New Orleans Levee: “safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost”

People in and around New Orleans remain afraid of levee breaks these days with the devastation caused by Katrina in 2005 never far from their minds. A new independent study released by two UC Berkeley Professors of civil and environmental engineering June 1st doesn’t give them any reason to feel more comfortable.

“The National Science Foundation-sponsored Independent Levee Investigative Team’s evaluation and scathing review of what happened to 350 miles of levees before, during and after Hurricane Katrina, admittedly the worst catastrophe in American history, uncovered the frightening truth about the man-made disaster that followed the storm and claimed nearly 2,000 lives.

The report is the result of an eight-month study by an independent team of 40 scientists and engineers led by Seed. The ILIT released the “Investigation of the Performance of the New Orleans Flood Protection Systems in Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005” on June 1.

“People didn’t die because the storm was bigger than the system could handle, and people didn’t die because the levees were overtopped,” Seed told reporters on June 1. “People died because mistakes were made and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost.” Source: CC Campbell-Rock SFBayView.com Full article here.

Comforting isn’t it?

People in South Florida around Lake Okeechobee are concerned that they’re next. Even suburbs like the one we live in here in West Palm Beach aren’t out of harms reach if a catastrophic breach like the ones caused by Katrina hit ‘Lake O,’ never mind the towns that sit right next to the levee walls.

Back in January The South Florida Water Management District hired three experts to evaluate the state of the Lake Okeechobee levee and reported that the dike has a one in six chance of collapsing without constant monitoring and repair. Nice huh? Basically the dike is an earthen levee that was built out of Lake muck in the 1930’s in response to the 1928 Hurricane that pushed waters over a much flimsier levee and killed 2,500 people. Today, there are a lot more people immediately surrounding the levee and that doesn’t even count the heavily populated Western communities of West Palm Beach such as Wellington, Royal Palm Beach and The Acreage.

Cross your fingers folks.