Sunday, September 25, 2005
 The orginal "official story" of how the New Orleans levees blew has been exposed as a fraud. LSU says the canal floodwalls "failed at a power elevation." Gee, like they just blew up or something.
From Baton Rouge Daily Advocate Sept. 22: An LSU hurricane expert said floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals in New Orleans weren't "overtopped" by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge, meaning the structures failed for other reasons.
Paul Kemp, director of the Natural Systems Modeling Group at LSU's Center for Coastal, Energy, and Environmental Resources, said researchers studying watermarks and other evidence to sharpen their future predictions saw no evidence that walls along the two canals had been overtopped. Breaches along those canals accounted for much of the flooding in New Orleans.
The findings of the LSU center, which predicts hurricane storm surges for emergency officials, clashes with the explanation that has been given by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The corps has said the floodwalls collapsed after water flowed over them, eroding the back-side levees inside which the floodwalls were erected. Once that support was eroded, the floodwalls burst, sending water pouring into the Lakeview area and all the way to downtown, the corps surmised.
But Kemp said his group's models are designed to predict levee overtopping. The predictions called for 11- to 12-foot surges in the canals, he said. Overtopping would have required about 14 feet, he said.
[..]
Observations on the ground after the storm support those predictions, he said.
[...]
"If they are not overtopped, it means they failed at some lower elevation" of water, Kemp said.
[...]
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