Irony of dependence


We're depending on government to solve the problems when the problems came from government to start with

The report came through. The blame is on humans, not Hurricane Katrina.

"People didn't die here because levees were overtopped," said Independent Levee Investigation Team leader Ray Seed, a geotechnical engineer at the University of California-Berkeley. "People died because mistakes were made and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced costs.

"New Orleans flooded not so much because there was a hurricane, but because of human error, poor decisions and judgments, and failed policies," said Seed, who traveled with other team members to New Orleans over the weekend to release their 500-page "draft final" report into what they say is the costliest catastrophic failure of an engineered system in history. Current damages are on the order of $100 billion to $150 billion -- and rising.

Floodwalls failed because they weren't built safe enough to begin with, and some levees washed away, not because they were first overpowered by a storm surge -- as preliminary findings by the Army Corps of Engineers suggest -- but because they were improperly built of sandy soils that the furious storm surge ate through before overtopping occurred, according to the report.

The report also ladles blame on Presidents, Congress, and local politics.

So who is in charge of the repairs and upgrades?

The President, Congress, and local politics.

Doesn't anybody see a problem there?

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - May 24, 2006 at 04:49 AM  Tag


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