www.sacbee.com/303/story/44358.html

Earthquakes, not hurricanes, could destroy levees built on unstable land, professor says. Raymond Seed, a professor of civil negineering at the University of California, Berkeley, calls it the most expensive inch of soil in the history of the world.

Seed and a team of 37 engineers and hydrologists found that layer of soil beneath the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans when they investigated why the city flooded so badly during Hurricane Katrina last year.

It was a layer of organic material laid down across much of the city by another hurricane 250 years earlier. It had a consistency similar to “peanut butter and jelly,” Seed said, and it was not detected by soil tests prior to construction of the modern 17th Street levee.”

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