"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." BZZZZZT!!!

[BurtWorm]

From pharyngula.org:

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/drowning_new_orleans/





George W. Bush, September 2005:

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."


Scientific American, October 2001:

New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh--an area the size of Manhattan--will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn't go very far.

Read the whole thing. It's a detailed description of the problem, with suggestions about what needs to be done to correct it.

Dear gob, I wish we could impeach a president for being an incompetent boob, a disgrace to his office and the nation, and just plain dishonest twit. We can arrest someone for being irresponsible and non compos mentis while driving a car, but when he's driving the country? Heck, all we can do is watch as he kills people and wrecks the nation.