BREAKING: Levée engineering flaws found & dismissed by ACE as early as1990

BREAKING: Levée engineering flaws found and then dismissed by ACE as early as 1990

Harry Shearer: Katrina's Smoking Gun Appears--Does Anybody Notice?

Today's Times-Picayune again leads the media pack, obtaining documents that forensic investigators looking into the Katrina floodwall breaches have found, documents that clearly pinpoint the moment when the Corps of Engineers appear to have engaged in what the paper's Chris Rose bluntly calls "criminal negligence". The documents, dating from 1990, show that the Corps' Vicksburg, Miss., office clearly calls into question engineering assumptions about soil strengths at the site of the 17th St. Canal floodwall project, then in final design review by the Corps.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20051230/cm_huffpost/013059;_ylt=A0SOwkr5hLVDl38AvhP9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhdA--


Documents, obtained by The Times-Picayune and provided to forensic engineers studying the levee breaches, show project engineers made a critical mistake in assessing soil strengths on the 17th Avenue Canal project, said Robert Bea, a University of California-Berkeley professor who is a member of the National Science Foundation team.

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/30/20029/111

there is little of substance in the shearer link, it's more an opinion piece, albeit an opinion i agree with

for more on the actual engineering errors ignored in 1990, go to the original nola story:

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1135925892299960.xml

it is quite a long piece but it seems clear the army corps of engineers swept known problems under the table

Investigators have long suspected engineering mistakes were at the heart of the levee and floodwall breaches. Not only did the structures fail before they reached design capacity, but documents show the designs were not appropriate for the weak soils and the depth of the canals, investigators said. Yet discovering why skilled engineers at reputable firms came up with obviously faulty designs, and how those mistakes were missed in the corps' lengthy review process, has stumped investigators.

Bea said the 1990 documents provide a two-part answer to one of the key questions in the investigation of the engineering behind work on the 17th Street canal and may hold true for failures at the London Avenue and Industrial canals as well.

The first part involves the choices engineers made to measure soil strength. A standard practice in levee design, Bea said, is to model soil strengths on the weakest layers in a project area. That allows engineers to design a structure that will withstand the most severe tests. That didn't happen on this project, Bea said.

the floodwalls just weren't right, the couple i knew who died in the london avenue canal breach, they had a chance to evacuate and they didn't take it, they thought they were safe, telling their son the house didn't flood during betsy -- and of course london avenue floodwall had substantial work done in the 90s

so they thought it was perfectly safe, i never felt unsafe when i lived in the house, which was built up, what do you do, you can't live your life assuming everyone else is incompetent

Not over judgment calls or discretion or what was the word used there? At any rate, over dispute over the human assumptions that go into something rather than scientific evidence (i.e. math errors of some kind), not estimation. So far that I've seen, organizations like this just do not allow second guessing of that nature because qualified engineers are not to be second guessed years later.

nt

However, the levees were built well before 1990. I lived in NOLA in the late 1970's and early 80's and everybody then knew that if a major hurricane hit that the city would be in deep trouble. It wasn't a secret.

thanks for the links.

war engines like moving towers, catapults, stuff for conquering sieged cities. They worked for Kings, Emperors and Generals of the military.

The deal is, if they fucked-up and made mistakes, their lives were measured in minutes. If they were successful and what they built worked, the world was their oyster. They accumulated great wealth and acclaim if they knew what they were doing, or they were killed if they failed.

It was a far simpler time then, there was no need for liability insurance and that sort of thing.

Even buildings were dedicated by having someone sacrificed under a cornerstone of the building. This was as late as the 1800th century in the last documented case in Europe of sacrificing someone to build a building. Belgium I think it was.

But nowadays, we are 'civilized'. Engineers get their wrists slapped for fucking-up, or stealing money that should have been spent on a construction job. Nobody is sacrificed.

We have insurance companies to give compensation to the families of those that die when engineers fuck-up. How much is a life worth? I know lawyers are fond of making calculations that conclude a life is worth $X based on earning potential, age of death and actuary tables. Can money 'compensate' for loss of life, when malfeasance or misfeasance is involved. I wonder, are crooked engineers as guilty of murder as a criminal that shoots someone during a robbery?

Maybe we are too 'civilized'.


Edit to add: In a way, humans are still sacrificed during construction of large projects. Two projects come to mind.

The first example was the construction of the suspension bridge across the Mackinnaw(sp?) Straights between the lower and upper Michigan. A worker slipped and fell into the concrete being poured for the bridge footing. There was no way he could be retrived, thus the pour continued and he was entombed.

The second example was a wall collapsed during the construction of a skyscraper in Detroit. The wall had not been adequately braced and a high winds blew it over killing 2 workers. Construction work can be hazardous. A moment of thoughtlessness, can be the end.

These examples are not deliberate sacrificing in the traditional way we think of it, but in a way, somehow it seems that blood payment is still made to some unseen forces in the world.

Just thinking in unusual ways here.

I am an Engineer, but don't take this post as a defense. These are just some observations that should make one leary of deciding this issue one way or another.

1) The most striking "evidence", in my mind, is that the failures occurred at the locations sited in the report, if the articles are true. That, however, is not conclusive. Katrina was an event beyond the design parameters of the levee system as a whole. Just because they failed at those particular locations, doesn't mean there was a design failure. It means that those points may be the weakest links, and as a result will be the first to give way when the design storm is exceeded. Which brings me to...

2) The purpose of the review at Vicksburg is oversight. It is their job to find faults with any design. It is a built-in safeguard. Vicksburg tries to poke holes in any design criteria. It is a part of every project. That they chose to point at that item is not surprising. Also note that bureaucratic agencies tend to CYA on any report they review. The fact that the Engineer in NO replied that it was a matter of engineering judgment implies nothing sinister. It is probably the most used rebuttal in the process. It would be incumbent upon Vicksburg to point out specifics and to file a grievance with the licensing board, if they felt that the design was inadequate for the specifications.

3) The last statement in the second account, is the revealing statement. I had absolutely no association with the project, but even I know from reading the professional literature that building a levee on the soils there is controversial. It is simply not feasible to take enough soil tests to eliminate the dangers there. As a result, the engineer goes with best practices of the time and location. This sometimes is not enough.

4) I'm a little suspicious of the statement that there was a "second" mistake in the slope stability analysis. It seems to leave open the possibility that the placed earth materials suffered from the same lack of consideration of the weak materials as the in situ earth materials at the base. This would be a HIGHLY unusual occurrence. Unusual to the point where it would be a difficult feat, unless one were TRYING to do that. I suspect what is more to the point is the inherent instability of the base was not taken into effect because the "average" strength was used in the analysis, but that would be "Problem #1" again, wouldn't it?

5) As to who's fault it is, that's a little ridiculous, isn't it? Do you honestly believe that Clinton or the Bush's spent one second of time considering the levee design in NO? These are matters left up to the faceless millions that we collectively call the governmental bureaucracy.

There may very well be a mistake made, and a villain in this story, but the case hasn't been made yet.