Half-Burying the Lede

Today's Washington Post follows yesterday's Times-Picayune and Los Angeles Times in reporting the National Weather Service's conclusion that Katrina was a weak Category 3, maybe even a 1 or 2, by the time it made landfall. So why did a Cat 1 storm result in such catastrophic flooding? Ah, there would be the question that might form the lede paragraph of a real news story. The Post at least provides part of the answer, many paragraphs into the story:
"This is a further indictment of the levee system," Ivor Van Heerden, an LSU professor and leader of a team of Louisiana investigators probing the cause of the levee breaches. "It indicates that most of the flooding of downtown New Orleans was a consequence of man's folly."

Other engineering experts agree: Considering Katrina's weakened state at the time it reached New Orleans, the failure of the city's 17th Street and London Avenue canal floodwalls can be explained only as a failure of design or construction, said Robert Bea, a civil engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

"The water level in the canals wasn't that high when the floodwalls breached," said Bea, a member of an investigating team funded by the National Science Foundation. "We had a premature failure of the defense system."
"Premature failure of defense system", "Man's folly"--those would be attention-grabbing headlines on a followup story about Katrina. But, for sheer uselessness, here's ABC News' conclusion on the devastation that flowed from a Cat 1/2 storm:

As for New Orleans and Mississippi, the National Hurricane Center said there are two reasons why Katrina was so damaging. It was a huge storm, with hurricane force winds 150 miles across. It had been a Category 5 when it raged over the Gulf of Mexico, and meteorologists believe that allowed it to suck up huge amounts of sea water, which created a massive storm surge.

Why make two or three phone calls--to experts who've been examining the levee and floodwall structures for months--when one, to the agency that issued the press release on the re-categorizing, will do?