Why people died in New Orleans

This is from today's New York Times.

The design and construction of the New Orleans hurricane protection system, a project spanning more than 40 years that remains incomplete, was inadequate to protect hundreds of thousands of people in an urban setting.

. . . "People didn't die because the storm was bigger than the system could handle, and people didn't die because the levees were overtopped," said Raymond B. Seed, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chief author of the report, in a weekend briefing for reporters here.

"People died because mistakes were made," he said, "and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost."

This is not the final word on the subject. The Army Corps of Engineers has its own report coming out soon. Still, this is damning and chilling. 40 years of ineptitude.