Rebuilding, Recriminations, and Restorations

Engineers are theorizing that weak soils under several of the levees were to blame for the failures, and not overtopping. That's not a surprise as some scientists and engineers had been saying that the storm wasn't severe enough to cause overtopping at 17th Street.

"The thing that is remarkable here is the very low strength of the soils around the bottom of the sheet pile" base of the floodwall, said Robert Bea, a geotechnical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who examined the test results. Bea is a member of the National Science Foundation team that is studying the levee system's performance during Katrina.

Bea said other data shows the same peat layer also runs under the London Avenue Canal breaches and probably was instrumental in those collapses as well.

Investigators are focusing on the 17th Street and London Avenue canal levee walls because, unlike other parts of the system, they apparently were not topped by Katrina's storm surge. That could mean a design or construction flaw is to blame for the collapses, and for the flooding of much of central New Orleans.

Read the rest of the article and you can see how it is possible that the soil strength was the key factor in the levee failure - the additional water from the storm caused further instability and pushed the levee off its foundations and caused the breach. If that's the case, we're talking about engineering failures on a massive scale, and one that calls into question the competency of those involved in the design, construction, and maintenance of the levee system.

Meanwhile Aaron Broussard is trying to fire a East Jefferson Parish Levee District Chief Patrick Bossetta. Broussard wants to put one of his own guys, Bobby Bourgeois, in the position. As some of you may recall, Broussard was the one who got on national tv and recounted a story about one of his coworker's mother who waited days to be rescued but drowned at St. Rita's Nursing Home. Broussard's story was a fraud, though St. Rita's was indeed the scene of a horrific tale - the owners failed to move the patients in the days before the hurricane hit and 34 patients died during the storm. This whole situation smacks of cronyism and one has to wonder whether Broussard is capable of handling things properly.

Back in New Orleans, Mayor Whiplash Nagin strikes again. The city officials have reversed the midnight curfew, and are letting less damaged areas stay open until 2AM. The new curfew is from 2AM to 6AM each day, though the rest of the city has an 8PM to 6AM curfew.

The new curfew marks a reversal of a midnight curfew Nagin said would be strictly enforced in the wake of a nationally televised beating by New Orleans police of a man on Bourbon Street.

Three police officers who punched and tackled 64-year-old Robert Davis, a retired teacher, have been charged with simple battery and suspended without pay, pending an inquiry. The officers charged Davis with public intoxication, resisting arrest and public intimidation. Both Davis and the officers have plead innocent.

Before the beating, the midnight curfew, as well as other, earlier curfews in the first days after Katrina, had been roundly ignored by many people, especially in the French Quarter. Some bars had stayed open, in their typical prestorm fashion, until the last paying customer walked out.

In recent days, many Bourbon Street bars have reopened in the Quarter, and some local staples have been open for weeks. Johnny White's never closed, and Molly's at the Market reopened immediately after the storm.

But many popular destinations for both locals and tourists, including Pat O'Brien's and the House of Blues, remain closed.

Technorati: flood aid; hurricane katrina; katrina aid; hurricane rita; slidell; biloxi; gulfport; pascagoula; nagin; blanco; barbour.