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
Thanks for the information and link. NOLA has always been one of my favorite cities; I’ve been there many times in my life, perhaps 4 or 5 times since Katrina. I hear many misconceptions about the disaster, but clearly am not into it as you and your nephew are. My main reason for addressing this is that so much of what the media reported about the aftermath just wasn’t so, presented in a partisan fashion to hurt the GWB Administration. Just my $0.02 worth.