Future engineers need a greater understanding of past failures — and how to avoid repeating them — a Louisiana-based nonprofit said to mark Tuesday's 18th anniversary of the deadly, catastrophic levee breaches that inundated most of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
Having better-educated engineers would be an important step in making sure that projects such as levees, bridges or skyscrapers can withstand everything from natural disasters to everyday use, said Levees.org. Founded in 2005, the donor-funded organization works to raise awareness that Katrina was in many ways a human-caused disaster. Federal levee design and construction failures allowed the hurricane to trigger one of the nation’s deadliest and costliest disasters.
