Katrina's Wake

Update (2/19): An administration in chaos in the wake of the storm - the emails. (Newsweek)







Items of note in the Hurricane Katrina Post Mortem:

(credit: WashPo) An upcoming 600+ page report details falilures of all levels of government: "The White House did not fully engage the president or "substantiate, analyze and act on the information at its disposal," failing to confirm the collapse of New Orleans's levee system on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, which led to catastrophic flooding of the city of 500,000 people."

(credit: NYTimes) Mr. Brown said that he told a senior White House official early on of the New Orleans flooding, and that the administration was too focused on terrorism to respond properly to natural disasters. "It is my belief," Mr. Brown told the senators, that if "we've confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could."

Officials say they've found more than 1,300 bodies, but many may be unaccounted.

Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for, and some of them _ again, no one is sure how many _ were probably washed into the Gulf of Mexico, drowned when their fishing boats sank, swept into Lake Pontchartrain or alligator-infested swamps, or buried under crushed homes, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana medical examiner.

A Kossak's got a great photo essay on the N.O. timeline.

Good night, America, how are you?
Don’t you know me I’m your native son,
I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done