New Orleans demands $77 billion in compensation

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
Corps of engineers failed to design the levees properly, not local contractors.

One levee failed when a 10kton barge hit it. It also failed where it was overtopped and the base eroded. Neither failure is related to design.

Learn your facts before you go off on denying a ruined city a chance to come back, *******.

Suing for $77B isn't "a chance to come back" it is nothing but blame shifting and asking the Feds to do everything for their lazy arses.

[Arrian]

AFAIK, the levees were constructed to deal with a Cat3 storm. The storm that hit was Cat4, was it not?

-Arrian

[Wiglaf]

I want $77 billion for Virginia, for, um, roads

Actually, that would be kickass.

You're so hardcore.

[Wiglaf]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/23/AR2005102301200_pf.html

[Wiglaf]

Was only a Cat 3 storm, and the Corps is to blame. See this is any of your wire reports, Gatekeeper? Dumbass.

NEW ORLEANS -- Within a space of 15 hours on Aug. 29, three massive, concrete floodwalls in separate parts of the city suddenly fractured and burst under the weight of surging waters from Hurricane Katrina. The breaches unleashed a wall of water that swept entire buildings from their foundations and transformed what might have been a routine hurricane into the costliest storm in U.S. history.

Today, exactly eight weeks after the storm, all three breaches are looking less like acts of God and more like failures of engineering that could have been anticipated and very likely prevented.

Investigators in recent days have assembled evidence implicating design flaws in the failures of two floodwalls near Lake Pontchartrain that collapsed when weakened soils beneath them became saturated and began to slide. They also have confirmed that a little-used navigation canal helped amplify and intensify Katrina's initial surge, contributing to a third floodwall collapse on the east side of town. The walls and navigation canal were built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for defending the city against hurricane-related flooding.

The preliminary findings -- based on physical evidence, Corps documents and hydrodynamic models run through a Louisiana State University supercomputer -- are the work of three teams of engineers and forensic experts conducting separate probes. The investigations are shedding light not only on the cause of the failures but also the scale of the rebuilding effort: The discovery of major flaws in the design of the city's levees and floodwalls could add billions of dollars to the cost of New Orleans' recovery.

Investigators already have rejected the initial explanation offered by Corps officials in the hurricane's aftermath that massive storm surges had overtopped and overwhelmed floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals on the north side of town. The new findings for the first time point to a human role in all three of the major floodwall failures that left about 100,000 homes underwater and caused most of Louisiana's approximately 1,000 hurricane deaths.

Experts now believe that Katrina was no stronger than a Category 3 storm when it roared into New Orleans, and Congress had directed the Corps to protect the city from just such a hurricane.

"This was not the Big One -- not even close," said Hassan Mashriqui, a storm surge expert at LSU's Hurricane Center. He said that Katrina would have caused some modest flooding and wind damage regardless, but that human errors turned "a problem into a catastrophe."

The National Science Foundation, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the state of Louisiana are all conducting investigations of the three major floodwall breaches and dozens of smaller ones. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced last week that the National Academies of science and engineering will lead a separate probe. The Corps has offered data and other assistance to the independent inquiries, but the agency has declined to speculate on the causes of the tragedy.

John Paul Woodley Jr., the assistant Army secretary overseeing the Corps, said it is still too early to cast blame for the drowning of New Orleans. But he said the Corps intends to learn from the Katrina investigations, and use the lessons to build stronger protections for the city.

"I'm not afraid of finding out the truth," Woodley said.

The independent investigations have pointed to two failures in the infrastructure maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers that were critical factors in the destruction Katrina wrought in New Orleans.

[Ming]

Would you two just chill... enough with the personal crap.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Ming
Would you two just chill... enough with the personal crap.

hey ming where you been ??

[Wiglaf]

I like how gatekeeper has bowed out. pwnt.

[Patroklos]

In reality, the levees were built to withstand a Cat3 hurricane, which it did (winds/sea surge), what they didn't withstand was the the rain the day after, flooding not coming form the sea, which you don't need a hurricane to create btw.

[kittenOFchaos]

Building a city below sea-level is something only a bunch of pot-smoking Dutch-men should be allowed to do.

[DanS]

Unfortunately, NO was grandfathered in.

[Zkribbler]

They built it above sea level and the pumped the water out of wells, and surprise, the city sank.

[SlowwHand]

Look, the only reason he asked for that amount was his mouthpiece said, "Well, why not? They might actually fall for it." So he did. But now he's thinking, "Oh, screw me. I'm going to look so bad over this one. I can't justify it."
He's already said "He told me to. Him. That guy over there. HEY! Come back here!"

[MrFun]

How much dislocation and dispossession of lower-income people and their property will occur with the new, reconstructed New Orleans?

[SlowwHand]

Let's talk about that. I guarantee you New Orlreans is safer now than ever before. Houston, San Antonio and Dallas got a lot of their criminals as refugees.