TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Sunday, November 06, 2005

The newest twist being peddled is that a contractor here or there used inferior materials, which then apparently spontaneously combusted and "heaved" in the hours following the Category 2 winds Katrina brought down upon the canal levees in New Orleans proper.

From Los Angles Times November 3, 2005:

"The New Orleans levees that ruptured during Hurricane Katrina's storm surges two months ago were weakened by widespread structural flaws, and the construction of several floodwalls may have been undermined by possible corruption, engineering experts told a Senate committee Wednesday.

"We're receiving disturbing reports that there may have been some conscious human error involved. There may have been some malfeasance," said Raymond B. Seed, a civil engineering professor at UC Berkeley who is heading an inquiry financed by the National Science Foundation. "We're pursuing evidence of those stories."

Seed would not detail the allegations....

The officials declined to be identified because the investigation was still in an early stage and the allegations had not been verified.

"These levees should have been expected to perform adequately if they had been designed and constructed properly," Seed said.
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A few weeks before, it was the native peat soil which spontaneously combusted. This Seed was pushing this angle.

From Washington Post Sat, Oct. 08, 2005:

"At the 17th Street Canal, they said, a section of the levee embankment moved back 35 feet. There is evidence of a similar "soil mass movement" at one of two London Avenue sites. The engineers speculate that either the pressure on the walls pushed them back against the soft soil or water seeping beneath the walls softened the soil, weakening the wall's support.

"The soil moved," said Paul Mlakar of the Army Corps of Engineers. "The exact mechanism is not known at this time."

The soil in the area, composed of sand, silt, clay and peat, is "compressible and not very strong," said Raymond Seed, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Seed has been spinning like a top with these undetailed, mysterious allegations, because there is simply no reasonable explanation for these "mass soil movements" beyond placed charges. It's no wonder that Seed's carefully-preared testimony to Congress avoided mentioning the explosive behavior of the soil, suddenly "heaving" up to 35 feet..

Why would a scientist make his case on innuendo instead of basic physics?

Follow the money. According to the UC-Berkely's Berkeleyan newspaper Oct. 20, Seed's team at Berkeley received "funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the campus's Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) [and] joined teams mobilized by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)."

9/11 researchers know ASCE for its comical report on the destruction of the Pentagon.

But what of this CITRIS. CITRIS has led the way in designing "smart dust," to track everything everywhere. And according to the academia watchdogs at UT Watch :

"CITRIS is administrated by UC Berkeley,and supports research on the Berkeley campus, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and the new UC Merced. Aside from the research conducted through CITRIS that actually does benefit society, there is a good deal which benefits the warfare state and its allies. In addition to the funding support CITRIS receives from DARPA and the ONR, the majority of support comes from corporations including weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Rockwell, TRW, Raytheon, SRI, Hughes Aircraft, United Technologies, etc. One of the major focuses of the CITRIS center will now be "Homeland Defense." Homeland Defense research will revolve around surveillance and police technologies
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DARPA, of course, is the Pentagon's Defense Advance Research Project Agency.

The UC Berkely team went in with a mision statement to find "why the levees failed," not whether or not the levees were sabotaged, as witness testimony and the physical evidence indicate.

Labels: Katrina

| Posted at 15:55 | PERMA-LINK |

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