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http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/11/02_levee.shtml

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“BERKELEY – Many of the New Orleans levee and floodwall failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina occurred at weak-link junctions where different levee or wall sections joined together, according to a preliminary report released today (Wednesday, Nov. 2) by independent investigators from the University of California, Berkeley, and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

Raymond Seed, UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Peter Nicholson, an associate professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Hawaii, presented several findings at a hearing this morning in Washington, D.C., before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Seed is the head of a team investigating the levee failures with funding from the National Science Foundation and the UC Berkeley-based Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and Nicholson is head of the ASCE geotechnical team.”

You can read the complete article by using the link noted above.

http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2006/08/29/grunwald/index.html?source=daily

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“If an unsafe building collapsed and killed 1,000 people, we wouldn t blame the buildings manager, even if he bungled his evacuation plan, or its maintenance crew, even if they had shirked their jobs before the disaster, or the rescue squad, even if it was terribly slow to respond. We wouldn t shrug and blame Mother Nature. And we certainly wouldnt blame the victims — especially if they had been assured the building was safe.

We would blame the architects and engineers who produced the unsafe building. And we might ask some tough questions about the way our buildings get produced.

Apparently its different with unsafe levees. Otherwise, the fingers of an outraged nation would point directly at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that drowned New Orleans a year ago. And the Hurricane Katrina anniversary coverage would focus on Americas dysfunctional system of funding water projects, a system owned and operated by shameless porkers in Congress and their environmentally destructive servants at the Corps.”

Check out the link noted above if you want to read more of this article by Michael Grunwald, a Washington Post reporter.