Engineering society accused of cover-ups in investigations of Katrina, World Trade Center

Engineers who build our roads, bridges and dams have been accused of covering up catastrophic design flaws in recent national disasters. The American society of Civil Engineers were paid by the federal government to investigate disasters after the attack on the World Trade Center and the levee failures caused by hurrican Katrina in 2005. This professional organization of engineers have been accused of covering up engineering mistakes. After these allegations an independent panel was formed to investigate the matter. Sherewood Boelhert, who is a retired congressman from New York heads the panel.

Plenty of assumptions have been made about the World Trade Center and in the case of hurricane Katrina, these professional engineers suggested that the power of the storm itself was a major problem as well as the poorly designed levees in New Orleans, LA. Raymond Seed a levee expert was the first to question the engineering socieities involvement and accused them and the Army Corps of collusion. Astaneh-Asl, a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley questioned the make up of the Engineers Societies investigation team and called it "moral corruption". What seems to be in question is how the professional engineers dealt with these disasters and why they're being investigated from the information obtained make them look very suspicious to say the least. As I recall from the news reports after these disasters is the fact that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) needed to investigate those disasters thorougly and that they were not doing enough to help the people who were devestaed by these disasters. I fail to understand how and why the government is allowed to let these engineering design flaws be swept under the table and nothing is really done to slove the problem at hand. I find it difficult myself to point a finger, for the simple fact that they're all covering up something. Although the good things is that these parties involved are all being investigated to date, especially to benefit the people who suffered in Katrina and the families of the World Trade Center victims. I think that the United States government and the Professional Engineers have much more to answer to in the days to come. Below is the link to this article, it is very interesting.

Newsday (New York)
March 26, 2008 Wednesday ALL EDITIONS
http://www.lexisnexis.com.libdb.njit.edu:8888/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?risb=21_T3420708043&format=GNBFI&sort=BOOLEAN&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T3420708046&cisb=22_T3420708045&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=306890&docNo=1