Les Jones

I'm not trying to be mean, but what is the point here? The legacy of engineering failures and miscalculations on the delta goes back 150 years. The system of leeves, floodgates, channels, pipelines, diversions and such is so complex there must be thousands of points of failure, the biggest being that we have accelerated the river's flow so that a significant portion of its silt load settles beyond the continental shelf.

The levees were rated to withstand a category 3 hurricane, and the levee boards and Corps of Engineers had been begging for money for critical repairs for decades, then skimming from the money they do get through graft, substandard work and plain old theft.

You must have some reason for belaboring the obvious.

To me it's an interesting story that's getting scant, page 14 coverage.

Your summary of the problem seems to be inaccurate. As the summary above makes clear, there were mistakes in accounting for the instability of the soil, and an even bigger mistake in calculating the depth of pilings needed. It wasn't that the system was in disrepair, it was that the system wasn't designed adequately in the first place.

The system was inadequately designed, at the largest scale not really designed at all, in disrepair, poorly built, mismanaged, underfunded, corrupt -- what bad can you say about the flood control system that is not true? Affixing details to a few of the myriad problems does not strike me as particularly interesting. What I am asking is why you find it interesting? Do these details inform us about where to go from here? Do they tell us something we didn't already know about how we got there to begin with?

You could make the same generalizations about the loss of the space shuttle Challenger: it was complicated, built with parts from the lowest bidder, major parts were re-used, atmospheric conditions could cause problems, the heat tiles constantly broke off, the computers were outdated, etc. But it was still important to figure out that it was the failure of O-ring seals on the side booster rockets at low temperatures that caused the destruction of the shuttle.

I mean, why wouldn't you want to know the facts?

With the Shuttle, you want to know what happened so 1) it won't happen again, 2) to see whether it was anyone's fault. Are you after #1 or #2 in this case?

Have I asked the question simply enough to get an answer this time?

Both.

Note, too, that in the case of the Challenger the explosion and investigation caused some people to question the wisdom of the entire space shuttle program (and those questions got even louder after the subsequent loss of the Columbia). Speficically, people started asking questions like:

- why do we have manned missions when unmanned missions could be used for much of the same work?
- why the emphasis on re-use of critical components like the rocket boosters?
- is the shuttle launch and re-launch schedule too aggressive?
- what is the likelihood of orbiter destruction Engineers estimated 1 in a hundred or thousand; managers estimated things like one in a hundred thousand, which we now know is absurdly optimistic.
- are we really getting any good science out of the space program, or is all the talk about science just for public relations? Feynman noted that he couldn't find much if any useful science - as opposed to engineering - that had come out of the space program.
- is there really any reason to use the shuttle when a design similar to the Saturn rockets would be cheaper and almost certainly more reliable?

I'd expect an investigation into the floodwall failures to produce similar questions about protecting New Orleans, about the efficacy of floodwalls, and about the political and engineering process that produces them.

I certainly hope those kind of questions get asked. There have been a number of articles recently that have questioned the wisdom of rebuilding, and that is encouraging. So far none of them have mentioned the billion-dollar diversion structure called Old River Control upstream of Baton Rouge that prevents the Mississippi from doing what it started to do decades ago, abandon the Acadian Basin, escape into the Atchafalaya, and establish a new mouth closer to Lafayette.