Though much of the complaints against the Bush administration and its utterly inept handling of Hurricane Katrina are valid, there is one criticism that is just not valid no matter how many times it’s repeated…

If the Army Corps of Engineers had completed its upgrades of the levee system, according to most sources willing to place all the blame on the Bush Administration, the city would not have been flooded. I’ve yet to find one independent corroboration on that fact, just speculation.

Factcheck.org, as usual, shatters myths with relative ease…

We asked the Corps about that “design issue.” David Hewitt, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said McClellan was referring to the fact that “the levees were designed for a category 3 hurricane.” He told us that, consequently, “when it became apparent that this was a category 5 hurricane, an evacuation of the city was ordered.” (A category 3 storm has sustained winds of no more than 130 miles per hour, while a category 5 storm has winds exceeding 155 miles per hour. Katrina had winds of 160 mph as it approached shore, but later weakened to winds of 140 mph as it made landfall, making it a strong category 4 storm, according to the National Hurricane Center.)

The levee upgrade project around Lake Pontchartrain was only 60 to 90 percent complete across most areas of New Orleans as of the end of May, according to the Corps’ May 23 fact sheet. Still, even if it had been completed, the project’s goal was protecting New Orleans from storm surges up to “a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane,” according to the fact sheet.

We don’t know whether the levees would have done better had the work been completed. But the Corps says that even a completed levee project wasn’t designed for the storm that actually occurred.

The story does take on a different tone when you realize that even had the project been 100% complete, it would’ve been destroyed anyway because Katrina was a storm that was not planned for and was stronger than the levee system anyway.

Why is this important?

Because there is this constant little buzzing gnat in the media that keeps buzzing about the levee project and how funding was cut for it to give tax breaks to the wealthy and to fight a war in Iraq. However, whether or not the project was completed, New Orleans would still be underwater.

Factcheck.org bases its source on a fact sheet from the Army Corps of Engineers, the organization in charge of the project. All the folks talking about lives being saved are basing their assumptions on? Anyone? I’ll throw this administration under the bus for every single aspect of this that they’re responsbile for. However, I don’t see a need to pin added responsibility on them that isn’t theirs. We don’t need to outwardly lie and bring in tax cuts and wars and other political footballs, when discussing this story. In this case, they just aren’t relevant.

Upgraded levees would’ve broken and flooded New Orleans. The lesson here is that we need to plan for more than a Category 3 hurricane if New Orleans is rebuilt.

Source: Factcheck.org