Home > Locals, Officials Suggest Levees were Intentionally Blown

Locals, Officials Suggest Levees were Intentionally Blown

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 15 September 2005
8 comments

Edito Governments Catastrophes USA

Could the levees in New Orleans have been INTENTIONALLY
blown out in order to provide the justification for total FEMA federal takeover?

The locals certainly seem to think so, yet, as usual,
the mainstream media is barely picking up on this wave of opinion, so it
is left to us once again to bring the issue into the open.

This website distances itself from claims that the levees
were blown to target the lower class areas and save the richer areas. The
fact is that the disaster affected everyone, and now that the lower classes
have largely been evacuated, the middle class are being targeted by door
to door raids. Jack booted thugs are arresting people if they don’t leave
and confiscating
their firearms
.

When Katrina hit, it drifted 15 miles to the east of
where forecasters said it would strike. Therefore it wasn’t quite the monster
described. The storm passed through with relatively minor damage, it was
the the storm surge from the Gulf that caused Lake Pontchartrain to rise
three feet and the subsequent flooding.

Katrina hit early on Monday 29th August, the levees
broke in three places - along the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal,
and the London Street Canal. (Click
here for a Map
)

The main storm surge from Hurricane Katrina washed into
Lake Pontchartrain at around 7AM on August 29th when the counterclockwise
motion of Katrina was pushing water from the Gulf of Mexico into the lake.


Some are questioning
the timeline of the levee failures, suggesting that there was a 21 hour
discrepancy between the storm surge and the collapse of the levees . This
is not the case. The first levee broke just
a few hours
after the hurricane hit on the same morning.

This confusion may have arisen due to the fact that
Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff has said that the levees broke
overnight between Monday-Tuesday, and that he was
not informed of this til midday Tuesday
.

The breach of the 17th Street Canal levee resulted in
the failure of a crucial pumping station nearby, according to a statement
made by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

However, it seems that this exact scenario was expected
and ignored. In an interview
with New Orleans radio station local radio station WWL-AM
, Nagin
revealed how irate he was that this had been allowed to happen:

Nagin:
You know what really upsets me, Garland? We told everybody the importance
of the 17th Street Canal issue. We said, "Please, please take care
of this. We don’t care what you do. Figure it out."
WWL: Who’d you say that to?
Nagin: Everybody: the governor, Homeland Security, FEMA. You name
it, we said it. And they allowed that pumping station next to Pumping Station
6 to go under water. Our sewage and water board people ... stayed there
and endangered their lives. And what happened when that pumping station
went down, the water started flowing again in the city, and it starting
getting to levels that probably killed more people. In addition to that,
we had water flowing through the pipes in the city. That’s a power station
over there. So there’s no water flowing anywhere on the east bank of Orleans
Parish. So our critical water supply was destroyed because of lack of action.

It has emerged though that some kind of work was carried
out on the 17th Street Canal levee. Reports
have suggested
that the funding was not there to complete the job,
but some work had been done:

"The Senate was seeking to restore some of the
SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it’s too late. One project that a contractor
had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at
the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday."

Of course we know that it was the White
House that slashed funding
for such projects in order to pump more
money into the war in Iraq.

According
to the New York Times
, Dr. Shea Penland of the Pontchartrain Institute
was surprised because the break was "along a section that was just
upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee, it had a vertical concrete wall
several feet thick."

It also seems that the broken section of the Industrial
Canal levee was having
"construction" work
done on it recently.

New York Times science reporter Dr. Andrew Revkin has
stated
of the 17th Street Canal that "officials and [Army Corps]
engineers said that after they had found the widening gap in the concrete
wall on the eastern side of the canal, they had no quick-response plan to
repair it."

Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander
of the corps, said
"plugging the gap was a lower priority."
The corps is directed by FEMA. "It is FEMA who is really calling the
shots and setting priorities here,"

Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps,
was quoted in the same article as saying "there were still no clear
hints why the main breach in the flood barriers occurred along the 17th
Street Canal, normally a conduit for vast streams of water pumped out of
the perpetually waterlogged city each day and which did not take the main
force of the waves roiling the lake. He said that a low spot marked on survey
charts of the levees near the spot that ruptured was unrelated and that
the depression was where a new bridge crossed the narrow canal near the
lakefront."

This would refute the speculation that a dip in the
retaining levee or walls might have allowed water to slop over and start
the collapse. So we have an unexplained crack in several feet of concrete.
FEMA decided not to plug it and let the water flow until a US city was flooded
and thousands had drowned.

Dynamite? History repeating itself?

Many locals have come forward to suggest that the levees were breached on
purpose by the authorities. Resident Andrea Garland, now re-located to Texas,
wrote
in her blog
:

"Also heard that part of the reason our house flooded
is they dynamited part of the levee after the first section broke - they
did this to prevent Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently
they used too much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater. So now I
know who is responsible for flooding my house - not Katrina, but our government."

This scenario is not so crazy as it sounds, in fact
this exact thing has happened before in the same city. In 1927, the Mississippi
River broke its banks in 145 places, depositing water at depths of up to
30ft over 27,000 square miles of land.

The disaster changed American society, shifting hundreds
of thousands of delta-dwelling blacks into northern cities and cementing
the divisions and suspicions that benign neglect has ensured remain today.
New Orleans’ (mainly white) business class pressurized the state to
dynamite a levee upstream, releasing water into (mainly black) areas of
the delta. Black workers were forced to work on flood relief at gunpoint,
like slaves.

Two parishes, St. Bernard and Plaquemines, which
had a combined population of 10,000, were destroyed. Just before Katrina,
these parishes had about 10 times the 1927 population. Both parishes are
now under many feet of water.

This information is covered in depth in a book
by John M. Barry entitled Rising
Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it Changed America, 1997

which has incidentally become heavily
in demand
after Katrina.

Furthermore, levees were also intentionally broke after
Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans in 1965, admittedly with less of an impact.
The tactic of breaking the dikes is not uncommon, as
this CNN report
on China’s flood plains highlights.

Engineers have now punched holes in several levees in
parts of New Orleans where flood levels were higher than the water in drainage
canals leading to Pontchartrain, in order to let water flow out.

Explosions?

There were reports of many explosions heard in New Orleans,
officials say they were transformers blowing up. Total
Information Analysis has reported
a claim by intelligence expert
Tom Heneghen that 25 earwitnesses cited explosions immediately before the
levee breach.

Similar reports are now appearing in many web blogs:

"He also mentioned that right before the mass flood
there was a loud sound like an explosion." - News
from St. Bernard

"I’ll tell you the worst thing I’ve heard and I
heard it from my mother. She said she heard several blasts - big booms -
right before the levees broke. Several blasts and then all the water came
pouring in." -
aangirfan

Although these are obviously not authoritative sources
of information, it is interesting to note how many local people are reporting
this. So interesting in fact that the mainstream has picked up on it in
places.

The
Washington Post reported
on the comments of a retired school teacher:

"Mullen has a schoolteacher’s kindly demeanor,
so it was jarring to hear him say he suspected that the levee breaks had
somehow been engineered to keep the wealthy French Quarter and Garden District
dry at the expense of poor black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward
— a suspicion I heard from many other black survivors."

The
Globe and Mail
is also carrying a similar story.

ABC World News Tonight carried a report which
contained an interview with a local, who described how a floating barge
had rammed the levee. The man seemed convinced that the levee was purposefully
broken. A transcript of which has appeared
on the net
:

David Muir:
“Was it solely the water that broke
the levee? Or was it the force of this barge that now sits where homes once
did? Joe Edwards says neither. People are so bitter, so disenfranchised
in this neighborhood, they actually think the city did it, blowing up the
levee to save richer neighborhoods, like the French Quarter.”

Muir to Edwards as they stand on a bridge: “So you’re convinced-”
Edwards: “I knows it happened.”
Muir: “-that they broke the levee on purpose?”
Edwards: “They blew it.”

Muir: “New Orleans’ Mayor says there’s no credence to this.”

Mayor Ray Nagin: “That storm was so powerful and it pushed so
much water — there’s no way anyone could have calculated — would dynamite
the levee to have the kind of impact to save the French Quarter.”
Muir concluded: “An LSU expert who looked at the video today,
says that while the barge may have caused it, it was most likely the sheer
force of the water that brought the levee, along the lower 9th ward, down.”

The mysterious barge story has also been
reported
by many other local residents. "The evacuees who witnessed
the barge striking the levee also want to know why the major media is not
covering this story."

The London
Observer
carried an intriguing story of a man named Correll Williams,
a 19-year-old meat cutter. The article states that:

"Williams only left his apartment after the authorities
took the decision to flood his district in an apparent attempt to sluice
out some of the water that had submerged a neighbouring district. Like hundreds
of others he had heard the news of the decision to flood his district on
the radio. The authorities had given people in the district until 5pm on
Tuesday to get out - after that they would open the floodgates."

Some final intriguing footage reveals a journalist questioning
former President Bill Clinton as to why many locals feel that the levees
were purposefully broken.

This was during the press conference with Clinton and
George Bush Snr announcing their combined "relief effort" for
New Orleans. Ignore the first 15 minutes of sickening joking and backslapping
between the two and skip to the last minute of footage. Upon hearing the
question Clinton appears to be surprised and then simply walks off.

Click
here to view the footage

Click here
to listen to an MP3 of the last 30 seconds

We will track this story as it develops and cover any
further updates.

Related:

FEMA
Deliberately Sabotaging Hurricane Relief Efforts

Government
Sabotage Of Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts

more pictures here

Forum posts

  • With the levee blown and weather control legislation pending, (fishy isn’t it) http://www.theorator.com/bills109/s517.html , does not charges of treason need to be brought forward on Congress and the Senate, in conjunction with Hilter, I mean Bush?

  • well Bush is a known liar and the evidence points to 9-11 being a insid job www.reopen911.org so is it hard to beleive this bush monkey caused the leve to break. Hell no. I say lynch this scum before he kills anymore people. Lee Harvey oswald where are you when you are needed.

  • I find it interesting that it was the newly "improved" section of the 17th Street levee that burst. It reminds me that the plane that purportedly hit the Pentagon hit it in the centre of the only section that had been hardened. I find this to be two too many coincidences, taking into account that in Switzerland (which is where I am living at present), bridges, dams, etc. have explosives built into them, in case of invasion, to deny the enemy access. It would have been simple to build explosives into the levees in preparation for the next major hurricane that came by, or just place the explosives there as a farewell "gift" when finishing off the work.

  • Now, this is the internet at its best. Sure, the levees were blown up by the same guy who fired the shots from the grassy knoll and faked the moon landings.

    Let’s see, here . . . . okay, the federal reaction to the disaster was sluggish, except that now we’ve decided it was so lightning-fast that the feds killed people for an excuse to come barging in.

    You should really hear what you sound like.

  • As for what these people "sound like" let me inform you of what you sound like: A Parental Government Denialist, you deny that our government can do wrong because you see our government as a parental figure, to teach you how to think, live, act and react. You are wrong. The government was never supposed to act as a parental figure, and we try to avoid parentalist laws whenever we can. However, you are acting like the poor kid who denies his mom is a gambling alcoholic....he’s never seen her at the casino, or at the bar (cuz he can’t get in) and as a result makes up all kinds of excuses of where she is, where the money went, and whether or not she’s drunk.

    There were plans drawn up in an early Scientific American magazine that stated that levees would have to be dynamited in case of a breach in able to relieve flooding of certain areas (French quarter, in particular) HOwever, the first levee to breech was the one that may have been dynamited. Not the way it was planned.

    There’s also the issue of 5 military contractors who were approaching the levee that were shot and killed by local police protecting the levee site....

    But maybe I can at least cast a little bit of doubt to make the denialists happy.

    I mean, explosion sounds right? I’d rather have eyewitnesses, because a "breach" of a concrete levee, meaning it suddenly releasing shitloads of water as its walls suddenly collapse, might just sound like an explosion...just before the water reaches your house.

    So as for the denialist, yeah, you’re still a denialist. You are not relieved of your title because there are actual realistic explanations for the sounds, but because you failed to give such an explanation.

  • Watch out—whether or not the levees were sabotaged, it is likely—especially with propagandameister Rove in charge—that false stories will be planted in order to discredit the dissenters. At least one of the ’levees blown’ stories—the one that mentions specific military explosives and states that a diver found burn marks—was first posted on a right-wing racist commentator’s website. Although it is still vaguely possible that the information is real, it is more likely that the ’burn marks’ story is a plant. There were many reports, on the other hand, of a very loud noise, which could have been the levee exploding, or could have been the sound of a large barge hitting the levee (see related photos on the net). That is not to say that the barge was not necessarily intentionally aimed.

    The Bush Administration is moving ahead full steam with corrupt hyper-profit initiatives to take advantage of the destruction and confusion, and conveniently for them, impoverished persons are now neatly out of the way and effectively politically disenfranchised.

    Theresa of KBOO radio

    • TBR News.org – September 2, 2005

      Excerpt: Quote [apparently describing lunch at the Cosmos Club on Thursday Sept.1]

      This afternoon, I was having lunch at the Cosmos Club out on Massachusetts Avenue. A good friend is a member of the posh club (that once was the elegant town home of Sumner Welles), and while at lunch, I was privy to a very vocal conversation at one of the big round center tables in the club dining room.

      One man was giving an overview of the situation to a group of his friends. The speaker was an undersecretary of an important department, well-liked by Bush and often in the White House to consult. The others ranged from an academic economist whose writings can be seen in a right wing paper and a number of Washington-based businessmen, all of whom are active and heavy contributors to the Bush White House.

      The loud one had obviously had a few drinks at the bar and this is probably why he was not more discreet. The gist of his comments was horrible to contemplate and it sounded like a top Nazi discussing Jews.

      It is well known here that the Bush family and many of the top advisers at the White House are racists but instead of detesting Jews, in this case, they all detest blacks. Their rationale, aside from their view of racial superiority, is that blacks are all "welfare queens, unwed mothers and drug dealers." It was the very firmly stated view of the host that it was better for everyone that New Orleans was under water for the time being.

      In that way, we were told (and I was not the only person in the dining room who heard all this), this served to "chase out the niggers" and permit Bush-supporting businessmen from buying up the soon-to-be condemned sodden houses for five cents on the dollar from friendly insurance companies (which one of them was a CEO of) and put up an enlarged and very profitable combination of industrial park and office building section. The money for this would, naturally, come from government grants which a terrified Congress (Mid Term elections are coming) had just voted for and the contracts to demolish the wrecked low-income slums would go, as a no-bid contract, to another stellar Bush supporter.

      As for the refugees, our table of proto-fascists all commented on the fact that most of them were on welfare and probably all voted Democratic so they could all be shipped to California or Chicago at the public expense and allowed to occupy less valuable public housing there.

      This conversation went on in a similar vein for some time and it was difficult for both myself and my host to refrain from making nasty comments or, for that matter, to enjoy our meal. These people are greedy and purely evil and I am <>positive<> from the overall conversations that Bush is conversant with this attitude and has no intentions of interfering with it.