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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Once more in re the breach

"[L]evees breaching had long been the nightmare scenario, warned about for many years by experts." --Salon, September 15, 2005 [LINK]
Now, I know I am one to belabor a point (it's what my friends love about me the most), but I'm now wondering whether there some cognitive phenomenon going on here. Are people unable to assimilate the seeming fact that no one of any consequence identified a levee breach as a possibility before Katrina hit New Orleans?

I have examined the Times-Picayune special report Salon is linking to here in vain for a reference to levees breaching, let alone that being the nightmare scenario or something experts have been warning about. When you see a piling on of John-Kerry-flavored phrases like "long been" and "for many years" in the same sentence, it may be a "tell" about the weakness of the sentence's argument. Here is the only reference to levee breaches I could find in the entire huge Times-Picayune piece, although I will admit I did not read every word of it (I'm running a blog here, not a neonatal ICU):
"Another scenario is that some part of the levee would fail," [LSU engineer Joseph] Suhayda said. "It's not something that's expected. But erosion occurs, and as levees broke, the break will get wider and wider." [emphasis mine]
If you find another reference to levees breaking in there, please post a comment and let me know about it so I can stop belaboring these this point.

I'm very open to having my mind changed on this, so please post a link or something that shows I am mistaken--although Salon just took their best shot and came up with the above. But again, maybe I missed something in the gajillion-column-inch Times-Picayune report that Salon linked to for the proposition. By the way, it's borderline disingenuous to link to some huge document to support a specific proposition, especially if nothing in the document really supports the proposition. In legal writing there are "pinpoint cites" and it would be nice if HTML offered a bit more precision.


posted at 11:54 PM

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