Robert Bea Quotations

As that concrete is breaking, it will emit sounds that probably to them sounded very much like muffled gunshots. Then they would have these very large booming sounds as that barge was slamming against the walls. Those residents probably heard what they heard, but they came to the wrong conclusion. We didn't see any signs of explosive action.

The whole rebuilding of this infrastructure is, I think, a critical issue for us to come to grips with.

The center of New Orleans is certainly not protection of farmland, so the factor of safety was incredibly low. We're talking about thousands of families without homes and shutting down a commercial infrastructure that's pretty darn important to the United States.

The reason it immediately shows up on my radar screen as being horribly low is because the soils are so variable.

We're still viewing it as cows eating grass, and it isn't.

The thinking was, those levees are just protecting farmland. But time goes on. We continue to develop, but we are dragging this 1.3 with us. We upgrade the levee system after (Hurricane) Betsy with better flood protection, but that 1.3 is still there. History has moved, but the corps hasn't.

We can see lots of evidence why those people could have heard very loud sounds that could have sounded like explosions.

It's like the snooze alarm on the alarm clock. You can only turn it off so many times before you get in trouble.

Now they want to build the levees a little higher and add some rocks on top of the canal. It's still a patchwork-quilt approach, which has already failed miserably.

It didn't hold. There isn't a door, and they've got measly sandbags they're putting in to compensate.