Words Whispered in Water: Why the Levees Broke in Hurricane Katrina (Natural Disaster, New Orleans Flood, Government Corruption)
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Words Whispered in Water: Why the Levees Broke in Hurricane Katrina (Natural Disaster, New Orleans Flood, Government Corruption)
In 2005, the world watched in horror as a major American city--New Orleans--was nearly wiped off the map by an epic flood. Newscasters attributed the flooding to a 'natural disaster.'
But one New Orleanian had her doubts.
Words Whispered in Water is the story of how--against all odds--one woman exposed the culprit in the castastrophic flooding and compelled the news media, and the government, to tell the truth.Â
When steel flood-walls built with inherent engineering mistakes broke in New Orleans, the responsible party, the Army Corps of Engineers, went into full-time damage control mode. The federal agency - with cooperation from Big Media and Engineering Establishment - spent millions bamboozling the American public. The Army Corps blamed the resulting flood devastation and death on Mother Nature and the low moral character of the city's residents.
But in the chaotic aftermath, Sandy Rosenthal uncovered evidence that the Army Corps had made egregious design mistakes in their steel flood-walls fifteen years before they buckled and failed, causing hundreds of deaths in 2005. With no special training, she exposed the scandal and eventually changed the narrative from "natural disaster" to "federal flood-wall failure." How this miracle of public truth-telling was accomplished is the subject of Words Whispered in Water.
Everyone relies on the Army Corps of Engineers whether they know it or not. Fifty-five percent of the American population lives in counties protected by flood-walls. The Army Corps' budget for 2019 is $4.8 billion for civil projects. A pie chart of annual federal spending in the United States shows a sliver big enough to see with the naked eye. The Army Corps employs 37,000 people, and there are Army Corps-built structures in every state of the nation. In fact, many of them are ongoing disasters including the Sacramento Central Valley region of California, the sugar-fertilizer soaked South Florida Everglades and more recently, sacred tribal lands and lakes in North Dakota invaded by a pipeline, stopped by the Obama administration and more recently greenlighted by a Trump order.
Words Whispered in Water highlights the importance of exposing the bad behavior of giant corporations and bureaucracies whose unsavory activities affect millions of people, because once bad behavior is exposed, there is noticeably less fraud and better behavior on the part of an organization. Just as Facebook and Wells Fargo are owning up to their bad behavior by flooding the airwaves with advertising promising to do better, Rosenthal's vigilance regarding the Army Corps has the potential to produce a similar pay-off that could hundreds of thousands of lives in the future. Rosenthal's story is crucial reading for potential citizen activists looking who desire to make a difference. Additionally, Words Whispered in Water provides lessons for politicians and bureaucrats from City Hall, to Congress, to the almost faceless Army Corps. In this era of lies and deception at every level in public life, the author shows how to use persuasiveness, persistence and free tools like the Freedom of Information Act, videos and social media to prevail.
Finally, Words Whispered in Water offers a valuable warning as to what is likely to happen in this time of eroding coastlines, coupled with America's history of trying to control - instead of coexist - with water.
