Resident's of New Orleans Should Reimburse U.S.

When I read the following headline on Fox News I was dumbfounded. Trial Starts Monday in Suit Against Army Corps of Engineers for Katrina Flooding. I think the Corps should receive a medal for keeping the residents of a "disaster waiting to happen" city safe for as long as they have. This isn't rocket science people, when you build a metropolitan area below sea level in the middle of the swamp it is eventually going to flood, no matter what you do to prevent it. Those people who are rebuilding in this location are complete idiots!

The article quotes residents arguing "the corps' poor maintenance of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shipping channel dug in the 1960s as a short-cut between the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans, led to the wipeout of St. Bernard Parish and the city's Lower Ninth Ward when Katrina struck in August 2005." Come on, seriously? What do you think is going to happen when you’re an Oceanside city built below sea level surrounded by swamp?

"It's really something the people of St. Bernard and the Lower 9th Ward, and New Orleans East, everybody in that area, have needed for a long time. What happened there should not happen in the United States of America," said plaintiffs' attorney John Andry. "It's the largest preventable catastrophe in American history." Yeah, because the United States of America is exempt from the wrath of Mother Nature and the laws of physics. The only way this catastrophe could have been prevented, is if the city had never been located there to begin with. You can't cheat the odds and the odds were, are, and always will be that New Orleans is going to flood for reasons already mentioned in this blog.

I was all about getting them the immediate help they needed to survive, but I am not sympathetic to their claims of victimization. The blame for the loss of life, the damage to property and the lack of preparation lie squarely on the shoulders of the people dumb enough to live there to begin with.