These techniques as described by the Corps website all sound good. In
fact they do an excellent job of containing river flooding. They were
put in place in 1928, one year after the disasterous 1927 flood (nothing focuses the mind as well as disaster).
According to Barry's book all these techniques were recommended to the Corps prior
to the flood, but its policy was to build higher levees. Barry
describes an engineering showdown ego-to-ego that was settled only by
disaster.
No doubt he'll write another book unearthing what really caused the
Katrina flood. He has been sighted working in the Ninth Ward and in
other venues around New Orleans. I have little doubt he'll tie it to the
1927 flood in more
than two ways:
- The egos are still in place. The federal bureaucracies are
fundamentally unchanged in the way they make decisions and how they
interact with their mid-level managers and the public and the
scinetific community
- Fighting all river flooding destroys the delta