Katrina, Four Years Later: Expert Fired Who Warned Levees Would Burst
By Greg Palast Wednesday Aug 26, 2009 11:00am
Tonight on Air America: Greg Palast joins Crooks and Liars' John Amato, guest host of "Clout!" on your local progressive station or streaming live on AirAmericaRadio.com at 9pm Eastern.
This week, special for Crooks and Liars readers, download for free, Palast's film for Democracy Now!, "Big Easy to Big Empty: How the White House Drowned New Orleans."
There's another floater. Four years on, there's another victim face down in the waters of Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Ivor van Heerden.
I don't get to use the word "heroic" very often. Van Heerden is heroic. The Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, it was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren't for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe:
"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breached. Nobody."
On the night of August 29, 2005, van Heerden was shut in at the state emergency center in Baton Rouge, providing technical advice to the rescue effort. As Hurricane Katrina came ashore, van Heerden and the State Police there were high-fiving it: Katrina missed the city of New Orleans, turning east.
What they did not know was that the levees had cracked. For crucial hours, the White House knew, but withheld the information that the levees of New Orleans had broken and that the city was about to drown. Bush's boys did not notify the State of the flood to come, which would have allowed police to launch an emergency hunt for the thousands who remained stranded.
"Fifteen hundred people drowned. That's the bottom line," said von Heerden. He shouldn't have told me that. The professor was already in trouble for saying, publicly, that the levees around New Orleans were no good, too short, by 18". They couldn't stand up to a storm like Katrina. He said it months before Katrina hit -- in a call to the White House, and later in the press.
So, even before Katrina, even before our interview, the professor was in hot water. Van Heerden was told by LSU officials that his complaints jeopardized funding from the Bush Administration. They tried to gag him. He didn't care: he ripped off the gag and spoke out.
It didn't matter to Bush, to the state, to the university, that van Heerden was right -- devastatingly right. Exactly as van Heerden predicted, the levees could not stand up to the storm surge.
In 2006, I met van Heerden in his office at the university's hurricane center; a cubby filled with charts of the city under water. He's a soft-spoken, even-tempered man, given to understatement and academic reserve. But his words were hand grenades: the Bush White House did nothing about the levees, despite warning after warning.
Why? A hurricane is an Act of God. But a levee failure is an Act of Bush -- of the federal government. Under the Flood Control Act of 1928, once the levees break, it's Washington's responsibility to save lives -- and to compensate the victims for lost homes and lost loved ones.
By telling me this, the professor had to know he was putting his job on the line. This week marks the fourth anniversary of the drowning of New Orleans.
Shakoor Aljuwani of the Rebuilding Lives Coalition reminds me it is also the fourth year of exile for more than half of the low-income black residents who once lived in the Crescent City. In the Lower Ninth Ward, 81% have yet to return.
And it marks the end of Dr. van Heerden's career at LSU. They got him. Once the network cameras were turned away from New Orleans, as America and Anderson Cooper shifted attention to Brad and Angelina and other news, the University put an end to Dr. van Heerden. "In 2006 they started the nonsense - they stopped me from teaching. They tried last year to get faculty to vote me out."
His contract was not renewed; he was forced out too, dumped along with the chief of the Hurricane Center who led the academics who supported van Heerden's research. The Man Who Was Right was fired.
Cronies and Contracts
I did not seek out professor van Heerden about Bush's deadly silence. Rather, I'd come to LSU to ask him about a strange little company, "Innovative Emergency Management," a politically well-connected firm that, a year before the hurricane, had finagled a contract to plan the evacuation of New Orleans.
Innovative Emergency Management knew a lot about political contributions, but seemed to have zero experience in hurricane response planning. In fact, their "plan" for New Orleans called for evacuating the city by automobile. When Katrina hit, 127,000 wheel-less New Orleans folk were left to float out.
And van Heerden knew all about it. Well before the hurricane, I discovered, he'd pointed out flaws in the "Innovative" plan - and was threatened for the revelation by a state official. The same official later joined the payroll of Innovative Emergency Management.
When I asked the company, at their office, for a copy of the plan, they body-blocked our Democracy Now! camerawoman and called the cops.
Not everyone shared the harsh fate of van Heerden. Just this month, Innovative Emergency Management, the firm with the drive-for-your-life plan, was handed a fat contract by the State of Alabama to draft - you guessed it - a hurricane evacuation plan for Mobile.
The City That Care Forgot
After the flood, I filmed the uplifting story of Common Ground, the commune of Katrina survivors who, under the leadership of the community organizer Malik Rahim, rebuilt a shattered hulk of a building with their own sweat and donated materials. They housed 350 displaced families.
Since I broadcast that film in 2006, Rahim and the tenants were evicted by speculators who bought the building. Just before Christmas, elderly residents were carried out and dumped in the street, literally, by marshals. The speculators paid the families who build their new edifice not one dime.
We also filmed the story of Patricia Thomas, a woman fighting to return to her home in the beautiful Lafitte public housing project. Speculators have long lusted for this property on the edge of the French Quarter.
And now the speculators have it. Patricia's home, unscathed by Katrina, was nevertheless bulldozed. As Rahim puts it, "They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain't had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers." Their plan succeeded. Patricia, homeless, died last year.
This Friday, take a moment to remember a courageous professor, an indefatigable activist and the refugee families who once lived in what was once called, "The City That Care Forgot."
Now, in 2009, you could call it the city that everyone forgot.
Part 2 tomorrow. A new warning; the next Katrina and Big Oil
For one week only, the International Humanities Center is offering, free of charge, a download of Greg Palast's investigative report for Democracy Now!, "Big Easy to Big Empty - the untold story of how the White House drowned New Orleans" at www.GregPalast.com.
Download the film or make a donation to support these investigations and get a copy signed by Palast at www.gregpalast.com/bigeasy.
*********************
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.
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from a state full of in-breeders.
intellect.
That's fucked up!
You're thinkin of West Virginia.
I'm from WV. There are 6 members of my immediate family and all of us are college graduates. Two of my brothers have a second degree on top of that.
So, from me, my family and WV: go fuck yourself.
that generalizations about incest and specific states is pretty ignorant. He could as easily have said Alaska or Arkansas. Stick around and get to know the old timers here and it'll all make sense to you. Not everyone gets crude satire but it does serve a specific purpose.
Besides even if WV did lead the nation in incest that in no way precludes your family happening to be well educated. In fact the more I think about that.... what the hell IS the connection you're trying to make between incest and access to education?
I grew up in New Orleans, and I don't appreciate the stereotyping of people from New Orleans.
As for the levees, *everyone* who lived in New Orleans knew that the levees would not hold up during a major hurricane. That's been known since the 1950's. If even the residents knew it, you can be sure that officials also knew it. They did nothing.
I survived Katrina (I'm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi). If you were not here, you cannot fathom what it was like to be here in the aftermath. We were without water for weeks. It was like getting Christmas present to be able to take a shower and flush the toilet.
The ball was completely dropped during Katrina. It is a bald-faced lie that no one knew the levees would fail during a major hurricane; the Army Corps of Engineers released a study decades ago showing that they would.
I wouldn't assume that the officials also knew. Officials work pretty hard at not knowing things that are inconvenient to them.
Disgustingly sad. But nobody attacked us after 9/11.
With an administration like Bush's, the people don't need enemies?
February 2001
Bush’s first budget proposed more than half a billion dollars worth of cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers for the 2002 fiscal year. Bush proposed half of what his own officials said was necessary for the critical Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project (SELA)—a project started after a 1995 rainstorm flooded 25,000 homes and caused a half billion dollars in damage. SELA's purpose was to inspect, repair and upgrade the entire MS river & Lake Ponchartrain levee system
Bush did this to offset the tax break he gave to the top 1% of rich Americans. The first major economic initiative pursued by the president was a massive tax cut for the rich, enacted in June of 2001. Bush signed his massive $1.3 trillion income tax cut into law-a tax cut that severely depleted the government of revenues it needed to address critical priorities.
February 2002
Bush provided just $5 million for maintaining and upgrading critical hurricane protection levees in New Orleans—one fifth of what government experts and Republican elected officials in Louisiana told the administration was needed. Bush knew SELA needed $80 million to keep working, but the he only proposed providing a quarter of that.
February 2004
The SELA project sought $100 million to repair the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain levees, but Bush offered only $16.5 million. The Army Corps of Engineers asked for $27 million to pay for hurricane protection upgrades around Lake Pontchartrain—but the White House cut that to $3.9 million. Gaps in levees around Lake Pontchartrain & the Industrial Canal, which were supposed to be filled by 2004, were not filled because of budget shortfalls. Repair work on the levees, including the ones that failed, was stopped due to lack of funds. Worse, because budget cuts had been compounding for three years straight, even after all the gaps are closed, the levee must settle for several more years until it reaches its final height. For the first time in 37 years, Bush's cuts stopped major work on the New Orleans levees.
Everyone knew the levees wouldn't hold. I despise Bush, and hold him responsible for many of the other balls that got dropped during Katrina, but not fixing the levees can't be blamed on him unless you also blame every other president who was in office and didn't fix them, either.
New Orleans residents had known for decades that the levees wouldn't survive a hit by a major hurricane.
CheneyBushCo doesn't count? I felt very under attack by that gang of criminal rogues, even before 9/11.
It was already in the air, started around the time all votes in Florida were not recounted,in some cases, maybe not even counted to begin with, by order of SCOTUS.
..but please don't forget the anthrax attack that the w apologists so conveniently forget when they talk 9/11.
real Americans. I mean Daschle and NBC? Give me a break. It was an accident that innocent people got hurt.
..a tree falling on a house in a storm not the delivery of weaponized bacteria spores in the mail. I don't care who received the envelopes although I wish no one had been infected or had died, and it would be off-topic to discuss the entire anthrax issue, my post was merely to remind us all that the w administration can't and should not be allowed to rewrite history.
Really? that's so wingy of you, ricky. I am shocked :o !
I don't care who it was aimed at. Nationality and its realness (?) have no business being considered here.
that they got to suffer, so that some of our compassionate Americans don't have to.
I have a question for Mr. Real American:
Who the %$#! appointed YOU to decide who's a "real" American and who isn't? Tell us what it is about you that makes you a "real" American while the rest of us get relegated to... well, whatever the hell the epithet du jour for anyone that doesn't buy your particular screed is today.
exactly were Daschle and NBC "guilty" of exactly?
Just because you don't like them doesn't mean that they can be summarily executed in this country.
I, for one, know that I a getting awfully tired of listening to people call for the destruction of fellow Americans.
Particularly reprehensible are those people that will say, publicly even, that they pray every night for the rape, murder or maiming of their fellow citizens.
It is time for the flaming rhetoric to be put to bed!
real American!
The anthrax was traced to military labs at Ft. Detrick, MD, and not to terrorist organizations, or foreign governments.
Administration, which has the credibility of an Nigerian e-mail.
Funny that the second, absolutely guilty person was found shortly before the Chimpys left office, and he was conveniently dead.
Of course, when normal people looked at the case, it fell apart.
We still don't know who did it.
Not the FBI or any US gov org openly (not to say they didn't know, but didn't want to tell), they were unsure where it came from, to their embarrassment independent labs did the DNA work the FBI thought wasn't possible with Anthrax and named Fort Detrick as the source. The rest is history and whitewash.
by lying us into war and sending our kids to die.
by ignoring the katrina warnings and allowing citizens to die.
by allowing Wall Street to "regulate" itself and letting our dreams die.
by attacking our Constitution so our way of life can die.
Proving guilty and being guilty are two different things, of course.
But as my grandfather always told me - It is not enough for a public servant to be honest, they have to be above even the appearance of impropriety. That is the only way that the public will ever trust them.
The Bush cabal left behind the appearance of impropriety a long time ago and moved on to "Oh yeah? PROVE IT! I dare you!" before they even took office.
As I've said many times in the past - There should have been a RICO investigation into the White House as an organized criminal activity.
Too bad we didn't have a justice department for the last 8 years, or maybe the corruption wouldn't be as widespread and blatant as it has gotten.
but you left out the fact that they have strong ties to Jeb Bush.
puts itself into the same class as such stellar institutions as Regents University and the like. The kind of place any kind of student who is serious about creating a future for themselves through education would want to cross off of their list of prospects.
This is exactly why tenure was made...
An academic states the truth, and gets fired for it because it is not convenient.
I'd have thought he would have been tenured long before that all went down, especially with what he brought to the table.
an academic position covered by tenure.
.
contract non-renewal to the hurricane story explicitly. For all I know he may have been a tenured professor and they may have shit canned him precisely for his being right and not keeping his mouth shut.
The article just does not say so. Given that it is Louisiana, he may have been fired for not saying Bobby Jindal rescued thousands of Katrina victims while trolling Lake Ponchatrain in a lifeboat with a tiger. It is just not in the post.
Jindal was too busy chasing bad spirits out of the victims to be out in a boat with a tiger.
in a cherry bark canoe? Reserve you disbelief until you have proof of insurance.
Would a birth certificate do instead of insurance?
why don't you show it to me first and then I'll ask you for more proof? /s
:P
some preplanted newspaper announcement?
My sly parents planted my announcement knowing full well years and years later people might doubt that I was born in Rome.
Rome Georgia, that is.
you're joking.
... a gift certificate?
is also the ability to discern what is implied and intended in addition to what is explicitly stated. I learned that in skool.
"Pro Life" Rick Perry's Texas murders an innocent man.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/25/7...
From Katrina to Iraq to wrongful executions, "pro life" conservatives love getting their killing on of innocent Americans.
from the moment of conception until the moment of birth. From the moment of birth, life means nothing to them.
Yeah, if your husband has horrible medical problems and you can't get insurance, ask your neighbor for help, don't expect any help from the govt.
If your whole town is flooded and people are drowning due to a faulty govt paid for levee breaking, swim and don't expect a damned thing from the govt.
Ergo, we need less government!
Er... right???
even if half were in their cars headed to Texas and the others were wading hip deep in shit at the Superdome.
When your neighbor's house is as flooded as yours is, what the hell can they do for you? What are you gonna do, ask them if you can borrow their canoe and the paddles?
you are responding to more of the insane "NO govt" ravings. Even David Brooks says that NO government is insane.
Even the pilgrims had social agreements by which to live together for the common good, regardless of how many pumpkin pies they brought to the table.
Ricky would have them all in individual forts.
You're trying to approach old Rick from the standpoint of someone with some common sense.
It ain't gonna work... never does with people who talk in sound bites and lameassed talking points from 3-4 years ago.
Really got you some hate going for brown folks, eh Ricky?
haven't you Tom? You'll have to excuse all my brown family members, bosses and business partners for finding you a little off point.
I thought overstatement was easily recognized for the satire it usually is.
someone with a video camera at the Coburn event to start asking all of those people that were clapping wildly after Coburn's suggestion that neighbors help care for their ill members, when was the last time THEY had nursed a seriously ill person who was not a member of their own family. If they were to indicate that they had by clapping their hand, I anticipate -
**crickets**
While looking for a lost story about fake Katrina hot-food photo ops, I came across this blog entry that very aptly illustrates what these people REALLY THINK about helping their fellow Americans:
and another good reason not to count on charity for society's needs:
I'm certainly not willing to put MY life in their oh-so-generous hands!
Hurricane Charlie- 2004:
In 2004, after Hurricane Charley, Bush declared the state a federal disaster area to release federal relief funds. Less than two days after Charley ripped through southwestern Florida, he was on the ground touring hard-hit neighborhoods.
Charley hit on a Friday. With emergency supply trucks pre-positioned at depots for rapid, post-storm deployment, the agency was able to deliver seven truckloads of ice, water, cots, blankets, baby food and building supplies by Sunday. On Monday, hundreds of federal housing inspectors were on the ground, and FEMA already had opened its first one-stop disaster relief center.
By the end of September, the agency had processed 646,984 registrations for assistance with the help of phone lines operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fifty-five shelters, 31 disaster recovery centers and six medical teams were in operation across the state. Federal and state assistance to households reached more than $361 million, nearly 300,000 housing inspections were completed, and roughly 150,000 waterproof tarps were provided for homeowners, according to FEMA figures.
Katrina:
George Bush: LA and MS are down nearly 8,000 National Guard troops because they are in Iraq -- with most of the rescue gear needed.
Bush is on vacation. The day before Katrina makes landfall, Bush rides his bike for two hours. The day Katrina hits, he goes to John McCain's birthday party. People are dying, troops and supplies are desperately needed. The levees are cracking and the emergency 1-1/2 ton sandbags are ready, but there aren't enough helicopters or pilots to set them before the levees fail. The mayor of New Orleans begs for Federal coordination, but there is none, and the sandbagging never gets done. Bush goes to San Diego, to play guitar with a country singer. Bush decides he'll end his vacation a couple of days early -- becasue he has tickets to a Padres game.
Except, of course, when it does. The people who knew of the calamity about to happen and tried to warn their fellow citizens get screwed, while the ones doing the screwing laugh all the way to the bank. "Heckuva job', indeed.
I believe it was two weeks ago I saw Maxine Waters on tv and she and some group were in NO investigating where the Katrina rebuilding money was going and to whom. So she hasn't forgotten.
Damn it all to hell, I wish this story you posted surprised me or made me say that just can't be true. Instead as I read it I kept saying, typical of the bush administration.
This is really a story of an inconvenient truth coming from Dr. Heerden, for the bush administration.
In this world where being ignorant is often rewarded and being intelligent is punished nothing should surprise anyone.
There is a negligence here and in any other case it would be a crime.
it is a crime. Just another that goes unpunished.
One of those un-criminal non-criminal crimes?
..New Orleans drowned. The criminal belongs in jail not in a house receiving our tax dollars.
McGramps. I could remember wrong.
Part of the time he was pickin' and a grinin' with his new guitar.
this is an old story...
Well, duh - of course he was fired. Cassandra wouldn't have gotten tenure, either.
in contrast to the scum sucking tom ridge, this man took a principled stand. guess that makes him a dirty liberal. i think things like this are what frustrates and angers me most when we are told to "not look back and go forward." these crimes NEED to be accounted for and the corruption exposed.
Dr. Heerden put it all on the line and he got fucked, meanwhile the perpetrators are on tv as talking heads, hired by universities (harvard, berkely,UTEP) and hired as advisors for major corporations involved with gov't programs. jeebus
I really really hate buschco...
With every cell, every atom in my body...I despise them for what they've done in our country and around the world...
even the ink on your Man in Black tat?
He's the present master of the art.
PS. I sent LSU a memo today asking them to remove my name from the list of friendly alumni.
This state, on should recall, is PROUD home to Billy Tauzin...
remove you from that list when you don't tithe in an annual amount of four figures or higher. Even then you have to buy season tickets.
Not to pull teeth or anything, but I think of Billy Cannon and not Billy Tauzin when LSU crosses my mind.
Please don't tell Tyler I have more than one degree. He'll be crushed.
... can you go more than 24 hrs w/o a desperate passive aggressive call for my attention? I dunno if I should feel honored or worried.
And you have more time than most to follow and respond every time I call.
More, more, more from Greg Palast!
If it weren't for him, Glen Greenwald, Sy Hersch, Matt Taibbi and Jeremy Scahill, I think I might have lost my faith in the media over the last ten years or so.
Keep up the good work!
Greg has been kicking ass for a while now and he knows how to firmly plant the boot.
..to the Morton Thiokol engineer who BEGGED them not to launch the Space Shuttle on January 28, 1986. That dismissal of expertise is known as the Challenger Disaster.
That less-than-optimum result led to a report calling for fundamental changes to the organizational culture at NASA. Which kind of occurred, but not really. I would say that a much more widespread change in organizational culture needs to take place in society at large. The idea that the guy in the corner office making the highest salary should be able to over-rule the (usually underpaid) guy (or gal) with the highest IQ is not only absurd, it's downright dangerous.
"The idea that the guy in the corner office making the highest salary should be able to over-rule the (usually underpaid) guy (or gal) with the highest IQ is not only absurd, it's downright dangerous."
And a LOT more common in this country then people realise! Much more common here then in industrialized, advanced, civilized nations.
Bush was bad, wait till they install the next GOP despot after they eviscerate Obama.
evisceration?
You know what the true irony is here regarding Katrina? These are the same "victims" who blamed the federal government for their demise during Hurricane Katrina who NOW love the federal government and are counting on same said government to take over their healthcare, i.e. THEIR WELL BEING! OMG.....you just can't find a better comedy show than this one folks! You leftists truly are loons!
that must be going on in your brain. Did you just read what you just wrote?
would be shocking if I hadn't seen it a million times already.
edit:
Ahhh he's new here.
If G.W. pulls out a scalpel and Limbaugh applies the anesthesia I'll join you.
empathy (and decency by extension). A trait that is quite pervasive in this society, even some of the posters in this site, who like to fancy themselves progressive, tend to be of the Marie Antoinette "let'em eat cake" school of thought when it really boils down to it.
Having lived overseas for long periods of time, this article sort of articulates (in a better way since I am not that much of a writer) some of my appreciations of this society of ours:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commenta...
Good to see you here at C&L. Keep up the good work.
...it was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren't for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe...
Nonsense. Nothing is hard to believe anymore. See Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley, Death Panels, Teabaggers, Birthers, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, etc.
Like I said -- nothing is hard to believe anymore.
Greg, thank you for your continued research into and work on this story that disgracefully drags on and on. I've relied on your writing many times for accurate information about Katrina and its aftermath--and I've passed videos of your work on to anyone who will listen.
Keep up the good work.
I am writing from New Orleans to tell you that the one thing that will enrage and hurt any New Orleanian who was affected by Katrina more than anything is to hear someone say that we somehow got what we deserved, or that everyone here was sitting around waiting for a cushy government handout when the storm hit.
Every single person I know who lost their home in the storm, as I did, felt completely abandoned by our country as we watched the drama unfold from hotel rooms across the nation. It was the saddest chapter in modern American history.
To read a post from someone here calling us a "state of in-breeders" gives a pretty good clue as to why we all felt so abandoned when we have lost so, so much; it's as if the public perception of Louisiana is that we are a state that really doesn't matter, when none of you seem to know that this state is not only the birthplace of jazz, but 18% of the national oil supply comes from our state, as well as being a major port and largest importer and exporter of coffee, grains, and lots of other things that all Americans take for granted, every waking day. You stay in our hotels, eat our food and vomit on our sidewalks. You take from us daily and pick our pockets clean, and you don't know that the USA would suddenly be helpless without what comes from Louisiana.
And being a state that doesn't matter is probably why the federal response to this federal disaster was so slow and incompetent. I remember hearing people in Tennessee blaming Ray Nagin for bringing a pro basketball team to New Orleans instead of fixing the levees; they had no clue that the levees were a federal responsibility and that Nagin had no power over doing anything to them. That is only a small example of the countless falsehoods about Katrina and Louisiana that so many of you think are the truth.
Van Heerden was silenced by the LSU Mafia - the good ol' boys club that exists in most major state universities, like Georgia, Alabama, and so on. Yes, he was fired because he spoke the truth, and the good ol boys club were afraid of losing funding from Bush. Governor Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin were the scapegoats - they did everything in their power. Bush even tried to sucker Blanco into signging over her power to the federal government, but wisely she refused. Louisiana would have ceased being a state and would have become a government possession.
Just like UGA, Auburn, and Florida State, LSU has their hands in everyone's pie, and they have the power to stall or change policy. The relationship of the governor to LSU is the same as the relationship of the Iranian president to the Ayatollah. One is a figurehead; the other has the real power. And not too much happens here unless LSU has a big stake in it. Beware major university politics - they are more fierce that you can imagine. They can ruin anyone who stands in their way. Trust me.
As for any of you who think we got what we deserved, that we were "refugees" as if Katrina somehow blew away our citizenship, and for those of you who think Louisiana is populated by uneducated in-breeders, you can all drop dead. Your lack of compassion in the face of the greatest tragedy this nation has ever experienced is appalling; a city drowned while the president didn't give a shit, and Mr. and Mrs. America sat by their TVs saying we deserved it for living in a city below sea level. We were told we were safe, that the levees would protect us. We have lost so very much - more than you can comprehend.
Well said. Sadly, the first comment on this thread is representative of ignorant, hate-filled, misinformed jackasses everywhere. They exist in every country.
The horrors of Katrina and what Gulf Coast residents went through is one of the most tragic things I've ever seen. It haunts me deeply. I cannot imagine what you are going through.
God Bless you all.
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