Katrina: Man Made Disaster

Yesterday I wrote this email to a friend. The links don't work (I'll try to get some to work later), and there are misstatements, but it will get the ball rolling. Throughout the dayI'll make further posts.

In general it's been my sense since the day after Katrina struck that the whole disaster was man made; that is, that if the floodwalls collasped after the hurricane passed, then their failure was not due to the fury of the winds and water, but through the failure of construction; and I don't believe that construction could have failed without corruption; that is, that the monoliths holding in the flood waters were just built bad. (Enough bold type). I'll try to get my arguments and evidence out in subsequent posts. (This particular reference I first found in National Review's The Corner.


Dear John,

Investigators link Levee Failures to Design Flaws
(The Washington Post}
By Joby Warrick and Michael Grunwald, Page A01, October 24, 2005
NEW ORLEANS -- Within a space of 15 hours on Aug. 29, three massive, concrete floodwalls in separate parts of the city suddenly fractured and......

Rumsfeld Orders Independent Levee Probe (washingtonpost.com)
October 20, 2005
NEW ORLEANS -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has ordered that an independent panel of experts evaluate the performance of New Orleans area....


Just ran into these. Can't read either article because the Washington Post requires a subscription, but it seems like they're finally getting to where I was two months ago.
In general the Army Corps of Engineers decides on the design in terms of picking what design to be used in a specific situation; a contractor is then selected (by the New Orleans Levee Council) to do the construction according to those specifications. In the Pittman Construction, Inc. appeal for more money (previous email) vrs the Army Corps of Engineers, the Corps argued they didn't deserve more money because 12 of the monoliths didn't meet specifications anyway, though the Corps had accepted them rather than insist they be redone. Their acceptance was probably because they were tired of fighting with the NO Levee Council, which probably thought everything was just fine and had other things to do with the money (federally appropriated for levee construction) rather than spend it on actual construction of levees.
The Rumsfeld order probably is due to his sense that the Corps was dragging its feet because their culpability was that they had accepted inferior construction.
The Post article, by emphasizing "design" is probably trying to pin the blame on the Corps, rather than on Pittman and the Levee Council.

And as I noted in my earlier email, what you just experienced in Miami this morning was almost exactly the same, only a little more severe, than what was experienced by New Orleans at the point of the 17th Street Canal failure, and I doubt that the damage to Miami proper was that great.

So things are finally getting where they should be and my contention that the floodwalls simply fell over is being established.


--I did find the Post article in the Montana Standard (www.mtstandard.com/articles/2005/10/24/newsnationworld/hj...)

Revlevant excerpts:

• "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 water from Hurricane Katrina. The breaches unleased 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 --Now, 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."
  
• "The walls and navigation canal were built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers...." (Not true, the walls, at least on the 17th Street Canal, were built by Pittman Construction).
• "Experts now believe Katrina was no stronger than a Category 3 storm...." (Actually, at the 17th Street Canal Katrina was probably no more than a Category One).
  

More in a few hours.