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The force of surging high water from Hurricane Katrina bent back a key New Orleans flood wall and splintered its foundation, an investigating panel said yesterday in a report that sheds new light on the cause of the city's flooding while raising questions about the safety of the city's surviving levees.

The report contradicted earlier views about why the 17th Street Canal flood wall collapsed, but it also said that the failures were "not anticipated" by the levees' designers and that the system did not perform as intended. A 450-foot section of the flood wall near Lake Pontchartrain collapsed Aug. 29 without ever being overtopped by Katrina's storm surge, according to the panel, which was appointed by the Army Corps of Engineers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031002105.html

Here's the whole Google string for the reports:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&ncl=http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-levees11mar11,1,6530893.story%3Fcoll%3Dla-headlines-nation