Buffalo Quake Teams Piecing Together Katrina�s Clues
The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is inescapable, but the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Reasearch, Buffalo, N.Y., is working to ensure that critical lessons are learned from the storm. The center has sent one team to New Orleans, where members found evidence of levees failing before they reached design capacity. Another team investigating post-storm conditions along the Mississippi coast marveled at the destructive power of a wall of water three stories high.
The center team sent engineers with a broad spectrum of expertise to the New Orleans on October 3. Staying in Baton Rouge along with most of the evacuees, the group made the now 2.5-hour, 70-mile commute every day through October 9 to study engineered structures. One notable observation is the lack of hurricane damage. "There was very little damage due to wind, but flooding destroyed the city," says Gilberto Mosqueda, assistant professor in the Dept. of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He maintains that failure in long-term planning doomed the city. "This could have been prevented had the proper resources been allocated to the levees," he says. "Its not like were dealing with a 30-ft wall of water like in Mississippi," he says. New evidence points to the levees failing because of intrinsic flaws, not overtopping, he says. "The soil embankments were pushed back 30 ft in some areas," says Mosqueda.