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At 19th anniversary of the worst engineering failure in US history
Founder Rosenthal is recipient of Editor's Choice Award of Literary Excellence from Reader's House
Mango Publishers announces Second Edition of Words Whispered in Water
“Public perception of levee failures and ongoing risk is largely based on falsehoods. We have done the fact-checking and are proud to present these truths.” H. J. Bosworth, Jr., P.E.,
Civil Engineer (1982–present)
TRUTH: Half of New Orleans is at or well above sea level.
Source: Tulane School of ArchitectureTRUTH: Pre-Katrina, more New Orleans homeowners had flood insurance per capita than the rest of the nation according to data obtained by Donald Powell with the Bush administration.
Source: New Orleans Times-PicayuneTRUTH: The Army Corps of Engineers spent only a few hours annually inspecting the levee districts’ maintenance before going to lunch.
Source: Water Policy, Vol 17, Issue 4 Monday Morning QuarterbackingTRUTH: As reported in the New York Times, experts J. David Rogers and Raymond Seed retracted this erroneous conclusion in their 2006 levee investigation. The levees failed mainly due to a mistake the Army Corps made in the 1980s when interpreting the results of their levee load test study.
Source: Water Policy, Vol 17, Issue 4; AbstractTRUTH: Sixty-two percent of the U.S. population lives in counties protected by levees.
Source: FEMA.TRUTH: Even the most desperate appeals to residents from local, state or federal officials did not warn that the levees could breach and fail. The first suggestion that levees could fail occurred at 1:47 a.m. in a memo from the Homeland Security Operations Center to the White House Situation Room, six hours after the evacuation was already completed.
Source: McQuaid and Schleifstein, Path of Destruction (Little Brown and Co, 2006), 179.TRUTH: New Orleans was the first urban area in the nation to create a regional board with experts.
Source: New Orleans Times-PicayuneTRUTH: The Army Corps decided that the High Walls Plan, or raising the heights of the levees, was less costly, less damaging to the environment and more acceptable to local interests.
Source: Water Policy, Vol 17, Issue 4; Frontage vs parallel protectionTRUTH: Judge Stanwood Duval’s 2009 settlement in the class action lawsuit against the pre-Katrina levee districts is neither proof of culpability nor acceptance of responsibility. It’s a settlement, and nothing more.
Source: New Orleans Times PicayuneTRUTH: No corps official has accepted responsibility for the failure of the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina without simultaneously – and also wrongly – directing blame toward local officials and environmental groups.
Source: Water Policy, Vol 17, Issue 4; Introduction