I agree with what you write, as it aligns with the report. I’m curious to know if you toured the disaster zone. If you have, you would understand why I refer to the Lower 9th as a “catastrophe”. If memory serves me, the university staff that took us out described the “flood” as a wall of water 6 feet high moving at about 10 feet/sec in the Lower 9th Ward. I saw houses that were moved intact two blocks from their foundations, cars stacked one upon the other, and the area generally looked like a war zone.
Did the MRGO failure lead to flooding with the city proper, or mainly St. Bernard’s and Plaquemines parishes?
I’ve been to NOLA many times… at least two or three times a year since Katrina in a professional capacity as I’m one of the organizers of an annual energy and engineering conference that is held there. There are also a number of power plant customers in the vicinity who I have to visit from time to time. I’ve toured the disaster area quite extensively (almost each visit in fact to see how things are progressing… or not progressing) and talked to many local residents. My nephew and his family live there although they moved there post-Katrina…he’s a bright scientist albeit not in earth sciences and between us, we’ve made it a bit of hobby to try to understand how it all came down. Regarding the MRGO failure, I have to confess that I don’t know the answer with certainty… it is my perception that it just lead to the flooding of St Bernard’s Parish and the Lower 9th Ward but that is just a semi-educated guess. Since the Corps did not do anything to truly shore up the channel, it grew substantially in size to perhaps 3 times the width of its design… this then put enormous pressure on the levee that protected St Bernard and the Lower 9th Ward. One of things that I’ve been hoping somebody would do is create the best animated model that was possible of the whole area to demonstrate the timeline of the devastation right from the point of the Katrina coming in to the point where the water had all been pumped out….including the reflooding a month later after Hurricane Rita damaged some of the levee breaches that weren’t fully repaired. This model is quite interesting but it could have been a lot better yet…. http://www.nola.com/katrina/graphics/continuous.swf