Was the New Orleans flooding the biggest man-made disaster since Chernobyl?
The president used the phrase that grates on New Orleanians like no other: “natural disaster”. This despite major reports by two pro bono teams of forensic engineers – the UC Berkeley-led Independent Levee Investigation Team and the Louisiana state government’s team – which identified the scale of the catastrophe as resulting from poorly designed levees and flood walls. The ILIT report called it “the worst man-made engineering disaster since Chernobyl”.
