Everyone knows the levee failed, but do they know how & why? That is what this diary is about, so here goes;
In sum: the levee broke from underneath, because it was leaking through a bed of peat that it was sitting on. It was leaking before Katrina, the residents were complaining about water puddles, but it was not repaired in time.
The levee that failed was on the Lake Ponchartrain side. The lake bed has a sub strata of peat in the area of the the failed levee. But months before Katrina hit, the residents of lakeview were complaining about water polling int heir yards. NO sent out its sewer & water people, but they could not find anythign wrong with their hardware,s o they sent out a specialist, who told the residents of Lakeview that the water that was pooling up was from the lake, proving that the levee was leaking. An attempt was made to get it repaired, but due to time money & inefficiency, the repairs were not made.
So when Katrina hit, the added wind driven water sped up the leak until sub levee erosion, via the pourous peat began, and the steel reinforcement plate and the levee gave way. The giving way of the plate is what caused the loud sound that some have claimed to be an explosion.
After the flood, the cause of the leak was found: The levees have a steel barrier inside of them- in this case, it was supposed to be 17 feet deep, deep enough to penetrate the peat strata into solid earth. But the plates were found to be only 10 feet deep, so the did not penetrate the peat barrier and seal off the peat.
Although this places the blame on the Army Corps of Engineers for not checking the levee when it was being built, the blame still lies with Bush: He was told that the Lake levees badly need rebuilding and he still cut the ACOE budget to pay for the tax breaks for his rich friends.
Reference material:
The ACOE budget cuts:
CUT #1:
June 7, 2001 (AP)
"Bush signed his massive $1.3 trillion income tax cut into law--
a tax cut that severely depleted the government of revenues it needed to address critical priorities. Bush's first budget introduced in February 2001 proposed more than half a billion dollars worth of cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers for the 2002 fiscal year. Bush proposed providing only half of what his own administration officials said was necessary to sustain the critical Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project (SELA)--a project started after a 1995 rainstorm flooded 25,000 homes and caused a half billion dollars in damage. Similarly, less than two weeks after Bush signed his tax cut on June 7, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that "despite warnings that it could slow emergency response to future flood and hurricane victims, House Republicans stripped $389 million in disaster relief money from the budget."
Cut #2 (AP)
February 2, 2004
"White House on February 2 released a budget with another massive cut to infrastructure and public works projects--
this time to the tune of $460 million. As the Denver Post later reported, "the Southeast Louisiana Flood Control project sought $100 million in U.S. aid to strengthen the levees holding back the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, but the Bush administration offered a paltry $16.5 million." The Chicago Tribune noted that the Army Corps of Engineers had also requested $27 million to pay for hurricane protection upgrades around Lake Pontchartrain--but the White House pared that back to $3.9 million.
Gaps in levees around Lake Pontchartrain, which were supposed to be filled by 2004, would not be filled because of budget shortfalls. Corps officials told the Times-Picayune in April "that the lack of money will leave gaps in the structure, weakening its effectiveness and pushing back its completion date." Worse, because budget cuts had been compounding for three years straight, "even after all the gaps are closed, the levee must settle for several more years until it reaches its final height." By June, the newspaper reported that "for the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees."
"We are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us," Jefferson Parish emergency manager Walter Maestri said at the time, desperately begging the Bush administration to reevaluate its budget decisions. As he noted, the budget cuts meant that levee gaps would accumulate and "we'll end up so far behind that we can't catch up. ... And the further behind we get, the more critical the safety of the city becomes." But almost no one in Washington was listening. Ten days after the Times-Picayune story, the U.S. House passed a $155 billion White House-backed bill to cut corporate taxes. The Senate had passed a similar bill the month before. Republican lawmakers from the Gulf Coast--who purported to be concerned about infrastructure budget cuts--all supported the new tax cut."
the levee leaks:
Residents Say Levee Leaked Months Before Katrina (NPR)
"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."
http://www.npr.org/...
And finally, to show what Bush's reaction to the briefing:
Video Contradicts Bush Katrina Statements
by Margaret Ebrahim and John Solomon (AP)
"Bush didn't ask a single question during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on Aug. 29 but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared".
WASHINGTON -- In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, risk lives in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage of the briefings.
Bush didn't ask a single question during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on Aug. 29 but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."