Good news for PBLS bad news for New Orleans - this NY Times article appeared on my work news intranet site - I don't have the original link - pasted only the first portion of the article:
Levee Repairs Show Signs Of Flaws
By John Schwartz
May 6, 2007
Some of the most celebrated levee repairs by the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina are already showing signs of serious flaws, a leading critic of the corps says.
The critic, Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said he encountered several areas of concern on a tour in March.
The most troubling, Dr. Bea said, was erosion on a levee by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation canal that helped channel water into New Orleans during the storm.
Breaches in that 13-mile levee devastated communities in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, and the rapid reconstruction of the barrier was hailed as one of the corps’ most significant rebuilding achievements in the months after the storm.
But Dr. Bea, an author of a blistering 2006 report on the levee failures paid for by the National Science Foundation, said erosion furrows, or rills, suggest that “the risks are still high.” Heavy storms, he said, may cause “tear-on-the-dotted-line levees.”
Dr. Bea examined the hurricane protection system at the request of National Geographic magazine, which is publishing photographs of the levee and an article on his concerns about the levee and other spots on its Web site at ngm.com/levees.
Corps officials argue that Dr. Bea is overstating the risk and say that they will reinspect elements of the levee system he has identified and fix problems they find. The disagreement underscores the difficulty of evaluating risk in hurricane protection here, where even dirt is a contentious issue. And discussing safety in a region still struggling with a 2005 disaster requires delicacy.
AI
