The Times-Picayune today quotes a National Science Foundation expert on levee failures--of course you've seen him on AC 360 and Brian Williams' program--who appears to have found the smoking gun, or at least the smoking copy machine. It appears that mis-copying soil data from one chart to another may well have led the Corps of Engineers to an errant estimate of the necessary depth the sheet pilings needed to go to anchor the floodwalls in sturdy, non-peaty soil.
Says J. David Rogers:
"So it's easy to deduce that if they saw that peat layer going to 30 feet, they would have placed the piling at least that deep. And it appears pretty clear, at this point, that the transfer of the boring data to the cross section is where the ball might have gotten dropped."
Hey, these things happen among engineers. No harm, no foul.
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