91视频

The Associated Press

Future engineers need a greater understanding of past failures 鈥� and how to avoid repeating them 鈥� a Louisiana-based nonprofit stated to mark the recent 18th anniversary of the deadly, catastrophic levee breaches that inundated most of New Orleans during聽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, according to 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鈥檚 deadliest and costliest disasters.

Meanwhile,聽Hurricane Idalia聽moved across Florida’s Gulf Coast with storm surges, floods and high winds in a state still dealing with聽lingering damage聽inflicted by Hurricane Ian last year.

And hurricanes and natural disasters aren鈥檛 the only events that engineers need to learn from, according to Levees.org. Sandy Rosenthal, its founder, and H.J. Bosworth, a professional engineer on the group鈥檚 board, pointed to other major failures such as the Interstate 35W聽bridge collapse聽in Minneapolis in 2007 and the聽collapses of two skywalks聽at a hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1981 among others.

Levees.org wants to make sure students graduating from engineering programs can 鈥渄emonstrate awareness of past engineering failures.鈥� The group is enlisting support from engineers, engineering instructors and public works experts, as well as the public. This coalition will then urge the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology to require instruction on engineering failures in its criteria for accrediting a program.

鈥淭his will be a bottom-up effort,鈥� Rosenthal said on Monday.

Rosenthal and her son Stanford, then 15, created the nonprofit in the wake of Katrina鈥檚 landfall on Aug. 29, 2005. The organization has conducted public relations campaigns and spearheaded聽exhibits, including a push to add levee breach sites to the National Register of Historic Places and transformation of a flood-ravaged home near one breach site into a museum.

Katrina formed in the Bahamas and made landfall in southeastern Florida before heading west into the Gulf of Mexico. It reached Category 5 strength in open water before weakening to a Category 3 at landfall in southeastern Louisiana. As it headed north, it made another landfall along the Mississippi coast.

Storm damage stretched from southeast Louisiana to the Florida panhandle. The Mississippi Gulf Coast suffered major damage, with surges as high as 28 feet in some areas. Scenes of death and despair in New Orleans gripped the nation. Water flowed through busted levees for days, covering 80 percent of the city, and took weeks to drain. At least 1,833 people were killed.