Les Jones

News > New Factcheck.org Katrina Articles

Factcheck has two new articles, Is Bush to Blame for New Orleans Flooding?, and Katrina timeline. Frankly, I don't think they enhance Factcheck's reputation for non-partisanship, but judge for yourself.

The second article seems to have been objectively hastily researched. Factcheck has already issued two corrections. The article also states as fact that a wayward barge struck a levee, and is committed to the notion that Katrina caused the waters of Lake Ponchatrain to overtop the levees.

That's certainly been a theory. Jim Miller had been following it for some time. In a later post he finds the barge theory less credible. He notes that the three breaches occurred not in levees on Lake Ponchatrain but in floodwalls on canals. There's less likely to be barge traffic on canals than on the lake, and earthen levees and concrete floodwalls fail in very different ways.

This Washington Post article notes that "Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals -- and the flooding of most of New Orleans."