"Leaking levee in New Orleans alarms experts; They question work elsewhere; Army disputes outside review"
NEW ORLEANS - Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city's flood defenses.
Outside engineering specialists who have studied the project said the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm.
The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so far of the $14 billion Congress set aside to repair and upgrade the metropolitan area's hundreds of miles of levees by 2011. Some outside specialists said that the leak could mean that billions more will be needed and that some of the work already completed may need to be redone.
And YOU PAID FOR IT, Americans!!!
"It is all based on a 30-year-old defunct model of thinking, and it means that when they wake up to this one - really - our cost is going to increase significantly," said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California at Berkeley.
The Army Corps of Engineers disputed the dire assessment. The agency said it is taking the risk of seepage into account and rebuilding the levees with an adequate margin of safety....
Yeah, sure they are.
The 17th Street Canal floodwall collapsed on the day Katrina sacked New Orleans in August 2005, and the failure severely damaged Lakeview. It was one of the biggest of about 50 levee breaches that contributed to the deaths of about 1,300 people.
Fixing the 17th Street Canal has been one of the most expensive and laborious repair jobs since the storm and has served as something of a test case for scientists and engineers, who plan to apply the lessons learned there to the city's other levees....
Engineers said the boggy ground is a more serious problem than the corps realizes. Bea said there is a roughly 40 percent chance of the 17th Street Canal levee collapsing if water rises higher than 6 feet above sea level. During Katrina, the water reached 7 feet in the canal.
John Schmertmann, a retired University of Florida professor and a consultant on foundations, agreed with Bea that the corps "may still be embedding some of these not-properly-considered factors, so the new walls may not do what the corps expects."
Pffffffttt!
.... Donald Jolissaint, chief of the corps' technical support branch in New Orleans, said the problem at the 17th Street Canal is not serious.
"I personally do not at all believe that this little wet spot is anything that is going to cause a breach or a failure of any kind," he said.
Well that's comforting, isn't it?
And George Bush believed there were WMDs in Iraq, too!
A newly installed floodgate could be used to cut off the flow of water into the canal and reduce pressure on the levee, he said.
Nevertheless, the corps is concerned enough that for weeks, workers have been analyzing the wet spots and digging a 160-foot-long, 10-foot-deep trench to zero in on the source. "We're doing everything we can to chase this down," Jolissaint said....
But DON'T WORRY, no problem!!!! Are you SICK of the LIES yet, readers?
Seepage was reported at the 17th Street Canal before Katrina. The corps denies that caused the collapse. Instead, the corps contends the floodwall flexed and finally cracked under the force of water the storm piled against it."
I heard the levees were actually blown up!!
That's what residents contend, and if you think it through, it makes sense.
If you wanted to drive poor people away so you could sweep in, get the land for pennies on the dollar, and then make riches through "redevelopment" it makes PERFECT SENSE, doesn't it?
So the GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE is a PLAN, isn't it?
