This should be interesting - Experts Say Faulty Levees Caused Much of Flooding

[astro]

I predict this will keep lawyers and civil engineering researchers busy for some time to come.

Experts Say Faulty Levees Caused Much of Flooding

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 20 – Louisiana’s top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina’s storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city’s flood- protection system should have kept most of the city dry.

The Army Corps of Engineers has said that Katrina was just too massive for a system that was not intended to protect the city from a storm greater than a Category 3 hurricane, and that the floodwall failures near Lake Pontchartrain were caused by extraordinary surges that overtopped the walls.

But with the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina’s surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals – and the flooding of most of New Orleans.

In the weeks since Katrina drowned this low-lying city, there has been an intense focus on the chaotic government response to the flood. But Ivor van Heerden, the Hurricane Center’s deputy director, said the real scandal of Katrina is the “catastrophic structural failure” of barriers that should have handled the hurricane with relative ease.

[Czarcasm]

Moving thread from IMHO to MPSIMS.

[Mama_Tiger]

The canal levees that failed were concrete barriers atop an earthen base, and it was the base that washed out. So it could very well be faulty construction.

As a court reporter, I did a contract appeal case a couple years back revolving around faulty levee construction (in a different area, though, up near the Bonne Carré spillway), where the contractor claimed that the Corps was having material brought in to build the levee with that had waaaay too much tree debris in it and not enough of the clay necessary for good levee construction. I never did find out how it turned out, but I’ve sure thought about it a lot in recent weeks. I’ve never forgotten the head of the trucking subcontractor, though, saying folks were asking him, “Why are you hauling those loads of branches?” when he was supposed to be hauling clay levee fill. :eek:

[CynicalGabe]

The biggest fault in the design was building a levee system and a city in that place to begin with.

[Wolfian]

@CynicalGabe

The biggest fault in the design was building a levee system and a city in that place to begin with.

Seriously. Living in a flood zone is like living in an earthquake zone. They were asking for it.

See ya in Denver!