Redstate

Are now setting their acclaimed timepieces by the liberals daily "Blame Bush" attacks!

No one is claiming that this exonerates Brown. I thought the point of this release is that when Bush said, after the storm, that, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," that it doesn't jibe with what Brown told him during this call.

The point is not "Did Bush screw up?" The point is "When Bush said no one saw it coming, was he telling the truth?"

Actually, instead of attacking him we ought to create a fan club--The Wit and Wisdom Of Dan Froomkin in which we post his idiocy of the day. I am certain he is an embarrassment to the saner heads at the paper. If we satirize him instead of attacking him, they may get the nerve to show him the door.

before. It is cut an pasted from another thread.

We require you lefties to submit original posts especially when it was vapid the first time it was used.

Since this thread is the same as the other, I used similar language.

And don't call me a leftie--I've voted GOP since I was in college. Your smirking "oh he's a leftie" is revealing to the weight of your arguments.

And I have now been explained (by someone who responded with substance, unlike you) that the difference is that the briefing warned of "overtopping" and not "breaching," the discussion moves on.

If you are comfortable with that distinction, that a government official can say, "Well, I was warned of a little flooding over, but not flooding through," well,  I guess they say we get the government we deserve.

glad you cleared up all that.

Just Google around and read about the flaps between him and Post Online editor Jim Brady.

If you did then you would know that there is a world of difference between a levee being overtopped and a levee being breached ...

But if you want to go around being indignant and self-righteous ... be our guest.

To infer that overtopping and breaching of the levees result in the same magnitude of disaster, if totally misunderstanding the magnitude of the disaster that hit NO.  Overtopping throws water over the levees while the wind is blowing, when the wind stops, the water stops flowing over the top.  When a breach occurs, the flowing continues until water reaches its equilibrium.  Expecting the levees to be overtopped will result in different planning and procedures to clean up the water after the winds stop blowing, to expect a breach is to tell everyone to leave, and if they stay, they die.  Bush was led to believe that an overtopping would occur.

If the esteemed senator from Louisiana truly believed that the levees would be breached, as she claims now, why did she not issue the leave or die warning?

Now.

Your last warning.

Why would the weatherman giving the presentation to the President and others express "grave, grave concerns" about the levees being "topped" if all that really meant, in your words, was that "overtopping throws water over the levees while the wind is blowing, when the wind stops, the water stops flowing over the top"?

That doesn't sound particularly "grave" to me.

Because overtopping is going to cause a mess.  A mess that will require significant effort to clean up.  Follow all of the hurricane warnings, and the surge expectations and you understand that the concern is high.  However, the disaster increases exponentially when the water will continue to flow until it reaches a level of equilibrium.  

I hope this helps.

I know this is getting tangential to the original post but as I understand it, overtopping is potentially more catastrophic.  Once water starts flowing over the top, a levee is going to get scoured away quickly causing it fail massively.  In fact I think some of the breaches in NO were the result of overtopping/scouring.

My wife's a civil engineer and she backs me up on this.

I shall defer to your wife's expertise.  However, I am unclear as to whether that expertise was included in the discussions with the President.  It clearly requires concerted flow of water over time to scour away reinforced concrete levees, which is what I've been led to believe were the type in NO.  I am not intimate with the details.  I have given my opinion, and believe that opinion is shared by many others.  Overtopping of the NO levees was not interpreted as meaning levee failure.  I know that the earthen work levees along the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers failed without being overtopped, just merely saturated, but they were earthen.

I did not have sexual relations with that levee...

Overtopping will result in flooding. If the overtopping goes on long enough the flooding will be extensive; not necessarily life threatenting but extensive --- and very, very messy.

In absolute fairness, sustained overtopping of the flood wall structures (not the berm levees but the walls) can, and may well have, caused "scouring". In this situation the water flowing over the top of the wall "scours" the earth away from the back side of the berm supporting the wall. This can result in the wall collapsing and there appears to be some evidence that this may have happened in several cases.

So yes it appears that overtopping can, under the right/wrong circumstances, lead to a breech. But that possibility was not under discussion at the time.

the MSM blissfully ignores colossal failures at the state and local level.

on what your meaning of the word levee is ...

Max Mayfield described the possibility of overtopping as a "very, very grave concern". He would have well understood that it can lead to a levee breach, as would most of the experts in the audience, and no doubt that's a large part of the reason for his concern. Perhaps he should have spelt it out for lay people, but he has a lot to say, and time is short. It seems to me that lay people hearing a hurricane expert express grave concern should find out why before dismissing it as just a minor flood problem.

for liberals to understand the difference between "overtopped" and "breached", using one of their heroes as an example.

When Ted Kennedy drinks liquor, the booze overtops the glass and goes into his alcoholic body. When he drove his car off the bridge, the water breached the car windows and doors, drowning that poor young girl.

(Crossposted on Wizbang)

The MSM is useless. If they have done what it seems- deliberately misedit a video tape so as to give false impressions and drive false conclusions, they are nothing more than a bunch of little Rathers: corrupt, lazy, condescending wannabe hacks. Theya re squandering the freedoms provided them in this country. A corallary of the 'use it or lose it' rule is 'misuse it enough, and it will be taken from you'.The doofusses in the MSM don't notice, but we are in a shooting war. Their behavior so far only serves to make the war worse for Americans and better for the enenmy. Their behavior is without honor or integrity or patriotism. As was pointed out elsewhere, their claims of love for this nation are about as sincere as those of a wife beater for his wife.

It's video-mania:

Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON - In the hectic, confused hours after Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, Louisiana's governor hesitantly but mistakenly assured the Bush administration that New Orleans' protective levees were intact, according to a new video obtained by The Associated Press showing briefings that day with federal officials.

Let's see how they spin this one.

understood.

Max is a meteorologist, not a hydrologist or civil engineer. He may or may not have understood this to be a problem. But he didn't bring up "scouring" as a potential problem so all we can go on is what he said and did, not what he might have said.

Max lives down here in Miami. Every time a storm draws a bead on us he goes on the air and tells us his concerns. If it's a big, powerful storm he tells us there is potential for serious damage and that there is a potential for grave danger to to people in low lying areas, mobile home parks, the Keys, whatever. He isn't lying and he isn't exagerating, his job is to try to make the fools who won't evacuate understand that there is grave danger headed our way. (When Max goes home to put up his storm shutters everyone suddenly starts paying attention ;-)

All I can do is go by what people actually said or did. They talked about overtopping; no one in any capacity talked about breeching or scouring. Just a fact, no matter how it interferes with Monday morning quarterbacking.

the tapes of the video conference the Bush administration provided to the major networks on Aug. 28, 2005.

it runs 10 pages, but it doesn't have a conclussion. Is there more to the transcript? If there is I would like to read it. Does anyone know how the rebuliding process is going? It looked like the French Quarter is fine. The news showed a neighborhood where only volunteers are doing the rebuilding. That being network tv I saw it on, I don't believe thats how things are really going on. As I understood it its hard to get a room in new Orleans because FEMA agents have occupied most of them. I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me what the facts are.

you are looking for. Go about your business.

I believe the tape is available there although I didn't avail myself of it.  The bovine appearance and stupidity of Louisiana's most famous interior decorator is not digestible in the early morning hours.  I do expect to see this spashed across the front pages of our leading newspapers, right!

you won't be able to tune a channel or open a newspaper without seeing it. Seeing what? The Blanco tape. What Blanco tape? The ... oh nevermind.

Is it just me, or has it been uproariously funny to see all of these liberals desperately grasping at straws ever since Bush got elected the FIRST time? Part of me wonders if the MSM is deliberately toying with them in order to increase readership (or viewership). They get all breathless about the latest "proof" that Bush did something wrong, and then, strangely enough, we keep finding out that it was overexaggerated, or made up out of whole cloth in the first place. I've never seen such a bunch for batting at shadows. It'd be funny, if their paranoia wasn't so contagious and wasn't hurting the morale of our troops.

Overtopping a levee does cause a mess, but the flow of water DOES stop once the wind stops blowing. A BREACHED levee allow water to flow through it until the water level on the other side reaches the bottom of the breach, which is a lot lower than the top of the levee, meaning much MORE water flows through a breached levee than over an intact levee.

In New Orleans after Katrina, there were three BRRACHES in levees, which allowed water to continue flowing into New Orleans for days after Katrina had moved inland.

I posted this on another thread, but it bears repeating here--an article in the Wall Street Journal a few days after Katrina had a map which showed the location of the breaches in the levees. Since the eye of Katrina passed to the east of New Orleans, the strongest winds were out of the north, blowing off Lake Ponchartrain. But the levees along Lake Ponchartrain HELD...the breaches occurred in levees along CANALS built between Lake Ponchartrain (to the north) and the Mississippi River (to the south).

This means that, any project intending to protect New Orleans from a future hurricane should NOT spend billions of dollars making the Lake Ponchartrain levees higher, because that wasn't the problem with Katrina.

What SHOULD be done (for much less money) would be to install hurricane-resistant water-tight LOCKS at both ends of all canals, which would be closed prior to the approach of a hurricane (with satellite tracking, we usually have a few days' warning).

Even if a breach did occur in a canal levee, the volume of water available for flooding would be that of the canal, not that of Lake Ponchartrain. This would be the difference between thousands of people being stranded in their attics and losing their homes, or only the lowest-lying areas getting ankle-deep water. Are there any civil engineers out there who could fill in the details and come up with a cost-effective way of doing this?

It's time to get more bang for our bucks on levees. Is the Federal government capable of this?

It is not a safe assumption that because the Ponchartrain levees did not breech in Katrina that they would not breech in substantilly similar conditions this season or two seasons from now.

The levees are designed to withstand the surge and rise in water from a Cat 3 storm. But the next Cat 3 storm, or evan a Cat 2 storm, will not be the same as the last one. Katrina passed several miles to the east of the city but a shift of only a few miles can produce radically different results. The intensity, size and forward speed of two seemingly similar storms can produce radically different results.

And it isn't always the surge or water level that does the damage. One of the great dangers of hurricanes is localized tornados that form in the bands radiating outward from the eye. Although there appeared to be some evidence of scouring from overtopping, I for one would not dismiss the possibility that the canal breeches may have been the second hand result of tornado activity.

There is some argument now about one of the breeches and a large barge that ended up on the landward side of the damaged storm wall. The discussion is about whether the barge hit and opened the wall or whether the wall opened and the barge went through with the flood. Although I have no evidence one way or the other I would not dismiss the possibility that the barge was torn loose from it's mooring by a tornando and crashed into the wall.

There are storms and there are storms and not all of the same category are the same. Hurricane Andrew for example was a Category 5 but it was less than 35 miles in diameter and moving forward at 20+ MPH. The last comparable Category 5 storm, Ivan (which weakened before making US landfall) was over a hundred miles across and moving forward at only a few miles an hour.

I guess the point of all of this is that it would not be a good idea to focus on the canal flood walls alone. The entire levee system needs to be evaluated. And it needs to be examined from many, many different directions. A flood wall that can withstand Cat 3 wind and water for days on end might fail from the momentary impact of even a small boat or barge.

It's a very complex business which is all the more reason why the pontificating from the media and Congress is so irritating. They could not hope to understand the forces at work and the physics involved yet they feel qualified to make accusation after accusation.

While the liberals may be harping on what happened in New Orleans, and this video, and Dan Froomkin has his cut and paste editorializing, the thing that I find personally disturbing is that this administration supplies both with an unlimited supply of amunition.

There were no WMDs. Al Quada was not in Iraq, the war in Iraq didn't go the way it was claimed it would go. The no child left behind has serious problems (so serious that Utah will not implement it and there is no redder state) The medicare prescription plan is a transfer payment to the pharmacutical industry, Turning our ports over to countries to where most of the terrorist come from doesn't seem sound. Osama has not been captured, the budget deficet is embarrassingly high. We have illegal immigrants flooding across our borders taking jobs, the goverment is spying on american citizens without any limit.

Yes I got my tax break, yes I got two conservative judges who are thougthful and intelligent, possibly two of the smartest appointees.

One or two mistakes are excusable, but it is embarrassing to try and explain away as many as this president has made. I long for the day's of Reagan conservativism.

It's the tape where Gov. Blanco is off-camera.  My bad!

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