Duh, We Didn't Know It Was Going To Do That

The Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force has released it's report on the cause of the failures of the 17th Street Canal floodwall and the conclusion is that nobody could have known what was going to happen.

Quote:

Although independent analysts have blamed the 17th Street Canal failure on faulty engineering, including flawed soil investigations by local firms, the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, composed of experts from academia and industry as well as state and federal agencies, said evidence points to forces that came together in a combination unique to the science and thus could not have been anticipated by the system's design teams.

This conclusion could only be reached if the faulty engineering is ignored. After all, how was the Corps of Engineers supposed to know that it's engineers were incompetent.

The draft report can be found here.