Government wrong on new Orleans flooding.(INSIDE REPORT)

According to the Army Corps of Engineers, the broken levees that flooded the city of New Orleans failed when the storm surge overtopped the floodwalls and, spilling to their foundations, undermined their structural integrity. This explanation, which has gotten wide currency with popular programming on such cable channels as The Discovery Channel, now appears to be faulty.

According to this explanation, the levees were not designed to cope with a storm as powerful as Katrina. As it turns out, however, Katrina's storm surge was not as uniformly powerful as originally thought. Scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have found that although some levees were topped, accounting for some of the flooding, several others were not. "We are absolutely convinced that those floodwalls were never overtopped," said Ivor van Heerden, who serves as deputy director of the center. In fact, according to the Washington Post, evidence indicates that the storm surge fell several feet short of overtopping the floodwalls along the city's 17th Street and London Avenue floodwalls. Breaches in these locations caused most of the flooding the city experienced. "This should not have been a big deal for these floodwalls," said G. Paul Kemp, an oceanographer and hurricane expert with Louisiana State University. "It should have been a modest challenge. There's no way this should have exceeded the capacity." In a related peculiarity, earthen floodwalls withstood the onslaught of the storm, while the concrete barriers did not. According to former ...