Failure of the New Orleans 17th Street Canal Levee and Floodwall during Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina resulted in the single most catastrophic failure of a civil engineered system in the history of the United States — failure of the flood defense system for the greater New Orleans area. This paper summarizes results from several forensic studies that have examined the causes for failure of one of the most important components of the flood protection system — failure of the levee and floodwall on the 17^th street canal. This failure has been publicly cited as an `engineering failure' (Walsh 2006) that involved `unforeseen and unforeseeable' (Marshall 2006) conditions. This paper illustrates why the engineering failure was firmly rooted in a failure to translate research to practice. Geotechnical engineering aspects of the levee and floodwall failure are developed including description of the soil and geologic conditions, analyses of the loading conditions, and analyses of the soil-structure-loading performance characteristics. In addition, the human and organizational aspects that played key roles in development of this failure are detailed. It is concluded that this was a predictable failure whose causes were embedded in a dysfunctional Technology Delivery System.