Required Reading

I sat in bed this morning with the NYTimes and was thoroughly absorbed by this very complete account of the disaster, which was written by several reporters and includes some eye-opening historical perspective. Take some time with a cup of coffee or a pint of beer--it's a long one--and give it a read. Here are a few of the pieces that struck me the most:

Just two months ago, further evidence emerged that the city and its levees were sinking, increasing the risk of a catastrophic flood, even as federal money to protect the city was being cut afresh. As flood waters rose on Tuesday, Senator Mary L. Landrieu tried to impress upon colleagues in Washington that this was America's tsunami, but she said that the more she pleaded, the more she felt she was not being heard. Most local officials who were supposed to be running the city eventually left, mainly because they could not communicate with the outside world, whose help they desperately needed. It took four days for National Guard troops to arrive to restore order as looting and lawlessness spiraled out of control. Mayor C. Ray Nagin said federal aid began flowing after he spoke by telephone to President Bush and told him bluntly: "Man, this is a mess, and I am not getting the resources I need. I need help, and if I don't get the help I need this city is going to blow up and this is going to be a national disgrace." New Orleans, Flannery O'Connor once wrote, is a place where the devil's existence is freely recognized. But not this devil. Not the devil of bloated bodies floating in muddy waters washing lazily over submerged pickups and campers, of corpses being eaten by rats as they decomposed on city streets, of people dying in wheelchairs outside the convention center as friends poured water over their heads to try to keep them alive. Not the devil who left Bill and Gail Orris sitting exhausted, dazed after escaping through the hole they poked through the roof of their home in nearby Chalmette, while their 20-year-old daughter, Lennie, unable to walk and mentally disabled, sucked her thumb and jerked spasmodically back and forth in her wheelchair in the hot sun. Not the devil who left Catherine Weiss, at 75, apologizing profusely for not having her teeth with her - she had left in a hurry, after all, when the water filled her house like a bathtub - and panicked about what had happened to her nephew, Michael Phillippello, who collapsed as a boat ferried them across the river to safety. [...] Many of the 1.3 million people in the metropolitan area did that. But, as always, many did not. This surprised exactly no one. In a 2003 Louisiana State University poll, 31 percent of New Orleans residents said they would stay in the city even if a Category 4 hurricane struck. Many stayed because they felt they had no choice. The survey found that those who said they would stay tended be poor, less educated, disabled, older, childless or isolated, or had lived in the city for a long period. Twenty-eight percent of the population of New Orleans lives below the poverty line, compared with 9 percent nationwide, according to census figures. Twenty-four percent of its adults are disabled, compared with 19 percent nationwide. An estimated 50,000 households in New Orleans do not have cars. And there was another bit of bad timing: the hurricane came at the end of the month, when those depending on public assistance are waiting for their next checks, typically mailed on the first of every month. "They wouldn't have had any money to evacuate," said Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell. Experts disagreed on whether there were adequate evacuation plans for those most in need. Brian Wolshon, an L.S.U. civil engineering professor who consulted on the state evacuation plan, said the city relied almost entirely on a "Good Samaritan scenario," in which residents would check on elderly and disabled neighbors and drive them out of the city if necessary. Planning was stymied by a shortage of buses, he said. As many as 2,000 buses, far more than New Orleans possessed, would be needed to evacuate an estimated 100,000 elderly and disabled people. [...] On Monday, there was nothing dramatic when the levee failed, no sound of an explosion or a crash. At midday, as the storm was blowing out of the city, the Web site of The Times-Picayune quoted residents near the 17th Street canal saying that after experiencing only minor flooding from the storm, suddenly the water in their yards was rising from what seemed to be a breach in the canal. One man said later that afternoon that the water was rising one brick on his house every 20 minutes. By 4:20 p.m. on Monday, the Web site reported that the water had already rolled through the nearby Lakeview neighborhood and on down to the center of the city. By then, the water in Lakeview had reached the second stories of many houses. The berms along Lake Pontchartrain had held. The problem was in canals that had been built to carry water pumped from city drains out to the lake. But on Monday, with the lake rising, the flow in the canals reversed. A surge, probably 10 feet above normal, flowed in from the lake, rising until it began cascading over the top of the sleek, butter-colored walls that stood between the east side of the 17th Street Canal and the city's Bucktown neighborhood. Greg Breerwood, a deputy district engineer for the Corps, said it appeared that as the weight of the water pressed on the high part of the wall, the water pouring over the top hit the ground on the other side and ate away at the soil supporting its base. [...] By Wednesday, with little visible response from the federal government, Ms. Landrieu said that she talked to FEMA officials. "I started to sense they were thinking I was a little overwrought, that maybe I was exaggerating a little bit," she said. When she pressed Mr. Brown on when he was going to finally get buses to pick up the people who had been trapped at the Superdome, "he just mumbled," she said.