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It seems the IPET made a huge error in their predictions of flooding in New Orleans’ Lakeview and Old Metairie neighborhoods. On June 20, 2007, the IPET team released flood maps saying the flooding in those areas was – due to the new floodgates and pumps – reduced by 5 feet. It turns out that flooding is reduced by only 6 inches.

Ed Link (head of IPET) said a human error (using a minus sign instead of a plus sign) caused the huge error.

For 5 months people have been using this information to make decisions. The error was uncovered by a third party who found the error deep in the appendices.

IPET knew about it and said nothing…..

You can find out more by clicking this link.

Sandy Rosenthal
Executive Director, Levees.Org

Levees.Org was served an order to Cease and Desist from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) on November 10, 2007. We were ordered to remove our funny student-made Public Service Announcement (PSA) from YouTube. If we refused, the ASCE promised “appropriate legal action.”

We stand behind every word of our PSA. But had we fired back with a rejection of the Cease and Desist, ASCE would likely have sued Levees.org not in Louisiana, but rather in Virginia where they are based. In that forum, it would have been difficult and expensive to find legal representation. Levees.Org does not possibly have the personnel, the resources nor the scope to take on a legal battle with a large powerful organization such as the ASCE.

Further, Levees.Org in no way wanted to bring harm to Newman school who was copied on the Cease and Desist.

So we removed our PSA video from YouTube late Tuesday night Nov 13, when the webmaster, my 17 year old son returned home from his State Cross Country meet.

Sandy Rosenthal, Exec Director, Levees.Org