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April 30, 2010

New Hurricane Initiative

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, University of California, Berkeley, researchers and their colleagues have suggested multiple mechanisms for the failure of New Orleans levees.

Following an eight-month study of the New Orleans levee system and its performance during Hurricane Katrina, a 30-person team of researchers led by Raymond Seed and Robert Bea of the University of California, Berkeley, released a near-complete draft of their findings in May 2006 in a "town hall" meeting in that Gulf Coast city.

Seed received two National Science Foundation grants to collect perishable data and to conduct an independent field investigation of the performance of the New Orleans levee systems with the intent the findings would prove vital for gauging the performance of levee systems distributed across the United States.

This image accompanied NSF press release, "Researchers Release Draft Final Report on New Orleans Levees."

Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation


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