Weasel Words

Tumbling Down

New Orleans had a false sense of security. A new report by an independent review panel found that flaws in the manmade levee system were largely responsible for the breaches that caused deadly flooding in and around New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

As John Schwartz reported in yesterday's Times, three dozen engineers and disaster experts studied the region's hurricane protection system and found that the storm system had not been up to the task of protecting the city.

Raymond Seed, an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the lead author of the report, put it about as succinctly as anyone has in the nine months since Katrina made landfall. "People didn't die because the storm was bigger than the system could handle," Mr. Seed told reporters, "and people didn't die because the levees were overtopped. People died because mistakes were made and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost."

I'm sorry, "mistakes were made" doesn't cut it. Who made them? How are they being held accountable? How many of the rest of us are at risk because "mistakes were made?"