In the days, weeks, and months after the levees broke, the American people were handed a packet of myths. The myth packet maximized and exaggerated the vulnerability of south Louisiana, the culpability of those who chose to live there, and the strength of the storm. The packet minimized the role of the Army Corps of Engineers in the flood protection failures.
Since our founding, Levees.org has devoted a lot of time to challenging myths when they appear in print. So we were thrilled when we saw hurricane expert and author John McQuaid properly chastise a New York Times reporter for his shorthand. McQuaid observed sloppy work by Timothy Egan in a cover piece on Dave Eggers’s new book Zeitoun.
“Day 2, the world changes. Zeitoun wakes to a sea of water, after the levees have been overtopped. He’s neck-deep in a city of a thousand acts of desperation.”
As any New Orleans resident will tell you, the levees around central New Orleans, including the area where Zeitoun lives, were never overtopped. Rather, badly-designed floodwalls collapsed and breached in several places before Katrina’s storm surge got anywhere near the top. There was some overtopping in more-exposed areas to the east, but the vast majority of the flooding was caused by those breaches – in other words, human error by the Corps of Engineers.
This is not a minor semantic point.
Click here for the full post by John McQuaid.
http://johnmcquaid.com/2009/08/16/the-katrina-flood-was-a-man-made-disaster-part-xxiii/
I am a Civil Engineer who live in New Orleans East and in the weeks following Katrina I was assigned to travel New Orleans East and document the damage done to the levee system. What I saw was 8 different places where water breached the levee system and entered the New Orleans East basin, the greatest of which was about FIVE MILES of levee along the southern flank of New Orleans East that was flattened. This is where most of the water came from that flooded our houses. The “levee” that failed was never designed as a hurricane protection levee. It was basically spoil material (sand, shell and muck)from the dredging of the Intracoastal Waterway, covered with a clay cap. Once the clay cap was compromised the whole thing came unzipped. While the spotlight was on the drama unfolding at the 17th Street Canal, the Corps of Engineers, quietly rebuilt the levee and the press never got wind of it. This was a disaster waiting to happen and the press has given it no attention. They planned it to fail and they approved it and they lied to us and told us that it was safe to live in the East and when it broke they cover up the mess in the dead of night.
[…] water line is visible on this home in the Lakeview neighborhood in New Orleans Last month, John McQuaid chastized a reporter for the New York Times for lazy journalism, that is, describing the flooding […]