Katrina Coverage

From this:
Soil tests indicate that a soft, spongy layer of swamp peat underneath the 17th Street canal floodwall was the weak point that caused soil to move and the wall to breach during Hurricane Katrina, an engineer who has studied the data says.
"The thing that is remarkable here is the very low strength of the […]

From this:
[Jesse] Jackson believes a big barge crashed through the floodwall here [Industrial Canal], bringing the tidal surge into this neighborhood, causing the devastation.
According to Ernest Murry from the Army Corps of Engineers, everything - including who owns the barge - is still up in the air. The barge has an ID #, but they […]

There are two pictures here someone took when trying to cross the 17th Street Canal into Lakeview. In the first there's a National Guardsman, in the second just a sign saying "No Civilians". (Unfortunately, there's "liberalism" in the first part of the post).

There's more on that possibility in "Pile of mud may be clue to levee failure". Also see the links here.

From "Ground Shifted Beneath Levees":
…Within days of the flooding, federal engineers asserted that the flood-control system was simply never designed for such a powerful storm.
Now, with evidence suggesting Katrina's intensity fell within the range the levees should have handled, corps spokesmen are saying the organization wants to conduct a full-scale analysis of the design and […]

From "Ground Shifted Beneath Levees":
…Levees and storm walls may be as much as 2 feet lower than they were designed to be, both because elevation data were outdated when the levees were built and because the land has continued to sink, [some experts] say.
…Experts also are studying the Army Corps of Engineers' 1990s project that […]

Lisa Myers of NBC reports in "New Orleans levee reported weak in 1990s":
NBC News has obtained what may be a key clue, hidden in long forgotten legal documents. They reveal that when the floodwall on the 17th Street Canal was built a decade ago, there were major construction problems — problems brought to the attention […]

There are several pictures of a barge that ran into a levee here. Note that those are on the Mississippi River side of things, and apparently no flooding was caused by those barges. Here's an aerial shot.
However, a commentor at a previous post of his site had this to say:
I've been speaking with some evacuees […]

Ivor van Heerden and others from LSU's Hurricane Center now say that the flooding of New Orleans was caused by either faulty design or fault construction of the floodwalls, rather than overtopping or other explanations: "Experts Say Faulty Levees Caused Much of Flooding". (Note that the WaPo's headline is confused: they aren't talking about the […]

This is from Aug 31, and discusses the funding for New Orleans' levees. I believe some of it has been contradicted by later reports, such as the news of what the levee board spends its money on.