Everybody's Flogging the Levee Story Again

The morning news shows are full of stories about a pre-Katrina teleconference which the media reports imply shows that Bush knew the levees were going to fail and didn't act accordingly. Captain Ed calls it a media hack job:

For those who want to see the transcripts themselves of the video conferences, the New York Times has them for the August 28th and August 29th briefings. The transcript for the 29th makes one garbled mention of the levees around New Orleans (page 6). After making the point that the storm surge would cause the greatest devastation in the Gulfport area of Mississippi, going as high as 21 feet, Max Mayfield then turns to New Orleans:

MAX MAYFIELD: ... The rest of the track we have 10 to 15 feet, in a few areas up to 16 feet. At least glimpsed it out, and Louisiana can talk a little bit more about this than I can, but it looks like the Federal levies [sic] around the City of New Orleans will not have been (incomprehensible) any breaches to.

That certainly doesn't sound like a warning -- and this was on the day the levees broke. That transcript clearly shows that the conference considered the storm surge and precipitation runoff to be the major threats of flooding in New Orleans. The possibility of breaches, even on the 29th, had been discounted.

You can read the rest of the takedown here.

Of course, as Scrappleface reminds us, as the discussions about the pending storm were going on, the city's school buses sat idle - buses which could have been used to move people out of the city (the buses are pictured here).

The second video, shot by a parking lot security camera several days earlier, shows row upon row of yellow school buses, sitting idle on a day when thousands of local residents remained in the path of the storm.

“Someone at the White House should have given the order to use those school buses to evacuate the city before Katrina hit,” said the Mayor, who is the top local government official in New Orleans. “It makes me ill to think that the federal government failed to intervene to save these people. George Bush had plenty of time, and he did nothing.”

Mr. Nagin, who is the Mayor of New Orleans, noted that local residents “did just what we have trained them to do in a disaster. They watched the hurricane coverage on CNN and waited for a federal official to knock on the door and rescue them.”

“They followed their training,” said Mr. Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, “but the knock never came. They were helpless, utterly helpless.”

The Scrappleface piece is parody, but given Nagin's history, couldn't you just hear him saying all of this?