Levee Leaked Months Before Failure
It’s coming out that New Orleans officials knew that there were weak spots in the levees months before Katrina was even an angry raindrop way out in the ocean:
State and federal investigators say that a leak may have been an early warning sign that the soil beneath the levee was unstable and help explain why it collapsed. They also say if authorities had investigated and found that a leak was undermining the levee, they could have shored it up and prevented the catastrophic breach. …“This is very, very significant,” Van Heerden says. “These poor folks had these seeps, and it was indicative that the water was already getting under the system and weakening the system.”
Once again, the bureaucratic and corrupt hierarchy of New Orleans is found wanting.
