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WINFIELD, Mo. -- Floodwaters punched a 150-foot hole in a Winfield levee last night, and firefighters spent hours in the dark going door-to-door to warn residents in one subdivision that water was coming faster than expected. Bill Byram, assistant chief and fire marshal of the Winfield-Foley Fire Protection District, said the levee just east of Winfield along Pillsbury Road broke about 8:15 p.m. Wednesday. Water was quickly flowing toward a second levee, and the National Guard was fortifying that with sandbags.

Hey "School-Bus" Nagin, Has anyone told you the water is coming! No, it's not a hurricane. It's weird, all that flood water from your neighbors to the north just happens to run south, right down the middle of your city! You're been warned! ...for what good that will do.

NEW ORLEANS - Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city's flood defenses Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so...

New Orleans (AP) -- The Army Corps of Engineers can be held liable for flood damage caused by a "hurricane highway," a navigation channel that is believed to have funneled Hurricane Katrina's storm surge into the city, a federal judge ruled Friday. The Corps of Engineers had argued that it was immune from liability because the channel is part of New Orleans' flood control system. The law says the federal government cannot be sued if something goes wrong with a flood control project such as a levee, reservoir or dam. Judge Stanwood Duval dismissed that argument, saying the Mississippi River-Gulf...

New Orleans (AP) -- A federal judge threw out a key class-action lawsuit Wednesday against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over flooding from a levee breach after Hurricane Katrina. U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval ruled that the Corps should be held immune over the failure of a wall on the 17th Street Canal that caused much of the flooding of New Orleans in August 2005. The suit led to 350,000 separate claims by businesses, government entities and residents, totaling billions of dollars in damages against the agency. The fate of many of those claims was pinned to that lawsuit...

So, President and Mrs. Bush went down to New Orleans to commemorate the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina...Here's a pop quiz: How much money has Uncle Sam spent...since Hurricane Katrina ripped the place apart? The grand total is $127 billion (including tax relief). That's right: a monstrous $127 billion. Of course, not a single media story has highlighted this gargantuan government-spending figure. But that number came straight from the White House... This is an outrage. The entire GDP of the state of Louisiana is only $141 billion, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. So the cash spent there nearly matches...

Levee Litigation Group Launches Campaign to Advise Victims of Hurricane Katrina to Protect their Legal Rights to Make Claims against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – Time to File Claims Running Group to Hold Press Conference on the Steps of Federal District Court in New Orleans on Tuesday, August, 29, 2006 at 10:00 a.m. New Orleans, August 28, 2006 – The Levee Litigation Group (www.leveelaw.com) announces that it has launched a campaign to encourage victims of Hurricane Katrina who lived in Orleans Parish, Jefferson Parish, St. Bernard Parish and Plaquemines Parish to protect their legal rights against the U.S....

President Bush on Thursday signed a $94.5 billion emergency spending bill to fund hurricane relief and the Iraq war that includes $30.4 million for Sacramento flood protection and levee repairs. The money includes $23.3 million targeted for 29 levee sites that state officials say represent an urgent risk. Last month, the state and federal governments agreed to allow expedited environmental reviews so those projects can be completed by Nov. 1. State officials now estimate the total cost of repairing those levees at less than $150 million. The remaining $7.1 million is for stream repairs in south Sacramento. The total was...

New Orleans braces for start of hurricane season, hoping $800 million in repairs will suffice for now. NEW ORLEANS - With meteorologists predicting another severe round of hurricanes this summer, the US Army Corps of Engineers is hastily working to finish repairs to the New Orleans' levee system by June 1 - the official start of hurricane season - calling the end product "stronger and better than before." But independent engineers and scientists say that even with $800 million in repairs and re-inforcements, the levee system is not safe yet, and they caution residents in badly damaged areas against "buying...

Sinking land ultimately reduces effectiveness of levee protection: The Army Corps of Engineers discovered a $4 billion surprise by underestimating the cost of repairing the levees because south Louisiana is sinking. One geologist has said the sinking will continue, especially in New Orleans East, because that part of town rests on a fault line. Bad roadways have become a common complaint over the years for some New Orleans residents, but to LSU Geologist Dr. Roy Dokka, they’re scientific evidence which demonstrate that the ultimate problem goes much deeper. Dokka suggests that Louisiana is not only sinking, but was sliding out...

State water officials on Friday warned of the potential for flooding and levee breaks throughout the San Joaquin Valley as California braced for another wave of storms, with a major system predicted to slam the state by early next week. "We are extremely worried there is a potential for levee failure in the San Joaquin system," said Jay Punia, chief of flood operations for the state Department of Water Resources. "We can't tell you where it will happen. If somebody is living behind a levee in the San Joaquin, they should be extremely cautious." The warning comes as California's rivers...

(AP) NAPA A series of levee breaks in southern Sonoma County is flooding acres of farmland along the Sonoma Creek. The Nationals Weather service says that a levee gave way on the Schell Creek near Schellville failedcausing minor flash flooding of immediately surrounding areas. According to reports, about 100 acres of farmland are flooded. The are a couple of farm buildings partially underwater, but there do not appear to be any houses or residential buildings affected. However, people near the town of Schellville along Highways 12 and 121 should be alert for rapidly rising waters and follow evacuation orders of...

RUTBAH, Iraq (AP) - U.S. Marines used to patrol the streets of this city near the volatile Syrian border. Now they've penned it in with a wall of sand, leaving only three ways in or out. While causing discomfort to the townspeople, the military says it is an effective barrier to insurgents and frees up troops for use in other parts of restive Anbar province in western Iraq. The Marines ringed Rutbah with a 10.5-mile-long berm, seven feet high and 20 feet wide, in mid-January and reduced their presence to checkpoints at the three entrances that also are manned by...

Friday, March 3, 2006 11:54 a.m. EST Bush Didn’t Lie About Levee Breaching News sources have reported that President Bush lied when he said he wasn’t warned that the levees in New Orleans could be breached during Hurricane Katrina. But a videotape of a key meeting between Bush and hurricane officials supports the president’s contention that the breaching of the levees was unanticipated. On September 1, four days after Katrina struck, Bush said: "I don’t think anybody anticipated a breach of the levees.” The Associated Press on Wednesday claimed that "federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security...

"Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey." Thus spake the humble early English King Canute, who once mocked flattering courtiers by demonstrating his impotence in the face of an incoming tide. "Stop," he said, attempting to command the waves, which of course kept coming. ...Thus we have this week's new low in anti-Bush hysteria, in which Democrats and assorted media are alleging some kind of scandal in a piece of videotape showing President Bush was warned that Hurricane...

Just hours after the Associated Press (AP) ‘shocked‘ New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin yesterday by showing him video of a FEMA briefing during Hurricane Katrina in which government officials speculate about the impact of the expected Category 5 storm, the AP has shown the mayor a second “alarming and disgusting” video. The first video shows President George Bush, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff and then-FEMA Director Michael Brown, among others, dealing with how to respond to the developing disaster, and what to make of inconsistent reports from New Orleans about the condition of the Lake Pontchatrain levees. The second video,...

WASHINGTON -- On the day that Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, President Bush and a top presidential aide were worried about whether New Orleans' levees had held, according to a transcript of discussions among disaster officials on the front lines of the storm.Those concerns, expressed about midday Aug. 29, are in contrast to an image of a detached president and also to what happened later that night. That's when an official manning the federal emergency operations center held off acting on reports of levee breaches as he waited for confirmation. .... skip to The transcript, obtained by The Times-Picayune, illustrates the...

snip... BOB BEA: In differing locations along the length of the MR-GO levee, we stopped, I got out and collected the soil samples. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Bob Bea is a civil engineer from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a member of an independent team investigating why the levees failed. Bea recently took three samples of soil from MR-GO and had them tested. BOB BEA: This material is relatively sandy, comes from probably something that is like a beach that has had clay mixed into it. Now the concern for such material is underwater erosion like comes from...

Flood protection has taken a back seat : Though he spent eight years on the Orleans Levee Board, Robert Lupo didn't spend much time talking about levees. Instead, the real estate magnate organized a $2.5 million renovation of the Mardi Gras Fountain, tried to find takers for the district's vacant real estate and helped lead a failed effort to find a private manager for Lakefront airport. "There were so many committee meetings we wound up spending almost every day out at the levee district," said Lupo, who stepped down in 2004. "It was a constant distraction. . . . The...

Gov. Kathleen Blanco left for Holland on Monday to learn how the Dutch created the huge flood-control system that protects a land much farther below sea level than Louisiana. The trip means the Democratic governor will miss President Bush's visit to New Orleans, scheduled for Thursday... The governor was among more than 40 government, business and education leaders - including Sens. David Vitter and Mary Landrieu ... Landrieu said the ambassador told her about that country's flood of 1953, when 1,800 people died. "He said, `Why don't you all come over and see what we've done since then?'" Landrieu recounted....

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal engineers trying to stop New Orleans flooding were unsure who was in charge of fixing the levees amid the confusion of Hurricane Katrina, according to interviews with congressional investigators released Thursday by a Senate panel. In a Nov. 15 interview with investigators, Army Corps of Engineers Col. Richard P. Wagenaar recounted an instance after Katrina hit when federal workers attempted to fill in the breached London Avenue canal and were told to stop. That led to a discussion of "who is in charge?" Wagenaar said. "I mean, where's the parish president? Where is the mayor? And...

Despite racist comments from opportunists like Louis Farrakhan that, "There was a 25 foot hole. We've suggested that it [the levee] may have been blown up so that the water would destroy the black part of town", it appears that, based on population, a higher percentage of white New Orleaners were killed during Hurricane Katrina than black ones. An article titled, Statistics Suggest Race Not a Factor in Katrina Deaths informs us that: African-Americans make up 67.25 percent of the population and 59.1 percent of the deceased. Other minorities constitute approximately 5 percent of the population and represented 4.3 percent...

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) yesterday declared efforts to evacuate state and New Orleans residents before Hurricane Katrina "an outstanding success" and told members of Congress they would not be investigating the government's flawed response into the Aug. 29 storm if levees protecting the city had not failed. Over three hours of measured, at times defiant testimony to a House investigative panel, the first-term governor rebutted Republican charges that overwhelmed state and city leaders did not order the evacuation of New Orleans soon enough or provide transportation or relief to poor, sick and elderly residents who did not get...

Don Powell, Gulf Coast Recovery Director, was asked by Sheppard Smith on FOX News just minutes ago, whose responsiblity it is to rebuild the New Orleans levee system--the city, parrish, state or federal. Don Powell answer--"it CLEARLY is the responsibility of the federal goverment. Taxpayer money will be used to rebuild the levee system."

EW ORLEANS, Dec 13 (Reuters) - An initial test of one of New Orleans' broken levees on Tuesday suggested it had been built deep enough to meet design specifications, raising new questions of what caused the system of flood protection to fail during Hurricane Katrina, engineering officials said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which designed and oversees the system of levees, pulled out several metal sheet pilings from a damaged levee at the city's 17th Street Canal and found their length met design specifications of at least 17 feet extending below sea level. Earlier seismic studies of the site...

When the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board developed a plan in 1981 to improve street drainage by dredging the 17th Street canal to increase capacity for Pump Station No.¤6, residents across the city applauded. Increasingly heavy rains were not only flooding streets, but pushing water into homes. Action was needed. It seemed like a no-brainer. Today forensic engineers investigating the levee breach that flooded much of city during Hurricane Katrina aren’t so sure. The search for the cause of the failure keeps returning to that dredging project as the probable starting point for a series of mistakes they believe...

Young, now helping to rebuild three damaged New Orleans canals between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, said design drawings show that steel pilings reinforcing the levees should have been driven to a depth of 17 feet below sea level. That does not appear to have been the case, based on preliminary findings by an investigative team led by Louisiana State University civil engineering professor Ivor van Heerden. Using sonar, his tests have shown sheet pilings at the canal went to only 10 feet below sea level. Steve Spencer, chief engineer for Orleans Parish levees, said his agency did the...

Late last month, while taking the bus tour of the Lower 9th Ward, Gwenith Fletcher remarked, "I came to see what God had done." Fletcher's sentiment parallels that of many people who see Hurricane Katrina, and all of its devastation, as one of those God-ordained natural disasters that happen sometimes, and reside far beyond the control of mere mortals. But the more I hear about the actions of our public officials in the years leading up to the hurricane, the more convinced I am that this was not a "natural disaster" in the usual sense of the phrase. Consider a...

NEW ORLEANS - Engineers responsible for monitoring the levees that failed following Hurricane Katrina were never told that canal water had been pooling in yards beside a flood wall months before the storm, an Army Corps of Engineers manager said Friday. Residents living along the 17th Street Canal told The Times-Picayune newspaper in an article published Friday that they had complained to the city Sewerage and Water Board nearly a year ago about water pooling in their yards. City workers came out and concluded environmental testing was needed to determine if water was seeping through the levee, said Beth LeBlanc,...

A year ago Beth LeBlanc and her neighbors on Bellaire Drive had a problem no one could seem to fix. Their yards, which swept to the base of the 17th Street Canal levee, kept filling with water. Then on Aug. 29, as Hurricane Katrina moved out of the area, that levee collapsed and tumbled into their homes, allowing Lake Pontchartrain and a world of misery to pour into the city. Now the residents of Bellaire Drive have questions.

Sheet piling supporting the failed floodwall on the 17th Street Canal extends just 10 feet below sea level, 7 feet shorter than the Corps of Engineers has maintained, a team of investigators said Wednesday, strengthening earlier findings that faulty design and construction played a role in the canal breaches that flooded much of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina......

New Orleans Levee Failure Analysis - Part V Contents Introduction and Basic Levee Construction, Section and Elevation Details Section 1. Pre-Landfall Flooding in Kenner and Western Metairie of East Jefferson Parish Section 2. Analysis of the 17th Street and London Canal Breaches and Post Katrina Flood Sequence in Downtown New Orleans Section 3. Surge Sequence for the Industrial Canal Basin, Analysis of the Five Major Breaches and east Orleans Parish Flooding Section 4. Flood Sequence for St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward, MRGO Reach Failure Analysis Section 5. Contributory Causality, Political and Funding Issues Leading to Levee Failures...

It's not the first time someone has criticized the way money from Congress was not used appropriately to shore up the levee system that failed during hurricane Katrina. But on Nine News Thursday morning, the former advisor to former president Bill Clinton named names. Dick Morris says over the last few years, Washington funded hundreds of millions of dollars to strengthen the levee system, but some of our senators spent it on something else. Dick Morris: "The congress and the White House voted 750 million dollars for levee repair and strengthening. It's Landrieu and the rest of the delegation out...

State wants more control of levee boards Jeremy Alford Daily Comet Capitol Correspondent October 28. 2005 12:00AM New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin testifies as Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco (on screen) listens via video teleconference in front of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure joint hearing on rebuilding New Orleans while on Capitol Hill in Washington, October 18, 2005. REUTERS/Larry Downing BATON ROUGE — Administrative officials are expected to push a set of proposals during the special session that convenes next Sunday to grant the state greater oversight of local levee boards. Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced her intentions this week as...

Hurricane Katrina destroyed close to 30 miles of Louisiana's levees, and while the state and the nation debate over how to rebuild them, people in southwest Louisiana wonder why they've never had them. As he sits through meeting after meeting about how to rebuild New Orleans, a state lawmaker from the other side of the state feels left out. With Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, if you think about it, we're the middle child, Rita," says Senator Nick Gautreaux from Vermilion Parish. Rita's storm surge wreaked havoc on much of his district. In New Orleans, much of the flooding happened because...

NEW ORLEANS - The head of the Orleans Levee Board has quit amid questions about no-bid contracts to his relatives in the days after Hurricane Katrina. The final days of board president Jim Huey's tenure also had been marred by his collection of nearly $100,000 in back pay several weeks before the storm. Huey had led the board for nine years. Huey defended the contracts and said he was legally entitled to the back pay. "Every single decision made during this crisis situation was made in the best interest of the levee district, and that will be proven in time,"...

We've seen three Category 5 hurricanes form this season, so why would the federal government spend more than a billion dollars to protect us from only a Category 3 storm? That's the question angry legislators were hurling Monday at the state capitol. The quickest fix is to simply patch holes and make the levee system what it was before Hurricane Katrina hit. But legislators say that wasn't enough to protect us before -- what makes it different this time? The latest images out of the flood-soaked Ninth Ward show the devastated area still soggy, still vulnerable. It sends shudders through...

Providing an exception to Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard’s unyielding stance that he evacuated all rank-and-file government workers before Hurricane Katrina to protect their lives, another top parish administrator has said he authorized 15 water department employees to man their posts during the storm. Walter Maestri, Broussard’s emergency management chief, said this week that he personally authorized the workers — nine on the West Bank and six in East Jefferson — to ride out Katrina inside water treatment plants so they could maintain potable water for thousands of patients who could not leave local hospitals because of fragile health. His...

WASHINGTON - Soil tests indicate that a soft, spongy layer of swamp peat underneath the 17th Street canal floodwall was the weak point that caused soil to move and the wall to breach during Hurricane Katrina, an engineer who has studied the data says. "The thing that is remarkable here is the very low strength of the soils around the bottom of the sheet pile" base of the floodwall, said Robert Bea, a geotechnical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who examined the test results. Bea is a member of the National Science Foundation team that is studying the...

Saying that he believes some of the flooding in East Jefferson from Hurricane Katrina was due to pump stations that were not running, East Jefferson Levee District President Pat Bossetta said Tuesday he’s ready to explore the feasibility of assuming operation of parish drainage pumps. Jefferson Parish, which is responsible for operating the pump stations, enacted its “doomsday’’ plan shortly before Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Under that two-year-old plan, designed to protect the lives of parish employees when a major hurricane is forecast to make a direct hit on the New Orleans region, Parish President Aaron Broussard’s administration...

WASHINGTON - The thin gray line of concrete floodwalls erected along drainage canals was supposed to protect New Orleans. But when Katrina hit, portions of the walls came tumbling down, flooding the city. A 1998 ruling, by an administrative judge for the Corps' Board of Contract Appeals, shows that the contractor, Pittman Construction, told the Corps that the soil and the foundation for the walls were “not of sufficient strength, rigidity and stability” to build on. “That's incredibly damning evidence,” says van Heerden, “I mean, really, incredibly damning.”

“Be ready to see something you’ve never seen before in your life.” Kenneth Ortolano, a volunteer with the Plaquemines Parish Emergency Operations office, pointed out the windshield of a Michigan Army National Guard CH-47 Chinook helicopter. Below and coming up quick, the crew could see what was left of Venice, Louisiana. After hurricane Katrina, it wasn’t much. “Look at all the boats on the backside of the levee. That was a marina with a bunch of condos. See where the white truck is? That’s the end of the road. The barge is right over there.” The Chinook crew and New...

Is the Orleans Levee Board doing its job? Critics allege corruption, charge the board with wasteful spending By Lisa Myers & the NBC Investigative Unit NBC News Updated: 11:52 a.m. ET Sept. 15, 2005 Lisa Myers Senior investigative correspondent The unveiling of the Mardi Gras Fountain was celebrated this year in typical New Orleans style. The cost of $2.4 million was paid by the Orleans Levee Board, the state agency whose main job is to protect the levees surrounding New Orleans — the same levees that failed after Katrina hit. "They misspent the money," says Billy Nungesser, a former top...

Nation of Islam chief Minister Louis Farrakhan has expanded on his theory that New Orleans' levees were blown up during Hurricane Katrina, announcing Friday that divers working on the levee break have found evidence of explosives. "These explosives are from the government side," he said during a press conference in Memphis held to promote his upcoming Million Man Anniversary March. In quotes picked up by Memphis TV station WMC, Farrakhan demanded an investigation into the Bush administration's levee plot. If true, he insisted: "somebody is guilty, then not only of mass destruction of property, but of mass murder." Farrakhan predicted...

Less than a month before Hurricane Katrina wrecked the Orleans Levee Board's finances and left the levees it maintains in shambles, board President Jim Huey requested and got nearly $100,000 in back pay that the agency's hired legal advisers - one of whom is a relative of his wife - determined he was entitled to receive. The payment for about $96,000, which was made without approval from the board or its staff attorney, came on the advice of Gerard Metzger and George Carmouche, two contract lawyers with close ties to Huey, who was originally appointed by former Gov. Edwin Edwards...

This is part four of a five part series examining the Hurricane Katrina levee failures. Part 1 is a timeline sequence of who reported what flood events, to whom, and when it was reported. It can be found here: Part I: Hurricane Katrina Flood Report Sequence Part 2 is a discussion of the levee system's viability, or lack thereof, prior to Hurricane Katrina. It can be found here: Part II: Pre-Katrina Levee Assessment Part 3 is a discussion of the overall storm surge sequence, levee failure modes, and causal limitations relating to the 17th Street Canal and London Canal seawall...

On the Failure of New Orleans levees: Has anyone asked if the hurricane wind forces comprimised the flood walls? The flood walls are segmented I-beams without any backfill. Is it possible that the wall segment interfaces were comprimised by winds and water seepage between the segments eventually caused the failure? Section IV. Supplemental Forces 3-25. Wind Load. Wind loads should be considered for retaining and flood walls during construction, prior to placing backfill. Wind loads can act any time in the life of a flood wall. In locations subjected to hurricanes, a wind load of 50 lb/sq ft can be...

Local authorities in our New Orleans levee project take the prize in the area of callous disregard and their bungling remains notorious to this day. From NRO: As a retired structural engineer who has done exhaustive work on bulk liquids retention structures, including dams, dykes and levees; also having audited engineering schematics on the New Orleans levees in the 1994-1996 era, rest assured that federal officials were properly concerned about that situation. The problem was that they were the only ones. We bucked and kicked local officials for years throughout the entire project. The municipality demanded the money, and received...

"I was looking at the levee, and water was just splashing over it a little - and then, BOOM! The barge hit, and it filled up in less than five minutes." This was a statement from a man rescued from near the Levee break. Has there been any definitive confirmation of barge damage?

Air America Hosts: Farrakhan Not Wrong on Levees Two hosts at the liberal radio network Air America are defending Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan - saying he's not wrong to suspect that white people deliberately blew up the levees in New Orleans. "You cannot blame people for coming up with conspiracy theories," Air America host Chuck D. said, after he was asked Thursday about the paranoid pronouncement by MSNBC's Tucker Carlson. Carlson gave him a second chance to denounce Farrakhan's lunatic declaration, saying, "You're a smart guy. You know that white people didn't blow up the levees to...