First, though, we must grant a point to the skeptics. Geographer Tim McKinney offers a reasonable-sounding explanation for the "explosion" sounds reported by some witnesses. You can access his document here.
Does McKinney end the matter? Not so fast!
A reader responded to my previous post, in which I wrote these words: "Yes, levees do break. Especially levees facing a Level 4 hurricane. Especially when those levees were designed to withstand only a Level 3 hurricane."
The reader's response deserves repetition here:
Perhaps that is true, but it's irrelevant. A Level 4 hurricane did not hit New Orleans, and it wasn't levees that broke and flooded the city.This argument seems reasonable.
The hurricane's eastern, "buzz-saw" side was in Mississippi, its eye landed near the Louisiana-Mississippi border, and it was Mississippi that suffered the worst hurricane damage (see NYT).
The strongest winds New Orleans saw were 100mph, ie a weak category 2. This is why after the hurricane missed New Orleans and hit Mississippi, headlines said things like "New Orleans Spared, Stock Market Rallies" (Bloomberg)
You can see from the photos that New Orleans suffered very little damage from the actual hurricane.
Sometime after the 100-mph winds subsided, several concrete canals deep within the neighborhoods of NOLA developed large (40-foot) holes, somehow. These are NOT the infamous earthen levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain. They are, again, concrete canals that make their way through the center of town. Concrete structures do not rupture without the addition of considerable energy, and that is how we know that a windy evening was not the culprit.
A mainstream source now makes very similar points. Note this Times-Picayune story:
One of the central mysteries emerging in the Hurricane Katrina disaster is why concrete floodwalls in three canals breached during the storm, causing much of the catastrophic flooding, while earthen hurricane levees surrounding the city remained intact.More:
Why did we have no hurricane levee failures but five separate places with floodwall failures?" asked Joseph Suhayda, a retired LSU coastal engineer who examined the breaches last week. "That suggests there may be something about floodwalls that makes them more susceptible to failure. Did (the storm) exceed design conditions? What were the conditions? What about the construction?"The Times-Picayune article officially takes us out of the "conspiracy buff" realm. This is a legitimate mystery -- one which, so far, has baffled scientists.
Ivor Van Heerden, who uses computer models to study storm-surge dynamics for the LSU Hurricane Center, has said that fragmentary initial data indicate that Katrina's storm-surge heights in Lake Pontchartrain would not have been high enough to top the canal walls and that a "catastrophic structural failure" occurred in the floodwalls.
19 comments:
i saw on the day this happened on a 24/7 news a report that they had blown a hole in the wall to release water away from the city. i heard it with my own ears , real time,nbc abc cnn fox i dont know. i have a backup, per chance so i know im not insane, look it up, they blew a river wall.good luck.p.s. i have visited your site daily for a year. great site. the whole N.O. thing is very suspect.
Yes, there is now a legitimate mystery in how the levee walls failed. But it is an engineering failure that needs to be invesitgated, not a malicious act and subsequent coverup as you are insinuating.
And, yes, the networks did report they blew a hole in a levee. But it was not the levee walls named in this story. Rather, it was a levee in St. Bernard Parish, at the outskirts of the city, allowing water in that Parish to drain out.
as the TP story and the poster above, the mystery is an engineering one, not a question of whether someone blew a hole in the floodwalls.
while it's true a cat 4 hurricane did not hit NOLA, top sustained winds there were measured at 105, a strong cat 2, and gusts were much higher and very frequent. and don't underestimate those windspeeds. good god. additionally, the wind, as it moved toward the louisiana-mississippi line (oh, and that's SO far away from NOLA), pushed lots and lots of water up the river and then into Lake Pontchartrain.
by the way, the mississippi landfall was katrina's 2nd -- 3rd if you go back to florida. hours earlier, it made landfall near Port Fourchon. Louisiana. the buzzsaw side hit louisiana too, and while that part didn't hit NOLA, 1)remember the don't underestimate part and 2)the buzzsaw hit in just the right spot to push water up river in exactly the deadly way it did.
the levees there held. fine, in fact. the water sure rose. the water that flooded NOLA, tho, came from the canals, which are used to give water from the lake a chance to escape into the river -- only the river was full. the levees and floodwalls -- there are both there -- aren't built as well as the levees on the lake and river, because they're not expected to need to be as strong. Katrina, for what happened, was the perfect storm.
now, the floodwalls and levees on the canals began overtopping EARLY MONDAY MORNING, as the storm came ashore. that was reported both by the National Weather Service and local media. it takes time, then, for that constant water and wind push to eventually break either a floodwall or a levee. it's never an instant thing.
once the storm had gone on, there was word that the ACE was going to "blow" some holes in the levees to allow the water, which was now above the level of the river and of lake borgne, to flow back into those bodies. "blow" turned out to be the wrong word. what they did was kind of "punch" a hole with a pipe, which allowed the water to drain that way, and when they're done with it, be easy to plug back up.
there WERE levee failures, just not the big ones on the lake and river. the floodwalls on the canals aren't very thick -- look at the pictures -- and we're getting much closer to an engineering problem.
The TP article most definitely does NOT take the "blown levee" story out of conspiracy theory land. just the opposite, in fact. it supports a design flaw or construction theory.
And just you can't ignore it:
Those Bush-loving Darwin-hating quasi-retarded brutishly-primitive hillbillies
you southern soft-heads
you barbaric, Jesus-addled, Limbaugh-tomized red-state hicks
your arrogant lies and smears and fake science and supernaturalistic yawpings and ludicrous self-deceits
you Jesusmaniac simpletons
Taking the first step to This, are we?
'Nazi policies were initiated as early as 1933 to take steps to assure that persons who were "undesirables" were unable to dilute the Aryan race by reproduction. The first step was the forced sterilization of persons considered "mentally deficient." A July 14, 1933 law legalized sterilization for persons with certain hereditary diseases, and empowered the Hereditary Health Courts to enforce this policy. The intent of the program was to eliminate the possibility that these people and their potential offspring would continue to be a burden to society.
Once sterilization became accepted, it was only a matter of time until the Nazis went one step further in approving a program of euthanasia. Intentionally masked by the onset of war, mentally and physically handicapped persons were rounded up and sent to special facilities for "treatment." Most were never heard from again. The families of the victims would often receive telegrams informing them that their loved one had died of a heart attack or pneumonia. In this way, the Nazis hoped to eliminate defective genes from the population, which would have the effect of strengthening future generations of the "master race." Early victims of this program were given fatal injections. These facilities were soon equipped with gas chambers.'
I've seen elsewhere, where your type refer to those who believe in a Higher authority, as 'mentally deficient.'
You can see what we did to your kind 60 years ago. Start using the mind God gave and get the Hatred out of your system, bub.
For the canal genius: The canals empty into the LAKE, not into the RIVER. The water pushed into the river got to within six inches of the top of the river levees, but the river levees held.
For the "weak category 2" genius -- the wall of water that surged into the Gulf Outlet and Lake Ponchartrain was a wall of water being pushed by a Category 4 storm. This is especially important when looking at the Gulf Outlet, because the East End levees and the St. Bernard levees basically served as a funnel to push a wall of water up that outlet. The lock master at the point where the Outlet hits the Mississippi River reported early on that the floodwall there was being overtopped into St. Bernard and New Orleans Parish (the lock sits at the parish line to keep the river -- which is at about 20 feet above sea level -- from changing course into the canal, which is a few feet above sea level in normal use). And the LSU computer simulation accurately reflects this overtopping.
The only mystery is the city canals and why they breached.
That said, the LSU guy's computer modeling says the city canals were not overtopped. Either the model is wrong, or the canals failed for some other reason. Government corruption is one possibility -- i.e., that corrupt contractors paid off corrupt government inspectors to pass work that was actually of inferior quality. Or there is the enemy action hypothesis (the bombs theory). In any event, there's still a whole lot of information that we need before we can say anything at all.
Oh, one thing against the bombs theory -- I looked at the pictures from the air of one of the canal floodwalls that failed, and the floodwall appears to be completely intact with no damage that appears to be caused by explosives, it appears that the segments simply pulled apart from each other and washed down the side of the levee, as if the rebar connecting them broke or the contractor didn't put rebar in there at all in order to save money, not as if the joints were blown up by bombs.
But yes, I definitely agree there's a smell here. Too many things wrong. But what it all means, I have no idea yet.
- Badtux the "What's that smell?" Penguin
If you have poorly poured concrete it will easily have weaknesses that under pressure of the excess water could spring leaks. Think of the old Dutch story of the boy with his finger in the hole in the dyke. Once a small leak sprung it would slowly cause further weakness which would eventually give way.
sorry, bad tux ... you're right about the water flow. my addled mind reversed it.
by the way, that category 4 storm that hit down at gulf outlet took out 9 miles of st. bernard's 10 mile levee on the left flank. that was a heckuva wall of water that went up river that day, man. betsy was nowhere near that big.
who owned the property where the levees broke?
msnbc was reporting on this tonight and they pulled the story for an emergency jet landing story for the next hour
Disastrous politics
Mark Alexander (archive)
September 23, 2005 | Print | Recommend to a friend
As residents in coastal Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama continue to piece their lives back together, there are two persistent questions about Hurricane Katrina at the forefront of acrimonious political debate this week.
First, there is the lingering question of who is responsible for the lack of planning, preparation and infrastructural improvement in the days, weeks, months and years leading up to the hurricane. This all-important question, however, has spawned a concerted effort to focus on the sluggish federal response as a diversion. (As a resource for this question, see the Katrina Consequential Timeline)
Clearly there were bureaucratic failures by FEMA -- but that is the nature of the beast, and no amount of reform, other than decentralization, will change that. The most productive thing President George Bush can do to alleviate the bureaucratic abysses is to eliminate it. As noted in this column last week, "As a first measure, the President should fire every senior executive service lawyer in DHS, FEMA, DoD, et al. The entire federal bureaucracy is hamstrung by legalities."
As for the question of accountability in New Orleans, by now, everyone on the planet knows that most of New Orleans, with the exception of the original city settlement, has been developed below sea level -- surrounded by expanding levees intended to protect it from Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and the Gulf. Those levees, designed to withstand a category three hurricane, were never upgraded to withstand a category four or five hurricane, though clearly such a storm was inevitable.
On a good day, New Orleans continuously pumps water out of the alluvial bowl created by its levees, though building structures there continue to sink. In the event of a category four or five hurricane, however, 80 percent of the city would be swamped, and every politician from the city's mayor to the state's governor knew it. But the Big Easy is a party town -- a gambling destination -- and the city's leadership wagered the city against odds of a big hurricane.
In the years prior to Hurricane Katrina, there were numerous factors that precluded the strengthening of New Orleans' levees. The primary burden for inaction lies with generations of corrupt Louisiana politicians, from the Huey Long dynasty forward. Despite the city's continued below-sea-level expansion, these crooked and negligent pols paid little regard to levee strength, even in the face of repeated warnings about their inadequacy. There were also successful legal challenges brought by environmental groups who blocked the expansion and hardening of levees in an effort to protect the neighboring wetlands. Indeed, New Orleans' hurricane-defense system -- such as it was -- would have been greatly improved by the Army Corps of Engineers had it not been for environmental lobby lawsuits in both 1977 and 1996.
In recent years, Louisiana has received more federal taxpayer-funded Corps of Engineer grants than any other state and has received more levee funding under the Bush administration than it did under the Clinton administration. However, that funding has been limited by massive boondoggle infrastructure projects like the 700-percent cost overrun for Ted Kennedy's Big Dig -- $16 billion American tax payers spent on 7.5 miles of Boston highway that could have been spent on NOLA levees, but we digress.
The funding New Orleans did receive was often diverted by the city's Levee Board to other projects. For example, the Board spent $2.4 million of levee funding on a Mardi Gras fountain near Lake Pontchartrain, and $15 million more on overpasses to riverboat casinos. All the while, a big storm was on the horizon.
On Monday, 29 August, after a few days of evacuation flip-flops, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents emerged midday to the realization that Katrina's worst winds had landed to the east. Although Katrina was now tearing into Mississippi and Alabama, New Orleans had -- or so it thought -- dodged the bullet.
As waters continued to rise against levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain, there was some concern that Katrina's massive rainfall might yet overtop the levees. However, it appears now that the levees were not overtopped. In fact, there is compelling evidence that the floodwalls failed structurally in two locations -- which would not have happened if they had been built to specifications. (Contrary to assertions by Nation of Islam agitator Louis Farrakhan, the levees were not "blown up" in order to divert flood waters from "white" to "black" parts of the city.)
Simply put, somewhere there is a contractor, and a whole cadre of well-grafted inspectors, who are accountable for the structural failure of the levees. Finding that contractor will be one of many serious tasks facing congressional investigators in the coming months.
As you recall, in the immediate aftermath of the levee failure, Democrats were waving accusatory fingers and demanding an "inquisition commission." They were hoping for colorful headlines blaming the Bush administration and, by extension, anyone on a Republican ticket in the upcoming election year. Then, when Republicans joined in the call for investigations, Democrats quickly backed down and, indeed, refused to take part altogether. Upon reflection, they determined that an inquiry into factual communication, material distribution and evacuation failures after Katrina would instead bury Louisiana Democrats -- from buck-passing New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (see his evacuation plan) to lachrymose Governor Kathleen Blanco to hysterical Senator Mary Landrieu.
Truth be told, congressional investigators need only do one thing to get to the bottom of the floodwaters in New Orleans -- follow the money.
Rep. Tom Davis, chairman of the Select Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, said this week that his investigation will "move ahead" with or without Democrats. Rep. Davis, who also chairs the chamber's Government Reform Committee, said, "At the end of the day, we must come together for good, hard fact-finding." But, he noted, Democrats "could tie up the process forever, and losing time is losing information." (Of course, the Demos will obstruct the investigation, claiming it is a Republican cover-up.)
Perhaps the committee's first witness should be Bill Nungesser, a former Levee Board chairman who tried to reform the system. Mr. Nungesser says of the levee failure, "Every time I turned over a rock, there was something rotten. I used to tell people, 'If your children ever die in a hurricane, come shoot us, because we're responsible.' We throw away all sorts of money." (In other words, Louisiana Democrats had looted New Orleans long before Katrina hit.)
Rotten indeed, which leads us to the second pressing question about Hurricane Katrina this week: Who's going to pay for what -- and how?
President Bush has proposed a massive reconstruction effort that will ultimately cost perhaps $200 billion both in hard-dollar reconstruction costs and soft-dollar tax incentives, enterprise zones and the like. The President also called for modest cuts in other government programs to offset the reconstruction costs, anticipating that congressional Republicans would follow suit with more aggressive proposals for cutting other department budgets.
On that note, House Republican Study Committee chairman Rep. Mike Pence announced "Operation Offset" Wednesday, a proposal to cut $500 billion over the next decade. "We must begin now, as the American people expect particularly Republican majorities in Washington to do, to make the hard choices," said Pence, who anteed up $16 million earmarked in the just-passed highway bill for his district's roads and infrastructure. Pence was quick to add that cutting all the pork out of the massive $284-billion highway bill (about $120 billion) would offset only about half the Gulf Coast reconstruction costs, and that there would have to be substantial cuts across the board in other bloated programs.
In a remarkable move, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was quick to comply, announcing that she would return $70 million of the $129 million in highway-bill earmarks that she'd grabbed for her district.
Speaker Dennis Hastert warned, "We all know that we have a fiscal responsibility throughout this process. We want to make sure that taxpayer dollars are being used for their intended purposes and not being misspent."
Rep. Tom Tancredo added his concern about how reconstruction funds will be used: "The head of the FBI in New Orleans just this past year described the state's public corruption as 'epidemic, endemic, and entrenched. No branch of government is exempt.' The question is not whether Congress should provide for those in need, but whether state and local officials who have been derelict in their duty should be trusted with that money."
Undoubtedly, the potential for fraud is as massive as the reconstruction effort, and some of this "cost offsetting" is tantamount to dumping unconstitutional pork from one plate to another.
Amid all of this rancorous debate about who's to blame and who will foot the bill, the plight of those on the Gulf Coast who actually lost family members, homes and businesses somehow gets lost. Those at ground level are not worrying about political agendas. They're busy trying to provide for their families. Or perhaps they're searching through the rubble, trying to find fragments of family heirlooms and photographs. It is for them that we continue to pray every day.
They (zionist governors) blew the levees to trigger a large scale Black migration into the final majority white towns across the usa.
Bush aims for our extinction. Occording to zionists, Unsuicidal White people stand in the way of Jesus Christ's second coming.
It has everything to do with racism, but not anti-black racism, such nonsense serves their agenda, but rather jewish racism against white people.
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