One would think so, anyway.

On Aug. 17, the Miami Herald ran an AP piece by Becky Bohrer.  The focus was on funding slated for Southern U in New Orleans.  She described SUNO as “virtually wiped out by Hurricane Katrina nearly four years ago.”  FYI, SUNO is in the main basin of the city and very close to the west side of Industrial Canal, the levees of which collapsed, as I recall.

The article’s not available anymore through the Miami Herald.  I haven’t tried to find it in AP archives.

Job denied: the shorthand is unacceptable

Levees.org refers to this as “shorthand reporting” — using “Katrina” to refer to the levee failure flooding.  It must stop.

To the editors,

Still to this day, four years later, your own editors continue to conflate the aftermath of an engineering failure with the aftermath of a weather event.  Hurricanes have been happening in subtropical climates such as New Orleans’ for a very long time, certainly since there’s been a city here.  The admittedly intense weather event of August 2005 did not cause the devastation and ruin of Southern University of New Orleans, as asserted in Becky Bohrer’s piece as it appeared on the Miami Herald web site, posted Monday, Aug. 17, 2009.  SUNO’s campus is situated in a particularly low section of the city, it was very hard hit by the flood unleashed by federally designed, constructed, and maintained levees that did not perform up to their specified capacity.  They were not overtopped; they fell apart.  Check the record.  Check your own reporting.  Check reports of independent civil engineering groups.  Check the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ own admissions, presented in sworn testimony before Congress, of their culpability in and responsibility for the New Orleans Flood of 2005.

You continue to do your readership and subscribing publications, along with the general public welfare, a great disservice every time you get these two distinct events confused.

Sincerely yours,

We cannot give up.  John McQuaid, a noted author agrees with the Levees.org position.  If you haven’t yet, check out this blog post from mid-August.

http://johnmcquaid.com/2009/08/16/the-katrina-flood-was-a-man-made-disaster-part-xxiii/