Heard a rumor that there could have been a pool construction violation at the place of the
breach on the 17th St Canal. They are saying that they could have cut into the levee to build the pool. The backyards of the houses that are along the 17th st. canal are finished off by the levee wall (does that make sense?)
Since there are so many faults to find such as poor design, soil failure etc... I thought i would throw this out there. Not that this was the only levee that broke mind you.
That's good to know, I'll keep it in the "possible" drawer for future reference.
I'm not sure I got this across in the main text, and it leads to something I left out, so...
Here's a pile of dirt, 700 feet long, 30 to 50 feet thick, the old levee embankment. On top of it is a concrete wall, eyeball says 10 feet tall, and the specs say 2 feet thick at the base, 1 foot thick at the top, each lineal foot of capwall weighing about, oh, twelve lineal feet of concrete sidewalk, a LOT of weight.
We know it failed, which means that the water pressure at some point exceeded the I-Wall's resistance to lateral displacement, which further means that at some earlier point the opposing forces exactly balanced.
Ever drive around a curve on ice and feel your car go "up on her toes" on the edge of a skid?
Seven hundred feet of heavy earthen embankment and concrete was balanced like that, essentially resting on ball bearings, before it failed. Because we know the weak layer was extensive, probably orders of magnitude more levee was in that perfectly balanced condition or very close to it at some point during the storm's passage.
Not to scare you, because any breach wider than the width of the canal where it connects to the Lake will not speed the flooding of the city up by much, whether it's a foot wider than the canal outlet, or a mile wider than the canal outlet. A wider breach will drain the canal faster, but then the limiting factor becomes the narrowest point in the canal between Lake and breach.
Anyway, the point here is, while large sections of levee were in such a precarious position, just about anything coud have caused a breach. A disruption from a felled tree's root ball thirty years ago in the embankment, one nutria tunnel, one shingle blown off a neighboring house and hitting the levee at 85 mph might have done it. A non-compliant swimming pool excavation could be akin to a speeding locomotive broadsiding your car on the icy curve by comparison. Yes, that would certainly do the trick.
While the 17th Street Canal breach is under discussion, the subject of the old court case involving the contractor who claimed weak soil needs to be addressed. MSNBC linked to an online version of the judge's decision in that case, but plastered their logo all over it so you couldn't read it.
That wasn't an accident. They didn't want you to read it because it blew their whole story line out of the water. The best laid plans, however...
If you really want to read it, you need to download the PDF file, open it, and open an image browser. Flip to page 2, hold your finger over the "Prtscrn" (Print screen) key on your keyboard, flip back to page 1, and hit Printscreen before the NBC logo loads, it is the last layer to be rendered. Then just go to your image browser, open a New image, paste the clipboard contents to the image, zoom to 100% and read what they never wanted you to read.
The judge's decision clearly demonstrates that this case involved a less than competent contractor trying to scam his way out of a jam.
Basically, he failed to brace his concrete forms properly, and the wet concrete pushed them around, and the wall sections set-up ("dried" to most people) crooked.
When the Corps of Engineers called him on it, he said the CoE had misrepresented conditions at the worksite. The CoE said to state their case in writing, make an official report describing what the contractor was claiming the CoE said about the worksite that turned out not to be true.
The contractor took a very long time responding to that request, basically giving the CoE the report shortly before the case went to court.
The contractor claimed that the CoE misrepresented the strength of the soil.
The CoE replied, "How would you know? You never bothered to request our soil testing data before submitting a bid. All the OTHER companies did. In fact, you never requested the data at all until your concrete went crooked due to sloppy form bracing and we called you on it."
At that point the contractor claimed that weak soil allowed the form brace anchors to wobble.
The CoE's response was that it was poor construction practice to try and brace forms to support heavy wet concrete on anchors driven only six feet in the ground, and that further, the CoE had no say in bracing techniques, that responsibility for bracing was explicitly assigned to the contractor in the standard contract that he had signed, and that finally, another contractor nearby had performed flawless work under the same conditions.
The judge was not amused, the contractor did NOT win the case, the contractor later went bankrupt, and NBC plastered their logo all over the "supporting documents" for their story because they didn't want you to read those documents, because then you would know that their whole "CoE Warned About Weak Soil Long Before Katrina" storyline was a pile of nutria squat.
An unproven....no....actually a disproven claim of "weak soil" at six feet below grade, has exactly zero bearing on a demonstrated weak layer at 15 to 20 feet below grade.
All it accomplishes is to demonstrate how far NBC is willing to go to pin the blame anywhere besides where it actually belongs.