Looks like there are many things that have gone wrong from some of the work done years ago....It's going to be just a plain mess to try to sort things out. Part of the problem that I can see is why should the taxpayer continue to put good money after bad....Until there are explanations as to what went wrong, how can they consider making something new in the place of the "mess"....
One "new" added on top of a "old mess" makes a New Mess to deal with...
>>>>> A 1980s-era Sewerage & Water Board dredging project in the 17th Street Canal next to the breached area left the Orleans Parish canal-side levee wall much narrower than that on the Jefferson Parish side. Investigators say that change probably contributed to the failure of the wall.
Pittman Construction, the contractor that built the 17th Street Canal wall, ran into trouble driving sheet piles in 1993. When the concrete tops to the walls were poured, documents show, the walls tipped slightly. Though the corps attributed this to Pittman's methods, not the site conditions, and a judge agreed, some engineers say the difficulty they encountered was an early warning sign. <<<<<
>>>>> It will takes months, and possibly years, to arrive at a detailed assessment of what went wrong and assess responsibility, engineers familiar with the situation say. Investigators must determine not only why individual wall sections failed, but they also must trace the roots of decisions, untangling overlapping responsibilities of the corps, private contractors and local agencies. A federal interagency team investigating the system won't make its report until June. A National Research Council team is only now being formed.
So far, the scope of the disaster, and the human element central to it, have only begun to sink in among political leaders and agency heads, including the corps, which is at the center of all the inquiries. The corps has declined to comment on the causes of the levee failures, pending the outcome of its own studies.
People familiar with the agency say the disaster means things might never be the same.
"In the old days the corps used to get criticized for being way too conservative in their designs," said Don Sweeney, a corps economist for 22 years who left after exposing irregularities in the agency's economic impact statements and now teaches at the University of Missouri. "They would design a structure with a safety factor of 4 or 5. They did have that reputation of building things with integrity that were built to last. And if they said it was built to do something, it would do it." <<<<< |
