Katrina’s Levee Failures: Cleansing the Corps
Jan 17th, 2006 by Anthony Kendall
The LA Times today published a lengthy report on the preliminary National Science Foundation findings on the levee failures in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
The article gives details on the construction of the levees, their lack of maintenance, and their underdesign. Despite all of these warning signs of massive and perhaps criminal incompetence, the very organization that constructed the levees is investigating their failure. The failure of New Orleans’ levee system is the single most expensive engineering design failure both in terms of material losses and loss of life in the history of our nation. Congress and the President demanded independent investigations into the losses of NASA’s Challenger and Columbia orbiters, and should absolutely do the same in this case. Thorough investigation and understanding of engineering failures is crucial to protecting others who rely on similar systems nationwide.
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