Down to Earth Blog

Wetlands Important, Levees Imperfect: Last week marked the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina drowning New Orleans. AOL News covered the event with this great package, "One Year After Katrina." My team in Research & Learn created this Katrina quiz; go ahead, try it!

Katrina was a huge disaster and a very sad story. The lasting impressions for me: All levels of government were unprepared and slow to react (witness the people waiting on their roofs for days to be rescued); industry's decimation of the wetlands and marshes at the mouth of the Mississippi River played a big role in the severity of the damage, allowing the Katrina storm surge (or more of it) to reach the city; and the New Orleans' levees failed, showing once again that we humans cannot hope to control Mother Nature all of the time.

For more on how the Army Corps of Engineers doomed New Orleans by its levee and navigation channel design failures, see Michael Grunwald's artice in Grist, "Rotten to the Corps."

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this

• #1 Comment from smurfboy77 
  9/10/06 4:32 PM | Permalink

  I heard people say New Orleans was the city of sin, and never thought about it much. But, think of this and the "city of sin" quote... Katrina hit New Orleans, and the people evacuated there and went to Texas. Well, not too much later after Katrina left, Rita went to texas and caused problems there. So tell me if you think New Orleans really was a city of sin! I believe they were right about it.