New Orleans in the news again, less than 50 miles from 3.0 quake and new data on Katrina intensity

BREITBART.COM - Hurricane Katrina Hit As Category 3, Not 4:

"MIAMI - Katrina hit the Gulf Coast as a Category 3 hurricane, not a Category 4 as first thought, and New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain likely were spared the storm's strongest winds, the National Hurricane Center said Tuesday. New Orleans' storm levees were generally believed to be able to protect the city from the flooding of a fast-moving Category 3 storm. But Katrina was generally a slow-moving storm, said Jim Taylor, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers."

The good news is that Katrina was only a moderately strong but slow moving Cat 3. The bad news is what happens if N.O. gets hit with a real Cat 4, let alone a 5?

We may all grow old waiting for the official word on why the levees failed. I predict that right up there, along with a few others thrown is as fig leaves, will be the problem I wrote about during the week after the storm - water undermining the levees from below. As the volume of water moving below the surface increased due to storm surge and heavy rain raising the Lake Pontchartrain water level at the edge of N.O. which increased the water pressure, fine material was swept away increasing the carrying capacity of the water to move coarser material. This eventually reduced the mass supporting the levees on the landward side allowing some of them to collapse. In support of this, I note that it has been found that in several places the levees did not extend downward far enough to reach a firm footing - instead, they rested on unconsolidated material.