Why did the levees fail?
There were three major levee failures in the city. They all failed before overtopping. In one case the levee was literally just pushed away. It appears as though it wasn’t built correctly. In another case the levee actually sank. The water had gone underneath it and pushed the foundation out and it just went down. There had been a lot of construction very close to the levees from residential and commercial development. A number were heavily planted with trees, things that can affect the structural integrity of the levee. What about the problems of debris? When we flew over New Orleans I saw between 40,000 and 50,000 refrigerators that had been moved out of homes and were just sitting side by side. That’s just one example of the unbelievable solid waste problem. There has never been a bigger solid waste problem in the United States. Over 108,000 houses took on more than four feet of water, all within New Orleans. That’s greater than 50 percent of the houses in New Orleans. That doesn’t
