Drowned by Human Incompetence

Drowned by Human Incompetence

By EUGENE ROBINSON
The Washington Post
May 31, 2006

The evidence, by now, is overwhelming: Beautiful, decadent New Orleans wasn't doomed by Hurricane Katrina, but by decades of human incompetence and neglect.

The mortal threat to New Orleans was not the powerful winds -- Mississippi took the brunt of those -- but the massive storm surge the hurricane generated. We now know that the levees, floodwalls and other barriers protecting the city were, for the most part, plenty tall enough and theoretically strong enough to keep the waters at bay. On paper, New Orleans should have ended up wet and wounded, but basically intact.

What happened instead was "the single most costly catastrophic failure of an engineered system in history," according to a report issued last week by the Independent Levee Investigation Team, a blue-ribbon panel led by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and funded by the National Science Foundation.

Some of the flood barriers were built using inadequate materials, the report says. Others were designed so poorly that they provided weak spots for the waters to exploit. Still others were left unfinished for lack of funds. The Army Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for building the levees that failed, has not yet issued its own final report on the flood and likely will dispute some of the independent team's conclusions. But Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff remarked last week that "had it not been for what appear to be structural problems in the building of the levees, Katrina would have been a bad hurricane" but not an unparalleled catastrophe.

More @ http://tinyurl.com/qklwb WSJ Also see related http://tinyurl.com/fp96n reuters

You would think that with some of the best engineers and materials in the world we could a first class job with levees, dikes, bridges, and so on, however that is not the case. We seem to be stuck somewhere in the 3rd world with taxpayer funded construction projects! I firmly believe that its not so much incompetence as it is the siphoning off of funds for building projects into the hands of crooked politicians and vendors that is to blame for shoddy construction. IMO. NOLA is a prime example of funds siphoned off and shoddy construction allowed to become the norm. And who pays for all this? Why the American taxpayer in lives and money lost.

Don't look for any of this to change real soon. The cycle siphoning off of funds and less than adequate construction is firmly rooted in American politics and American business.