Banned YouTube 11/14/07

This article in today's Times-Picayune cracked me up. I don't know how long this will stay up here, but since the American Society of Civil Engineers has strong-armed Levees.org into taking it down (off of YouTube), I thought I'd better get it up here fast, at least for now. It's short (1:05) and quite to the point, which is that we (we, being the whole nation) need a real investigation into what happened on August 29, 2005, how the engineering failed. From the T-P article:

The video was produced by Stanford Rosenthal, a senior at Isidore Newman School and the son of Levees.org President Sandy Rosenthal, who said her group would remove the video from the Web by Tuesday night, although she believes the allegations it contains are accurate. It has become an Internet phenomenon, garnering tens of thousands of viewers in just a week.

"I told them, yes, we'd take it down, but our Webmaster is 17 years old and is on a field trip and out of town," Rosenthal said Tuesday.

 

  

A couple of Sundays ago, I spent four or five hours on Lake Lanier, another Corps project that supplies Atlanta, much of Georgia, some of Alabama and most of the Florida panhandle with drinking water. Now, it is not the fault of the ACoE that we've been two years without sufficient rain, which has caused this precious reservoir to drop to seventeen feet below full, leaving docks and boathouses sitting caterwomple on dry land and government officials leading public prayer services (stopping just short of the rain dance). I've also been spending my free time for the last week reading John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it changed America (ashamed that it's taken me so long to get to it). One of the many things this brilliant and riveting work illuminates is just how the Corps, issues and all, came into being, actually and culturally.

I hope the YouTube stays up for a while because it's creative and spot on and all over the blogosphere recently. Perhaps someone with better technical skills than I can save it and host it elsewhere? I can't imagine, given the number of souls lost on 8/29 (1,836 according to Wikipedia, although many think this number errs on the low side, not counting many whose lives were lost during, and in the aftermath of, evacuation), that there wouldn't be a government investigation into how it happened, what went wrong after it happened and how to avoid anything like it ever happening again. I know for a fact that there are good folks in the Corps working hard to find a way to provide safe and effective engineering projects going forward, working hard to fix the mistakes that were made in the past. My gut says that they, above all, would want the truth to come first. I'm just sayin'.

Peace, out, y'all.

*****************

UPDATE: Greg Peter's at Suspect Device has kindly saved and posted the video as a flash movie in case YouTube actually gets around to taking it down. Thanks, Greg. H/T Liprap.