Wizbang watch - Hello? Mainstream Media??? Are You Awake?

Paul is back at Wizbang with this post. On the surface his analysis of the story seems to make it a slam dunk that the Army Corps of Engineers was negligent in their design of the New Orleans Levees. But he left out an important paragraph:

According to records, Eustis Engineering provided the detailed analyses of the ability of soils along the path of the levee to withstand water pressure once the wall was built on top. The information was provided to Modjeski and Masters, the contractor that designed the wall for the corps. If the project followed normal procedures, the engineers with those firms were using design criteria spelled out in various corps handbooks. "You use the corps cookbook, and you usually have to work it out using corps (computer) programs," Prochaska said.

Now I am not saying this completely absolves the ACE. It doesn't, but it does spread the blame considerably. Paul's response to this was on the order of "Well they used the Corps guidelines the Corps is responsible". To that I say GIGO. If Eustis Engineering used bad samples / technique whatever for the soil analysis then the model using the ACE guidelines will be wrong. Should the ACE have provided more oversight? Probably, but if Eustis Engineering was purposefully cooking the books then I am not sure that it would have caught the error anyway. I am not accusing anyone of any wrong doing, just pointing out that all this did not happen in a vacuum and trying to lay all the blame on one agency is wrong. There is plenty of blame to go around.

Michelle Malkin also has this story. A lot of her story seems to be based on Paul's story at Wizbang. The same offending paragraph is missing. She however provides this other bit of context:

"In a separate article published November 19, Marshall reported that levee leaks were reported to the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board a year ago. City officials neither took action nor bothered to report the leaks to the Army Corps of Engineers:"

I wonder, under Paul's theory of blame was the ACE supposed to psychically detect these leaks and rush out to fix them with their amazing mental powers?

Again plenty of blame to go around.