LSU lucky they are away for their first home game

It's still more than two days away, and there is a chance that it heads East or is eaten up by Cuba.

I was going to ask, if they fixed that 23-foot issue (i.e. any storm that produces a storm surge of more than 23 feet overwhelms most levees) in the 16 years since Katrina.  (Katrina produced a 28-foot surge.)

Barges hit the levees and caused breeches. If not for a couple barges the Katrina story would be significantly different.

So much incorrect info in this thread its laughable. The 20+ foot storm surge was in Mississippi which was to the east of the storm eye. New Orleans saw 18-16ft surge and was to the west of the eye. New Orleans just got the pub because its a major city that flooded but the surge was significantly worse in Mississippi.

18-20 feet in New Orleans?  As I understand it, the upriver issues were a part of the issues downriver.  But I would welcome additional information.

ING 4727 (the barge) did end up in the Ninth Ward, but the Department of Defense, United States Army Corps of Engineers, State of Louisiana and University of California all came to the conclusion that ING 4727 wound up in the Ninth Ward, because it went over or through an existing breach in the Industrial Canal Floodwall and did not, in and of itself, cause the breach.  The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana has definitively determined that ING 4727 did not cause the breach to the Industrial Canal Floodwall.

And that was a single breach!  There were at least five other breaches in Orleans Parish alone and an additional 40+ breaches elsewhere in Louisiana and Mississippi.

All it takes is a little internet search and you will find New Orleans did not get 28ft of storm surge during Katrina, but hey don’t let facts get in the way of your ignorance.

Civiltiger says "Barges hit the levees and caused breeches. If not for a couple barges the Katrina story would be significantly different." ag87 makes snide comment about not letting facts get in the way of fantasy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ING_4727 I cant vouch for the accuracy of the wiki article but it does say, "Many locals blame the barge for the catastrophic inundation of the area. Some lawyers have blamed the barge, including its owners and the cement terminal that had moored the barge and which had the barge in its care, custody, and control at the time of the hurricane.

A week after the storm Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi gave his preliminary impression, saying, "One would think it's the barge that did it," and confirming that the barge striking the floodwalls would have "precipitated a tremendous collapse".[4] However, in the preliminary report presented to Congress, experts say that the barge was drawn through an existing hole in the floodwall, and that it was the topping of the Industrial Canal floodwall, not the barge, that caused the break.[5] The LSU report subsequently found that overtopping did not occur, rather, design failures precipited the levee failures.

By late 2007, several investigations were completed that included analysis of the question of whether the barge had a causative role in one or more of the failures in the floodwalls atop the Industrial Canal levees, or whether it came into the city from an already-existing breach. The investigators funded by the National Science Foundation—from the University of California at Berkeley—concluded that the barge went through an already-existing breach caused by foundation failure of the floodwall. Another group of investigators, funded by the State of Louisiana, came to the same conclusion. Finally, a $20 million study, funded by the Department of Defense/United States Army Corps of Engineers, blamed the Industrial Canal levee failures on overtopping of the floodwalls by the storm surge and resulting scour and undermining of the foundation and not the barge.

There is also speculation that the barge may have caused the other nearby breaches in the Industrial Canal by striking the floodwalls on the other side before bouncing back and going all the way through the levee near the end of Prieur Street, although all the scientists and engineers who investigated the failures regard such speculation as dubious and without any evidentiary basis."

So I will go with what the Corp, the Department of Defense, LSU, and UCBerkeley folks said. My professional experience with scour is looking at it, and then the math involved, and finally deciding to bring in a guy who had a PhD in Fluvial Geomorphology. For full disclosure, I had never heard the term before I met him.