Levees Breached Not Topped, Soggy Peat, Design Flaws Apparent

May 19, 2006 - Why Did the 17th Street Canal Levee Fail? - The London Avenue Canal and the 17th Street Canal both failed when water had only risen part of the way up the wall. Had those walls held, large sections of New Orleans might have stayed dry...

Dec. 01, 2005 - For Levee Tour, Inspectors Plotted Their Every Mousse - When engineers and Orleans Levee Board officials gather twice a year to tour the city's floodwalls, records show that the inspection requires less planning than the day's final event: lunch...

Nov. 22, 2005 - Residents Say Levee Leaked Months Before Katrina - When the New Orleans levee system collapsed, one of the major breaks came along the city's 17th Street Canal. In recent interviews, neighbors say that, months earlier, canal water was leaking through the levee -- within several hundred feet of where it later failed...

Nov. 10, 2005 - Sonar Shows 17th St Canal Levee Sheet Metal Pilings are 7 Ft. Shallower Than Corps Claimed - Independent engineers have questioned whether the pilings, even at the corps' stated depth, went down far enough to support the floodwalls and prevent storm surge from penetrating beneath the earthen levees and causing structural failure...

Nov. 10, 2005 - U.S. Attorney Looks at Possible Corruption in Levee Probe - "We are aware of individuals in public situations who have undisclosed conflicts of interest, and we're extremely concerned about those," Letten said, though he declined to name them...

Nov. 3, 2005 - Corruption May Have Helped Undermine City Levees - "We're receiving disturbing reports that there may have been some conscious human error involved. There may have been some malfeasance," said Raymond B. Seed, a civil engineering professor at UC Berkeley who is heading an inquiry financed by the National Science Foundation...

Nov. 2, 2005 - Investigators Release Preliminary Findings of Levee Failures at Senate Hearing - Many of the New Orleans levee and floodwall failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina occurred at weak-link junctions where different levee or wall sections joined together, according to a preliminary report released today...

Oct. 22, 2005 - Officials Knew About Weak Soil Under Levee - Army Corps of Engineers officials and the contractors who designed and built the wall were aware of the soft soil and took it into account in their design calculations, the documents show...

Oct. 2005 - Fat Fingers Inside 17th St Canal-Hurricane Barrier Lawsuit - As President of Orleans Levee Bd. in the 1960's,Gerald Gallinghouse played a leading roll in the development and settlement of the New Orleans Lakefront area. This area has been now totally flooded due to the 17th Street outfall drainage canal containment wall failure...

Sept. 30, 2005 - 17th St. Levee Reported Weak in 1990's - 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...

Sept. 21, 2005 - Experts Say Faulty Levees Caused Much of Flooding - Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood- protection system should have kept most of the city dry...

Sept. 18, 2005 - The Aftermath: Corps' Defenses Went Awry - After Katrina and its enormous human toll, critics say the corps should rethink its bottom line approach to hurricane protection. They say the storm exposed flaws in the corps' planning that might blind agency leaders and Congress to solutions that are more effective in saving lives...

Sept. 2, 2005 - Corps Takes Heat on Levees - Two central questions will be hashed out in the months ahead. Did the Bush administration, fearing the Corps budget was being treated as congressional pork, shortchange the system in a way that contributed to the catastrophic failure of the levees after Hurricane Katrina struck the city? And did a design flaw or the recent work on the system overseen by the Corps contribute to the problem?

Sept. 1, 2005 - City's Defenses Weakened, Ignored - The city's fabled levees were vulnerable, but government was unwilling to spend the enormous sums to strengthen them. Instead, money was poured for decades into attempts to control the flow of the Mississippi River, in the process destroying Louisiana's delta wetlands that weaken storms when they come ashore...

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