Saturday, March 24, 2007

Infamous last words

Before Katrina struck . . . he and fellow researchers had found sagging levees. He enlisted his students to ask the corps about them . . . the agency responded . . . "'These were federal levees built to federal standards and they're not going to fail"' . . . .

THE "TEAM LOUISIANA" REPORT on why the levees didn't hold -- and why New Orleans drowned -- came out this week, and it pretty much told us what everybody but the Bush Administration already knew:

The Army Corps of Engineers screwed up. Bad.

Here are a couple of tidbits from a report by The Associated Press:

The report also said the corps never used a storm surge model released in 1979 by the National Hurricane Center. "If they had, they would have realized that their levee system wasn't high enough for a Category 3 storm at all," said team leader Ivor van Heerden, a Louisiana State University professor, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center and a corps critic.

Additionally, he said the corps ignored its own models that suggested that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation channel completed in the early 1960s, would funnel storm surge into St. Bernard Parish and New Orleans.

The corps also should have known two canals would fail when water levels reached 10 feet. Van Heerden said that "a back-of-the-envelope calculation" would have alerted engineers to a problem with one of the canals, and that a soil strength analysis available since the 1950s would have highlighted flaws in the other.

The corps was preparing a response, spokesman John Hall said Wednesday.

Van Heerden said almost all the problems could have been avoided if independent engineers had reviewed the corps' plans before construction started.

Before Katrina struck, he said, he and fellow researchers had found sagging levees. He enlisted his students to ask the corps about them, and the agency responded by saying "'These were federal levees built to federal standards and they're not going to fail,"' he said.

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