Project Katrina

I’ve have written again and again about how Bush’s statement, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” is just false. The evidence was there. Government organizations raised a “red flag” many times. Scientific America did a long feature story on the topic. Heck, ask anybody that has lived in New Orleans that has a brain bigger then an acorn and they knew the danger. And now we have yet more evidence.

More then 20 years ago: “The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ built a levee and floodwall system to test a design similar to the 17th Street Canal in 1985, which indicated that failure was imminent, according to a statement from Raymond B. Seed and Robert G. Bea, in charge of the National Science Foundation’s Independent Levee Investigation Team.”

On Friday, according to USA Today, the Corps said the breach at the 17th Street Canal was the result of water working its way between the floodwall and the earthen levee into which it was set, and of soft subsurface clay. Once the levee split, the force of the high water pushed the floodwall, and the half of the levee behind it, backward on the clay, the corps task force said.

Do I think Bush and his staff should have known all of this info off the top of their head? Of course not. The government produces thousands, if not million of reports a year. But when it was clear Katrina was about to hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, you’d think mid-level staffers would have accessed this data and passed it up the chain of command.