Dark Bilious Vapors

As I mentioned in an earlier piece about the NOLA shipping canal design flaws exacerbating the flooding from Hurricane Katrina:

"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.
...
Experts now believe that Katrina was no stronger than a Category 3 storm when it roared into New Orleans, and Congress had directed the Corps to protect the city from just such a hurricane.

"This was not the Big One -- not even close," said Hassan Mashriqui, a storm surge expert at LSU's Hurricane Center. He said that Katrina would have caused some modest flooding and wind damage regardless, but that human errors turned "a problem into a catastrophe..."

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

Karen on 10.24.05 @ 09:50 AM CST