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Ten years ago today, residents of my hometown, New Orleans, and its suburbs suffered death and devastation caused by government failure. Of course, a hurricane that was category 3 when it made landfall on August 29, 2005, sparked this death and devastation, but negligent maintenance allowed the calamitous breaches of the government-owned and operated levee system for containing the waters of the Mississippi river and of Lake Pontchartrain.
The house in which I lived from the age of 4 to 22 (which is in New Orleans’s close-in suburb of Marrero) was flooded with more than three feet of water. My Aunt Carol’s and Uncle Eddie’s home (which sits just behind my boyhood home) was similarly flooded. Fortunately, no one in my family suffered bodily harm, in part because my parents had, two years earlier, moved to a home in Mandeville, LA, which is on Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore.
Pete Boettke and some of my other Mercatus Center colleagues have just released the video below – and this study [2] – on Katrina and the recovery effort that followed.