Three years ago, the newspaper that hopes to resurface today as a printed product published a series of in-depth articles under the theme "Washing Away." It outlined, in great and frightening detail, how the flood-control and hurricane-protective measures that had been cobbled together over the past 300 years were wholly unequal to the task.

The same threats were well-known to everyone from the local Army Corps of Engineers to some of the same federal deep-thought guys who also were paid to worry about such things as terrorist attacks on our financial centers.

Not only were the levees not tall enough or firm enough to stand up to the Category 4 or 5 hurricane that everyone knew would come someday, the same levees also hold in whatever water breaches the perimeter until it can be laboriously pumped out over days or weeks.

That falsely reassuring protective system, along with all kinds of other human development in the area, caused much of the Mississippi Delta to sink even lower than it already had been, even as development, agriculture and invasive species started destroying the large coastal marshes that otherwise serve as nature's storm surge protector.

After deadly flooding struck the city in 1995, $430 million in federal money and $50 million in local matches went toward new levees and pumping stations. But after 2003, with estimates of still-needed work ranging from $250 million to $1 billion, the money dried up.

In a nation with priorities that began with tax cuts for the rich and quickly turned to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington just couldn't reach that far into its purse for the needed cash. Serious evacuation plans also were lacking.

Now, with damage from the hurricane-spawned flooding adding up to at least $25 billion - not to mention thousands of lives lost, tens of thousands of lives disrupted and the national cost of the months-long New Orleans diaspora now beginning - it all seems like phony economizing on an epic scale.

The attacks of 9/11 resulted in many accusations that someone, someone else, should have seen it coming. Maybe. But many responsible people did see today's disaster in New Orleans coming, and we did virtually nothing about it.