A Surprise a Day

Not properly designed. That's engineer-speak for "the Corps of Engineers drowned New Orleans and came close to drowning Jefferson Parish."
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That's a pretty accurate summation of what faces New Orleanians when they wake up and open the newspaper. Today's T-P offers a fine oneto those residents of Jefferson Parish, west of New Orleans, who were feeling secure if not smug about their relatively unflooded experience following Miss K. The indefatigable forensic engineering teams, led by Berkeley's Prof. Robert Bea and Prof. David Rogers of U. of Missouri, among others, have found that the Jeff Parish side of the 17th St. Canal floodwall was, to use a localism, fixin' to breach. It just was beaten to the punch by the New Orleans side, which breached first. The teams pinpoint the same reasons for the west side's incipient failure that doomed the city side of the canal's "protection."

Rogers and Bea say the bottom line of all the research tells them that neither side of the 17th Street Canal floodwall was properly designed to withstand the force of rising water and that both were built on equally unreliable swampy soils, including a layer of something Bea likens to "black toothpaste," the consistency of axle grease.

...they say their calculations show woefully low factors of safety in both walls -- engineer-speak for a design that isn't safe enough to do the job that it's built to do...

Not properly designed. That's engineer-speak for "the Corps of Engineers drowned New Orleans and came close to drowning Jefferson Parish:". That's a surprise that can last you all day.

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