story will cause you to grind your teeth. The dramatic climax of the story comes when Tony Zumbado, a freelance video photographer for NBC and his assistant Josh Holm make their way by boat to Memorial Hospital and discovered forty-five decomposing bodies of patients who had not been evacuated or rescued. Katrina was more than a natural disaster. it was a political disaster of major proportion. The dispossessed learned that their government didn’t care. The rest of us learned once and for all how incompetent the Bush administration was. The flood killed more than people; it destroyed a carefully built myth that Mr. Bush was capable of protecting us.
A companion book to Brinkley’s The Great Deluge is Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry. This whole Katrina thing happened once before and we didn’t learn much from history. We kept messing with the river and ignoring the danger signs. In 1927 there were heroes and goats as well. Herbert Hoover who led the relief effort was catapulted into the presidency as a result of his performance. Read together you will come to one conclusion—neither one of these books are on Preznit Bush’s reading list. Here’s an excerpt from Amazon.com.
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