The Information Super-Frog

Today is 6 years since Hurricane Katrina hit the Louisiana/Mississippi coast, and Greater New Orleans was struck by the accompanying unnatural disaster of the greatest engineering failure in U.S. history.







So, what's in the news on the 6th anniversary of the Great Levee Failure?


Times-Picayune:New Orleans levees get a near-failing grade in new corps rating system

The words "levee break" and news footage of cities under water certainly has a dread familiarity for those of us greater New Orleans. Our hearts go out to our countrymen in the Mid-West.



Midwest Flood News

Red Cross.org

Just a "natural" disaster?

"Authorities knew the aging levee near Birdland, a working-class, racially diverse neighborhood, was the weakest link among the city's levees. A 2003 Corps report called for nearly $10 million in improvements across Des Moines, but there wasn't enough federal money to do all the work." Des Moines Levee Fails (hat tip to jdquintette)

But of course we can't afford 10 million here and 12 million there to defend America when we have a 2.4 Trillion dollar war to take care of. (And Bush wants another 178 billion, saying "our men and women in uniform and their families deserve better". Indeed, so do we all.)

Besides, it's cheaper (not for the country, of course, but for BushCo) to just let citizens die and start a PR campaign to blame the victims.

I'm not saying defending Americans isn't on BushCo's list of priorities at all. It's probably somewhere down their list as a subset of potential public relations problems. Right around the note to make sure Dear Leader doesn't start massaging female foreign leaders when there are media cameras around.

Edit:
Is 'Mother Nature' Really To Blame for the Midwest Floods? article by Georgianne Nienaber. More on levees, politics, and Army Corps of Engineers follies.

The flooding of New Orleans was caused by: Incompetent design by the Army Corps of Engineers.

From article in today's Times-Picayune:

"This is the largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States. Nothing has come close to the $300 billion in damages and half-million people out of their homes and the lives lost. Nothing this big has ever happened before in civil engineering."

"That miscalculation was so obvious and fundamental, investigators said, they "could not fathom" how the design team [...] could have missed what is being termed the costliest engineering mistake in American history."

So. It wasn't that the storm was worse than the city's protection system was supposedly designed to deal with.

It wasn't that some corrupt SOB local contractor or politician massivley skimped on mateials to line their own pocket (which had been my guess).

It was that the ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS screwed up the design from the start.

Somehow, I thought they had some idea of what they were doing, and could get it done. Isn't this the organization that built the Panama Canal? Built logistical support under the most extreme conditions allowing victory in WWII?

Or are people more familiar with the Corps than I unsurprised at this massive level of incompetence?

One of the sub-groups of the Krewe du Vieux is going as the "Coprse of Engineers" this year, outfits a combination of Engineers and Grim Reapers.


( full Times-Picayune article text mirrored )

Graffitti on the garage of a home a couple blocks from the London Avenue Canal breech.

Note high water lines 3/4 of the way up to the roof.