ABSTRACT ONLY:
A large portion of the destruction from Hurricane Katrina was cause not only by the storm itself but also by the storms exposure of engineering and engineering-related policy failures. ASCE’s Hurricane Katrina External Review Panel, which was convened at the request of Lieutenant General Carl A. Strock, P.E., M.ASCE, then the commander and chief of engineers of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to conduct an in-depth peer review of the comprehensive work of the Corps’s Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, published its report last month entitled The New Orleans Hurricane Protection System: What Went Wrong and Why. This article is a distillation of some of the report’s major findings.