http://wizbangblog.com/...
Over on the "Wizbang" blog (you can read the full post and see the video referenced below at the link above), "Paul" has shown some pretty interesting evidence that the levee breach which flooded much of the city was inevitable, and Katrina was just the final nail in the coffin. In actuality, Katrina SAVED lives, he says, because many people HAD evacuated.
See below for more:
This is the levee about a week after the storm went through and it had been repaired.
This is a screencap of a video taken by a N.O. firefighter right as the levee began pouring water into New Orleans (note: I originally misidentified this as the Lower 9th Ward. The 17th St. Canal is not the lower 9th, my error)
Notice anything odd? Look at the BACK wall of the levee, away from where the break is. Notice the bushes? They are at almost exactly the same level in both images! The levee was NOT being topped.
Paul then links us to a November 22, 2005 NPR story:
http://www.npr.org/...
Residents of New Orleans who live along the 17th Street Canal say that water was leaking from the canal and into their yards months before Hurricane Katrina caused the levee system to collapse. The leaks, they say, occurred within several hundred feet of where the levee later failed.
State and federal investigators say that a leak may have been an early warning sign that the soil beneath the levee was unstable and help explain why it collapsed. They also say if authorities had investigated and found that a leak was undermining the levee, they could have shored it up and prevented the catastrophic breach.
Paul goes on to say:
The bottom line is, Katrina's storm surge did not wash the wall away. As you may remember, water had been seeping under the floodwall at the break location for about a year before Katrina. The ground under the levee was soaked and ready to give at any moment...
New Orleans was doomed with or without Katrina, we just didn't know it. A good high tide puts more water in the canal than this. As the video shows, the water was barely higher than normal levels. The walls could have failed on a decent high tide.
From the looks of the video the fact the wall failed when Katrina was approaching was really coincidence. Yes, Katrina was the "final straw" but so could any winds from the southeast. Or any given winter storm. (we often get winds out the south that "stack" the lake far higher than this.) Indeed these same walls held much higher surges in the past; that is, before they were undermined by seeping water for a year.
Ironically the same flawed walls are incrementally safer now. We'll never have water seeping under them for a year and nobody doing anything. The flaw(s) is still there but now we can compensate for it more effectively. The right answer, of course, is to replace them.
What I will say next will probably completely throw you. Katrina saved probably over 50,000 lives.
That levee was doomed. If it had failed without notice, the death toll would have been measured in tens of thousands. There would be no evacuation, no preparation, no Feds at all. (such that they were anyway) no Coast Guard in choppers etc. Tens of thousands of people would have been dead in hours and tens of thousands more would have died on 120 degree rooftops waiting for rescue. It would have been unimaginable. - More unimaginable.
"Luckily" -and I groan when I say that- Katrina allowed the city to be evacuated.
I've said it for months. Katrina didn't flood New Orleans. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But what I find just as troubling is the history of this video. It was turned over to Federal authorities just days after the storm. The firemen who took it were told they would be fired if they spoke about it. For months the Corps -who had to have seen the video- claimed the walls were overtopped. For months the firemen listened to the lies and never said a word.
There was no national security reason to hold the video as there might be of a terrorist attack. In fact the video would have helped the scientists studying it determine the cause. Congress had the firemen testify behind closed doors then placed a gag order on them.
I routinely mock conspiracy theorists but I have trouble understanding why this tape was withheld for months. What I also find interesting is that the Corps denied they were to blame until June 1... Just TWO WEEKS before this video was quietly released.
I think 50,000 is a bit high of an estimate personally. Still, it is pretty compelling.
Wait, you say, what's that about the Corps taking blame? You missed that one, you say?
Well, here it is:
http://www.forbes.com/...
A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data.
"This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, `We've had a catastrophic failure,'" Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season.
[...]
Serious work began on New Orleans' hurricane protection system in the 1960s after Hurricane Betsy flooded the city in 1965. But over the decades, funding slackened and many parts of the system were not finished by the time Katrina hit.
The result was a disjointed system of levees, inconsistent in quality, materials and design, that left gaps exploited by the storm, the report said.
Also, engineers did not take into account the poor soil quality underneath New Orleans, the report said, and failed to account for the sinking of land, which caused some sections to be as much as 2 feet lower than other parts.
Four breaches in canals that run through New Orleans were caused by foundation failures that were "not considered in the original design of these structures," the report said. Those breaches caused two-thirds of the city's flooding.
Clearly, this is just one blogger. This is my first time reading this blog, I found the link on metafilter.
It looks pretty compelling to someone with zero expertise. Anyone have any further insight into this?