Katrina levee expert named ASCE fellow

J. David RogersDr. J. David Rogers was recently named ASCE Fellow.

Dr. Rogers is the go-to whenever major media needs expert commentary on dam failure, levee failures and landslides. He also very well known in New Orleans Louisiana.

He was the lead researcher on a paper published in 2015 in Water Policy journal titled “Interaction between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Orleans Levee Board preceding the drainage canal wall failures and catastrophic flooding of New Orleans in 2005.”

This article, featured in a 2015 Sunday New York Times article, focused attention on the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and its lack of external peer reviews that allowed for faulty flood walls to be installed in the city.

It pinpointed the key factors that led to the walls’ failure during Hurricane Katrina and the actions taken years by the corps – before the disaster – that allowed the engineering oversights to occur.

“As more information has emerged from the time of the disaster and its prior decision-making processes, new details allow us to have a better idea of the situation and what led to the various levee failures,” says Rogers. “This article is meant to put the record straight about the conclusions people drew from the disaster, many of which were based on incorrect information.”

Rogers and his co-authors said that the main fault in the failure of the flood walls along the city’s principal drainage canals was the misinterpretation of a full-scale load test carried out by the Corps in the Atchafalaya Basin near Morgan City, Louisiana in the mid 1980s.

Dr. Rogers has also written articles and prepared posted lectures on the evolution of flood control practice, the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal and the Tennessee Valley Authority, among many others.

2 responses to “Katrina levee expert named ASCE fellow”

  1. Delores Moline says:

    Why is it taking so long for the people of NOLA to be compensated for Katrina. Is it because of the RACE game;where it was a surprise that so many blacks owned their homes? There have been quite a few hurricane disasters since Katrina,many of those have been settled and the people affected have been made WHOLE again —not NOLA.Politicans need to get real and stop lying.

  2. S. Rosenthal says:

    The fact that so few in Greater New Orleans were made whole after the flooding is a painful truth. The number one reason is the Army Corps of Engineers was found, by the courts, to be immune from paying financial damages due to verbiage in the Flood Control Act of 1928. I addressed this travesty in my Point of View article published in the Times Picayune regarding The American Crime Story.

    http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2016/04/katrina_american_crime_story.html

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