Katrina Coverage

According to Bush Adviser Acknowledges Lack of Preparation for Katrina, on the night of Monday August 29, Marty Bahamonde reported to Michael Brown that "he had observed a massive break on the Lake Pontchartrain levee [the 17th Avenue Canal levee] and flooding over 80 percent of the city". Brown told Bahamonde that he would call […]

WASHINGTON — The Army Corps of Engineers is planning to repair New Orleans area levee breaches caused by Hurricane Katrina with fortified walls much stronger than the originals, design documents show.
Where some floodwalls — consisting of a concrete section mounted on a steel base — collapsed, the corps wants bulkier concrete walls and significantly deeper […]

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 […]

Here's a site that appears to have Army Corps of Engineers and related engineering reports for sale (levees, seepage). I don't know if they're available directly from ACE for free. And, the reports go back several years.
From "Performance of Levee Underseepage Controls: A Critical Review" by the ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER VICKSBURG MS […]

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 […]

The BBC will be showing a doc called "The Hurricane That Shook America", and they promote it in Fema 'knew of New Orleans danger'.
There appear to be two slightly newsworthy bits of info:
a key briefing officer within Fema sent a message directly to Mr Brown early on the day before Katrina hit, warning him […]

From "Engineers: New cause of New Orleans flood":
Much of the city flooded not because water rushed over the tops of levees, but because two of the storm barriers that ring New Orleans actually shifted and then collapsed, a team of independent engineers said Friday.
The preliminary analysis contradicts initial reports by the U.S. Army Corps of […]

As I've been trying to point out, when the media refers to "levees" in some cases they're refering to floodwalls. Now, from the It-takes-a-DUmmie category comes this picture-heavy thread showing the difference and the distinction between them.

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 […]