- That'll be $300 billion dollars, please.
-
- The time for excuses and foot dragging on the part
of the federal government has passed. It's becoming increasingly obvious
that the tremendous loss of property and displacement of the citizenry
of New Orleans was not the result of a mere natural disaster.
-
- Using data about the soil along the 17th Street Canal
-- data obtained from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, data that was used
to design the levees along the 17th Street Canal -- and plugging that data
into engineering equations used to determine whether a wall is strong enough
to withstand the force of rising water, Team Louisiana found that sheet
piling driven to the depths indicated on the Corps' plans for the levee
would not resist 14 ft. of water, but would fail at 11 to 12 ft. of water.
Further, they determined that the sheet piling was not driven to the design
depth of 17.5 feet, but that it was driven to only 10 ft.
-
- Investigators have been puzzled by the corps' design
since it was made public in news reports. They said it was obvious the
weak soils in the former swampland upon which the canal and levee were
built clearly called for sheet piles driven much deeper than the canal
bottom. It was not a challenging engineering problem, investigators said.
-
- Prochaska said a rule of thumb is that the length of
sheet piling below a canal bottom should be two to three times longer than
the length extending above the canal bottom.
-
- "That's if you have uniform soils, and we certainly
don't have that in the New Orleans area," he said. "It kind of
boggles the mind that they missed this, because it's so basic, and there
were so many qualified engineers working on this."
-
- WHAT THE F**K?!?
-
- First, they develop a design that is fundamentally
and obviously flawed. Second, they fail to even implement the flawed design
to spec. Third, the flaw is so obvious that at least two engineering firms
and two divisions of the Corps of Engineers (a minimum of 4 points of review)
missed it.
-
- Call me a radical, I suppose, but I think someone has
a lot of 'splaining to do. And I think that the federal government has
a lot of money to shell out: to homeowners, business owners, residents,
and yes, even to insurance companies. Because this disaster was incredibly
unnatural and very preventable. It shouldn't matter whether anyone in the
area affected by the 17th Street Canal levee had flood insurance or not,
because their damages were the result of negligence by multiple government
agencies and multiple independent engineering firms.
-
- Congress needs to get off their bribe-fattened asses
and pony up the cash, pronto.
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