Nagin messing up the evacuation is only half the story here. CBS is further perpetuating the lie that New Orleans was devastated by the hurricane. Katrina made landfall east of New Orleans. The majority of the damage to New Orleans was a lack of preparedness for flooding which occurred in the aftermath when the dikes broke. The local Democrat-controlled dike commission had been preparing to divert funds for maintenance to the construction of a casino.
“The majority of the damage to New Orleans was a lack of preparedness for flooding which occurred in the aftermath when the dikes broke. The local Democrat-controlled dike commission had been preparing to divert funds for maintenance to the construction of a casino.”
Corps: Levees’ design caused deadly failure
Updated 6/1/2006 10:30 PM ET
By Alan Levin, USA TODAY
New Orleans’ levees failed during Hurricane Katrina because federal engineers for decades did not anticipate the potential height of storm waters and underestimated the strength required to hold them back, the Army Corps of Engineers concluded Thursday.
“That is a very sobering thing for us,” said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the corps chief. “This is the first instance of a failure of a corps design of any significance.”
A well-designed levee system might not have held back the high waves and storm surge that swamped nearly 80% of New Orleans and vast areas nearby, but it would have minimized damage and allowed a swifter recovery, the corps said in a 6,000-page report.
The design of critical levee walls that failed near Lake Pontchartrain on New Orleans’ north side was “marginal,” the report said. Tests conducted by the corps in the 1980s showed that the levees could crumble under pressure from high water — as they did after the storm hit on Aug. 29 — but those findings were not used in the design.
The corps oversees construction of flood controls in the nation’s waterways. Katrina damaged 169 miles of the 350-mile levee system that protects the New Orleans area and caused more than 1,570 deaths in Louisiana alone. The corps, Strock said, is “deeply saddened and enormously troubled by the suffering of so many.”
The report, prepared with the help of outside engineers and scientists, offers the most complete account yet of why the levees failed. Some engineers said the report did not go far enough in identifying failures within the corps. A report last month by engineers at the University of California-Berkeley urged that the corps be made more efficient and less vulnerable to political pressure.
“If you cannot fix the organizational problems, the flood control problems will never be fixed,” said Robert Bea, a Berkeley professor who helped prepare last month’s analysis.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-01-levees_x.htm