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John McQuaid

Mark Schleifstein

Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms Hardcover – August 16, 2006

by Mark Schleifstein (Author), John McQuaid (Author)

4.7 16 ratings

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At 5:02 A.M. on August 29, 2005, Power Went Out in the Superdome. Not long after, wind ripped giant white rubber sheets off the roof and sent huge shards of debris flying toward Uptown. Rivulets of rainwater began finding their way down through the ceiling, dripping and pouring into the stands, the mezzanine, and the football field. Without ventilation, the air began to get gamy with the smell of sweat and garbage. The bathrooms stopped working. Many people slept; others waited, mostly in silence.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Little, Brown and Company
Publication date

August 16, 2006
Dimensions

6 x 0.86 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

031601642X
ISBN-13

978-0316016421
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (August 16, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 031601642X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316016421
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.86 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,775,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #606 in War of 1812 History
- #1,408 in Atmospheric Sciences (Books)
- #1,661 in Natural Disasters (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.7 16 ratings

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John McQuaid
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John McQuaid has written about topics such as city-destroying super-termites, the slow collapse of fishing communities, hurricane levee engineering, mountaintop removal coal mining, and the global flower business for publications including Smithsonian magazine, The Washington Post, Wired, Forbes.com, EatingWell magazine and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He is the co-author of Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms. His work has won a Pulitzer Prize, as well as awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife, son and daughter. The struggle to satisfy and understand the kids' strange and contradictory food choices (the elder liked super-hot peppers and limes, the younger rice, pasta and cheese) was the inspiration for Tasty.
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Mark Schleifstein
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4.7 out of 5

16 global ratings

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N. S. Alito

Thoughtful, Informative and Readable

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 15, 2006

Verified Purchase

Path of Destruction provides an in-depth background to the geographic, technical and political contributions to the Katrina disaster. It describes the natural challenges of settling on the active Mississippi delta, the innately human bone-headed attempts to protect settlements on an increasingly vulnerable marshland, and the classic political forces (farces?) over the centuries that made problems worse, and it does it all in a very readable way.

I grew up in New Orleans, and visit family there often, so I thought I understood the growing threat from hurricanes, yet McQuaid and Schleifstein filled in the gaps, and corrected common misconceptions; it is impressively well researched. (The horrendous tale of the response to the great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 alone is worth the price of admission.)

This is what I would call a "crossover book": Even if you're sick of hearing about Katrina-this and New Orleans-that, this book is interesting and readable enough to earn space on your "classic studies of human behavior" bookshelf.

9 people found this helpful

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36dodge

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 21, 2018

ok

A riveting and extremely, extraordinarily dismaying read about the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 16, 2012

Want a sign of the coming Apocalypse?

The two Pulitzer Price-winning journalists of the New Orleans Times-Picayune -- in a PATH OF DESTRUCTION -- a riveting read more like a thriller than a report on the New Orleans experiences with Hurricane Katrina -- well, the surest sign of the looming Apocalypse is that the book is No. 1,112,679 on the Amazon list as of The Ides of March, 2012.

Worse, the books which top the Amazon list moments ago are a flurry of self-absorbed, self-centered, syrupy, self-obsessed, self-referential, selfish rubbish, garbage and trash including -- in the top 20 -- stupid fiction and "novels"; worthless self-help, dieting and self-healing garbage; cookbooks,and even one called "Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think". (How dark is it up there?)

That alone says more about The United States of America than anything else could.

First, forget everything you think you heard, read, saw or watched on TV about Hurricane Katrina. Just forget it -- clean slate, you know. Or DON'T forget it -- compare and contrast what you think you remembered having heard, read, saw or watched on TV about Hurricane Katrina with the devastating page-by-page detailing of the astonishingly stupid, incompetent, ignorant, hallucinatory dys-performance of the then-brand-spanking-new militarized, domestic "Department of Homeland Security" and the entire Federal government which was ready and primed -- I guess -- to take on a new 9/11 but couldn't quite handle a far, far, far, far, far worse catastrophe and tragedy than 9/11 ever was, namely Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

And yes, Dubya was vacationing -- taking a long siesta -- at his, uhhh, "raench" near Waco, Texas.

Even worse, the media "goat" for the disaster -- "Brownie" -- actually turns out to have been -- if not a hero, then certainly not the villain he was portrayed as by the inept, stupid, dys-journalism of the news, media and entertainment industrial complex -- especially television. The machinations, manipulations and maneuvering to "damage control" mode by the Bush/Cheney administration and its own "Great Satan" named Karl Rove are simply beyond comprehension, given the scope of the negligence and the magnitude of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Yes, it was worse than you thought.

The book begins with a descriptive but clear history of hurricane disasters, even those unearthed via archaeology before European colonization of the Mississippi River Delta, which was then, "only" occupied by itinerant savages.

I was really intrigued at how much WAS known about the range of hurricane disasters in the area; then bewildered at the vain, conceited efforts to "control" the Mississippi River which always made everything worse; then stupefied at the repeated, paragraph-by-paragraph, empirical evidence of the unutterable, repeat re-stupidification of Homo sapiens Americanus. (For instance, the taxpayers paid to build levees around flood-prone marsh and bottomlands so that, ahem, DEVELOPERS could then DEVELOP the levee-protected swamps and bottomlands and make beaucoups of profits courtesy of the taxpayer's dime. Sound familiar? Meanwhile, levees were NOT built around actual populations of Homo sapiens.

And that was even BEFORE we got to Hurricane Katrina.

I underlined. I circled. I check-marked. I commented in the margins. I wrote giant question marks and exclamation points. I started writing my own exclamations such a "Good God!" in the margins. Then my own exclamations became both sacred and profane, and certainly not of such type as to be repeatable in a "family" book review.

Yes, "Homeland Security" and the military and the National Surveillance Security Industrial Complex were all prepared -- and apparently well-prepared for an (EXTREMELY UNLIKELY) return performance by Osama bin Laden and his boyz. But no one at the federal level -- except much of the time for "Brownie" -- was less- or worst-prepared for the human catastrophe, disaster and tragedy that was Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans.

With the American economy in ruins because of unrepentant Wall Street criminality which continues with impunity, with monster storms and floods wreaking havoc all across The United States since Katrina (as well as around the "globalized" globe in "weather" you NEVER hear about); with the incontrovertible evidence of Climate Change and Global Warming; with tens of millions out of work, out of unemployment, thrown out of their homes by criminally negligent banks; with the greatest (and thus most nation-destabilizing) wealth inequality in recorded human history -- I COULD go on -- it seems clear that "The American Dream" is a horrific nightmare which will only get "worser and worser" as the creeping corporate state robo-signs our very lives, liberties, fortunes and "sacred honor" into oblivion.

About all that would be left would be..."The Pursuit of Happiness".

Very sad, too bad this is NOT a "Nation of Book Readers". It is NOT a "book culture" any more, especially in the school systems where high stake standardized testing and rote "belief" culture has replaced authentic teaching and learning and reading and writing and homework and conversation and mathematizing and (gasp!) EVEN SCIENCE (Origin of the Species by Chuck Darwin)...well, you begin to start to try to get a tenuous grip on the future which lies ahead.

This book is "blinking red lights" and a "hair on fire" warning for us to connect the dots before it is too late.

And to think I thought PATH OF DESTRUCTION was going to be Just a Little Bitty Ole Pissant Hurricane Tale.

"Occupy!"

One person found this helpful

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Armchair Interviews

A must read!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 18, 2006

In 2002, John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein wrote "Washing Away," an award-winning series for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The authors exposed the unique vulnerability of New Orleans to hurricanes, exploring "an obvious but little-acknowledged fact: here was a city that, for the six months of every hurricane season, lived with a substantial risk of utter annihilation...much of the city was built on top of a swamp, below sea level and gradually sinking."

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Louisiana coast. In Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms, McQuaid and Schleifstein revisit familiar territory, helping readers understand why this tragic event happened when there were so many warnings.

Path of Destruction outlines the factors that contributed to the tragedy in New Orleans. By 2005, many levees were still incomplete and those built had inadequate safety levels, with safety factors of 1.3 (bridges have a safety factor of 2). The Army Corps of Engineers were more interested in commerce than hurricane safety. When combined with sinking marshlands and unstable soil, these facts increased the likelihood that levees would be overtopped or broken by a Category 2 hurricane, turning much of New Orleans into a lake. Hurricanes sweeping in off the Gulf of Mexico no longer have extensive marshlands to diminish the storm's strength for "the delta has collapsed like a souffle."

McQuaid and Schleifstein also provide extensive evaluation of Katrina's aftermath. Once the levees broke, 80% of New Orleans was under water and the delayed response by FEMA severely increased the misery caused by Katrina.

Despite the harrowing experiences of one year ago and the knowledge that what happened in New Orleans was "catastrophic structural failure" not an "act of God," the U.S. government is poised to repeat prior mistakes. The Corps is rebuilding levees to their former level of protection, leaving New Orleans as exposed as before Katrina. At one point, Corps contractors were caught "dredging up weak soil and incorporating it into a new levee." Given the prediction of an increase in Katrina-like storms, the time to act and prevent future tragedies is now.

Armchair Interviews says: Alarming information from award-winning journalists.

6 people found this helpful

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