Don't Fight Mother Nature!

Can someone explain something to me? Hurricane Katrina killed 1,570 people. The Army Corp of Engineers is now taking the blame for the levee failures. We have already spent $800 million fixing the system and another $3.7 BILLION in spending is planned. Huh? Remember when Sam Kinison made fun of sending people food and money that lived in places where food didn't grow? (What is this?....SAND. What's this going to be in 500 years?.....SAND! Don't send food to these people - move these people to the food!) or something like that. This might be a dumb question - but why do we need a city there? Yes, it was a strategic location at one point - but is it entirely necessary now? The question you have to ask yourself is "is it worth spending all this money so that people can live 5-10 feet below sea-level?". Why fight Mother Nature? If New York City is over-populated are we going to build platforms 110 stories in the air so we can build another city ontop of the existing one? Let me explain something to you: If I was born in tornado alley and I built a house and it was destroyed, then I built another house and it was destroyed....I'm NOT building a third and I might not even build the second! Sure, call me crazy because these people are poor and can't just pick up and move. Well, they were forced to move last year so why rebuild the area only to have them come back? This time around the property that was once shacks will now be high-priced condos and houses. Great. People were profiteering. So the next time this happens instead of losing lives and shitty housing, we'll lose lives and exquisite housing. I'm not trying to be callous or anything - but suppose we just discovered North America and were planning where one of our major tourist destinations would be. Would one of our first projects be to spend billions of dollars so people could live below sea-level? So many things can go wrong in a levee/pump system that it simply baffles me as to why we try to combat this. Mother Nature is not an engineering problem waiting to be solved and I don't think anyone should have to apologize for the structural system failing. The people that should have to apologize are the local and state officials who did not have an adequate evacuation plan. Would we blame NASA if a meteor struck Earth? Instead of pouring money into this area faster than the waters actually came in year after year for testing, maintenance and labor.....maybe we should add up the total cost of that over 15-20 years, split it up between the residents and give them seed money to get out of dodge. A simplistic solution but I don't think you can beat the ocean in a fair fight. Just my two cents.