We won't know the "aftermath" of Katrina for several years. I can give an opinion as to the situation as I see it.

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, New Orleans (as a matter of fact all of Lousiana) is one of my least favorite places on earth, and as much as the human suffering is horrible, I'm not that sorry to see the punishment of the hubris, arrogance and downright stupidity of building a city in a pit at the intersection of three major bodies of water in an area that routinely gets hurricanes.

That said, the words "dumb" "idiotic" "preventable" and all the other words I can find in the Thesaurus come to mind.

For example - the hospital that is flooding to the first floor - but the backup generator, rather than being on the roof, is on the ground - now it's not working. The people who ignored the warnings to leave. The fact that they CHARGED people to take a bus to the Superdome. The fact that the Superdome is the only practical shelter and it's a shelter of "last resort".

The fact that the levees were made of dirt and designed for a Cat 3 - at best.

More and more, I see that the idiocy of short-term thinking is the "root cause" here. How many thousands will die because of it?