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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?