Well,....it seems, at a professional convention, some emergency preparedness officials from NO appoached a guy with a cartography/mapmaking business in little ol' Medford, OR. They had data about levee heights, sea swells during huricanes, etc. They basically wanted him to turn it all into a visual map of NO that would show the level of flooding after a Category 4 hurricane. The map is eerily accurate to what actually happened.
The map was made in 1985! Twenty years ago. Of course, nobody had any idea.....He included the link to a newspaper story that started with this:
When President Bush said "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" on ABC's "Good Morning America" a day after Katrina pounded New Orleans, the production manager of Benchmark Maps was floored.
"I said, `My God, man.' Every professional knew this was a possibility," Lawrence Andreas said.
His proof: An atlas created in Benchmark's downtown Medford office 20 years ago details the possible effects of a Category 4 hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast.
Here's the link: http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2005/0911/local/stories/07local.htm from Monday, Sept 11, '05.
They knew exactly what would happen- it was merely a matter of time. Now why was it that they didn't reinforce those levees again?