Katrinia Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Katrinia - Essay Example It is evident that lacked effective management and leadership skills among the organizations involved in the development of the system. On August 2005, more than fifty failures of the floodwalls and levees were protecting New Orleans, Louisiana and its environs from the passage of Hurricane Katrina and landfall in Mississippi. The floodwall and levee failures resulted in flooding in approximately eighty percent of New Orleans and the entire area of St. Bernard Parish. Billions of gallons of water flooded into the vast region of New Orleans, destroying more than ten thousand businesses and home. The US Army Corps of Engineers were given the responsibility of designing and constructing the levee system while the local levee boards were charged with the responsibility of maintaining the levee. The engineering corps handed over the components of the levee system to the local boards on completion. When Hurricane Katrina approached in 2005, the project was between sixty and ninety percent complete. Civil engineers and other specialists, trying to identify the underlying causes of the failures of the flooding protection sy stem, carried out five investigations. From the research report, the primary reason for the flooding was out of inadequate design and construction by the Corps of Engineers. The storm surge and waves broke into twenty places in the Mississippi River Gulf and the entire region of St. Bernard Parish (Bea, 2000). On August 29, 2005, levees, and floodwalls catastrophically failed throughout the urban area of New Orleans. For a period of eight months after the failure of New Orleans Flood Defense System (NOFDS), ILIT (Independent Levee Investigation Team scrutinized over 2800 documents. They also carried out over 220 interviews and evaluated more than 370 contributions from the public. For eight months, many investigations were conducted to find out the reasons