Design Flaws Destroyed Levees in New Orleans

Investigators Link Levee Failures to Design Flaws
Three Teams of Engineers Find Weakened Soil, Navigation Canal Contributed to La. Collapses

By Joby Warrick and Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, October 24, 2005; Page A01

NEW ORLEANS -- Within a space of 15 hours on Aug. 29, three massive, concrete floodwalls in separate parts of the city suddenly fractured and burst under the weight of surging waters from Hurricane Katrina. The breaches unleashed a wall of water that swept entire buildings from their foundations and transformed what might have been a routine hurricane into the costliest storm in U.S. history.

Today, exactly eight weeks after the storm, all three breaches are looking less like acts of God and more like failures of engineering that could have been anticipated and very likely prevented.

Investigators in recent days have assembled evidence implicating design flaws in the failures of two floodwalls near Lake Pontchartrain that collapsed when weakened soils beneath them became saturated and began to slide. They also have confirmed that a little-used navigation canal helped amplify and intensify Katrina's initial surge, contributing to a third floodwall collapse on the east side of town. The walls and navigation canal were built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for defending the city against hurricane-related flooding.

The preliminary findings -- based on physical evidence, Corps documents and hydrodynamic models run through a Louisiana State University supercomputer -- are the work of three teams of engineers and forensic experts conducting separate probes. The investigations are shedding light not only on the cause of the failures but also the scale of the rebuilding effort: The discovery of major flaws in the design of the city's levees and floodwalls could add billions of dollars to the cost of New Orleans' recovery.

Investigators already have rejected the initial explanation offered by Corps officials in the hurricane's aftermath that massive storm surges had overtopped and overwhelmed floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals on the north side of town. The new findings for the first time point to a human role in all three of the major floodwall failures that left about 100,000 homes underwater and caused most of Louisiana's approximately 1,000 hurricane deaths.

Obviously this is President Bush's fault. While he was governor of Texas he slipped over to New Orleans and made the Corps of Engineers construct the levees using faulty designs because he knew that Katrina would strike New Orleans in 2005. Excuse me let me get my tin-foil hat. This should shut the Bush critics up, but it won't. There is nothing so small, no conspiracy too absurd for the Bush haters to buy into and pass along.

Full Story: Levees Poorly Designed

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