Engineer testifies of 'hurricane highway' in MR-GO trial News for New Orleans, Louisiana Top Stories News and Weather for New Orleans wwltv.com

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"Bob Bea, a civil engineer with the University of California at Berkeley, said Katrina's flooding would have been minimal if the 76-mile Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet had not been built or if the Army Corps of Engineers had maintained it properly.

"This was not a natural disaster, this was a manmade disaster," said Bea, who specializes in studying engineering disasters and risk management and who, by his own account, has spent about 10,000 hours studying the levee failures during Katrina.
The testimony came at the end of the first week of a federal trial against the corps." "

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"During the first week of testimony, plaintiffs' experts testified the gulf outlet was a disaster.

John Day, an emeritus professor of marine and environmental sciences at Louisiana State University, said the outlet destroyed large areas of freshwater swamp, 15-foot-high marsh grasses and cypress forest because it let salt water from the Gulf of Mexico wash inland.

He said the corps was told repeatedly the outlet was destroying wetlands southeast of New Orleans and that the agency should block the salt water intrusion. But he said those warnings were ignored, even as the corps' own studies showed the importance of wetlands."


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