Levees Should Have Held

The Katrina finger pointing blame game will now morph into a debate over whether the New Orleans flooding was truly a natural disaster or a case of malpractice.

The Washington Post reports that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were smaller than authorities have suggested and that poor design, faulty construction or a combination of the two were to blame for the massive flooding of New Orleans.

Using computer models and visual evidence, scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers.

According to the Post, Ivor van Heerden, the Hurricane Center's deputy director, said the real scandal of Katrina is the "catastrophic structural failure" of barriers that should have handled the hurricane with relative ease:

"We are absolutely convinced that those floodwalls were never overtopped," said van Heerden, who also runs LSU's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes.

The evidence that the storm surge was not enough to overtop the 17th Street and London Avenue floodwalls includes a "debris line" that indicates the top height of Katrina's waves was at least four feet below the crest of Lake Pontchartrain's levees. The article also claims the breached floodwalls near the lake showed no signs of overtopping -- no splattering of mud, no drip lines and no erosion at their bases.

G. Paul Kemp, a hurricane expert who runs LSU's Natural Systems Modeling Laboratory is quoted as saying:

This should not have been a big deal for these floodwalls. It should have been a modest challenge.