It wasn’t an Act of God. It was an Act of Chevron. An Act of Exxon. An Act of Big Oil. gregpalast.com/new-orleans-wi… #NewOrleans #Louisiana #HurricaneKatrina #Barry #BigOil #Pollution #Environment #ClimateChange

Take a look at these numbers dug out of #Louisiana state records:

Conoco 3.3 million acres
Exxon Mobil 2.1 million acres
Chevron 2.7 million acres
Shell 1.3 million acres

These are the total acres of wetlands removed by just four oil companies over two decades.

#NewOrleans used be to a long, swampy way from the Gulf of Mexico. #Hurricanes & storm surges had to cross a protective mangrove forest nearly a 100 miles thick. Then Standard Oil, Exxon’s prior alias, began channeling pipelines & tanker routes thu the soft delta prairie grass.

Just one channel dug for Exxon’s pleasure, the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (“MR-GO”) was dubbed the Hurricane Highway by experts-long before #Katrina — that invited the storm right up to — and over-the city’s gates, the levees. gregpalast.com/how-mother-nat… #Barry #NewOrleansFlood

Without #BigOil’s tree and prairie holocaust, “#Katrina would have been a storm of no note,” Professor Ivor van Heerden told me. If they’d only left just 10% of the protective collar. They didn’t. gregpalast.com/new-orleans-wi… #NewOrleans #Louisiana #Barry #NewOrleansFlood

After Professor van Heerden went public about the unending life-and-death threat of continued #oil drilling and channelling, LSU closed down its entire #Hurricane Center (can you imagine?) and fired Heerden and fellow experts. gregpalast.com/expert-fired-w… #Barry #NewOrleansFlood

This was after LSU received a $300,000 check from Chevron — passed by a front group called America’s Wetlands which lobbies for more drilling in the wetlands. In place of Van Heerden's team, LSU’s new “Wetlands Center” had professors picked by a board of petroleum industry hacks.

The Palast Investigative Fund is making our half-hour investigative report available as a free download – Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans. gregpalast.com/bigeasydownloa… #Katrina #Barry #BigOil #NewOrleansFlood

In the course of filming Big Easy to Big Empty, I was charged with violation of anti-terror laws on a complaint from Exxon Corporation. Charges were dropped, and our digging continued. gregpalast.com/how-mother-nat…