Mine: Taken by Katrina

I object! Here in the heart of New Orleans, our disaster was man-made. It was the worst engineering catastrophy in the history of North America.

Our outfall canal floodwalls fell down without even being overtopped by storm surge water (at less than half their design loads) because of negligent engineering in the design of those floodwalls’ foundations by engineers employed with the US Army Corps of Engineers as reported in the official levee failure investigation reports and reported to Congress by Corps leadership in June of 2006 and as decided by US 5th District Judge S. Duval in January 2008.

It is really very simple, technically. West of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, in the heart of the city (as well as the Lower Ninth Ward along the IHNC), the US Army Corps of Engineers used steel sheet-piles driven to only 17.5 feet below sea level when 60 foot below sea level was required to avoid failure had the water risen to the top of the walls. They did this because they made gross mistakes in their design calculations. It was pure engineering negligence. The barge entered the Lower Ninth Ward through an existing breach.

The levee failures and subsequent flooding were NOT because of ‘maintenance’ or our corrupt local levee boards and politicians or because of weak soil, barges, wind, rain, land elevation, levee heights, subsidence, budgets, democrats, republicans, crime, an act of God, school busses, our culture, environmentalists, neighborhood groups. It wasn’t even caused by FEMA, our Sewage and Water Board or our state’s Department of Transportation, or our poverty, lack of education or any of the other RED HERRING issues very successfully promoted by so many. It was not the fault of flood victims.

Blaming levee and floodwall failures on Katrina is like saying a bridge collapse was because of traffic. And, it seems many outsiders would even blame the drivers?

New Orleans and New Orleanians deserve vindication on these issues.