Mike,

>I have been watching Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke" with my daughters, an hour at a time. It's great stuff but that's about as much as I can take at a time.

I'm not sure what that Spike Lee one is, but I recorded a Discovery program on Katrina earlier this week... an all these people they interviewed that were caught in it were just sort of amazing fools IMO. Someone talking about not having her mom's diabetes medicine, no food... umm people you live in a flood disaster prone area aren't you expected to be responsible for your own emergency preparedness? Why wait for a bozo mayor or governor to declare an evacuation order? The darned storm was coming for a long time.

There was another program on a couple of nights later on levee systems around the world. It showed an elevation cross section of New Orleans compared to the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchatrain, about 10% of New Orleans is above the normal levels of those two bodies of water. I was suprised that Sacramento is in the same sort of flood risk from the rivers that surround it.. and those guys are just a richter 5 earthquake during spring snow melt away from catastrophy.

A lot of people in the US need to have a higher sense of personal responsibility and grasp the concept of "higher ground".