New Orleans Flood Defenses "Blame Report" Due Out Soon
The storm in Southeast Louisiana over the quality of its engineered flood defenses when Hurricane Katrina swept ashore on Aug. 29, 2005, is about to turn from a technical analysis of the structures and their construction, to a dissection of the political, financial and design decisions that lay behind it having been built the way it was in the first place.
A task force convened at the direction of Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to sort out the decision chronology behind the development of the system, has completed its work. The task force’s report is almost ready to turn over to the Dept. of Justice for final review, a Corps source reports.