New Orleans Could Have Prevented Katrina Flooding
posted in Politics |The evidence, by now, is overwhelming: Beautiful, decadent New Orleans wasn't doomed by Hurricane Katrina but by decades of human incompetence and neglect.
And…
On paper, New Orleans should have ended up wet and wounded, but basically intact.
What happened instead was "the single most costly catastrophic failure of an engineered system in history," according to a report issued last week by the Independent Levee Investigation Team, a blue-ribbon panel led by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and funded by the National Science Foundation.
And…
Earthen levees stretching east from the city were built with "highly erodible sand" and other "lightweight" materials that could be found locally, rather than more "cohesive" clay soils that would have had to be trucked in. "When the storm surge arrived, massive portions of these levees eroded catastrophically," the report says.
And…
…there are many miles of levees around New Orleans that were built with the same questionable design principles and materials that were used in the barriers that gave way. The Corps has patched the levee system so that it could probably prevent the last flood, but what about the next one?
Chertoff worries about a storm hitting next-door Jefferson Parish, which has seen its population swell with evacuees and reconstruction workers.
Eugene Robinson reports at The Catastrophe Wasn't Katrina.
