An autopsy of Hurricane Katrina

The New York Times : Computer models of storms that helped design the levee system in New Orleans were flawed from the start because the models were too simplistic says a report issued last week. The Army Corp of Engineers designed their hurriance model in 1969, and never saw the need to go back and reanalyze “the true risks of catastrophic flooding” in New Orleans. Even when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the successor agency to the Weather Bureau, recommended increasing the strength of the model, the corps did not change its construction plans. When hurriance Katrina hit the coast last year, Katrina acted more like four storms rather than one single storm, something that the corp’s simulations could not model. New levees and repairs to the old levees , will be based more on probability statistical research that can incoporate the latest research findings says Daniel Hitchings, director of the corps task force in charge of overall hurricane recovery for the Gulf Coast.