Anticipation

Our Johnny-on-the-Spot President; via Reuters:

He defended the federal government's response so far to the growing crisis amid urgent pleas for help from stranded victims. He said the breach of the levees that led to the submerging of much of New Orleans had not been anticipated.

Really? Here's an item from today's USAToday:

For years, engineers up and down the Mississippi River have talked about the disaster that would result if New Orleans' bulwark of levees and flood walls were hit by a hurricane like Katrina. But when it was time to find money to strengthen them, the city's defenses ended up far down the federal government's priority list. [...] Joe Suhayda, an oceanographer and retired engineering professor at Louisiana State University, says the weakness was "an acknowledged, likely scenario that was not dealt with in the sense that (officials) solved the problem." Suhayda helped with an emergency response exercise last year in which computer models showed that the levees and flood walls guarding the city would be overwhelmed by even a Category 3 hurricane they were designed to withstand. That exercise, run by local, state and federal officials in New Orleans, showed a fictitious Hurricane Pam with winds up to 130 mph leaving a path of destruction eerily similar to Katrina's — a million people evacuated and needing shelter for months, thousands awaiting rescue, up to 600,000 buildings destroyed.

And here's a story from 2001 about a FEMA report (hat tip to the comments in this Daily Kos diary:

So vulnerable, in fact, that earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most castastrophic disasters facing this country. The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City. The New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all. In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city's less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water. Thousands of refugees could land in Houston. Economically, the toll would be shattering. Southern Louisiana produces one-third of the country's seafood, one-fifth of its oil and one-quarter of its natural gas. The city's tourism, lifeblood of the French Quarter, would cease to exist. The Big Easy might never recover.