Forensic Engineering - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 190

THE MASTER OF DISASTER
In the summer of 2008, the Mississippi flooded again.
A snowy winter and a wet spring led to high moisture levels in the Midwest, and on
June 1 the first rains of early summer arrived. The Iowa, the Cedar, the Mississippi, and
many smaller rivers began to rise. The rain kept falling, and the rivers began to overtop
their banks. The swollen Mississippi swept away bridges, breached levees, submerged
the sandbagged fortifications built around small towns by frantic citizens and the Na-
tional Guard, and overwhelmed the locks and dams operated by the Corps of Engin-
eers. Lakes designed to capture excess runoff overflowed. Up and up the waters rose, for
two weeks, sinking large swaths of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri.
In Missouri, the owner of a house built on stilts high above the flood-plain told a
group of engineers investigating what was let of the home, “My first house here was
flooded out in 1956, so I built a second one. That was flooded out in 1993. This here is
my third house. Now it's flooded out, too. They keep tellin' me it's okay to build here,
that the levees will protect me. But I think somebody's been lyin' to me.”
Like many people who built in the Mississippi's floodplain, the man had been wiped
out. “I don't know what to do,” he said. “This time I've got nothing left.”
The leader of the investigating engineers, a bald, rapier-thin seventy-four-year-old
with a military bearing, a silver mustache, and piercing eyes, nodded. This was Dr.
Robert Bea, a professor of engineering and codirector of the Center for Risk Mitigation
at UC Berkeley. Bea calls himself a “forensic engineer,” and he is famous within engin-
eering circles as a kind of master of disaster.
In 2003, he was a principal investigator of the Columbiaspace shuttle disaster for
NASA, and in 2005 he led the National Science Foundation's investigation of levee
breaches in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. He has studied the causes of over six
hundred engineering failures—from perforated submarine hulls to collapsed tunnels
and upended oil rigs—and found that most of these accidents were caused by human
error. In particular, he discovered, engineers failed to address so-called residual risk:
those things people believe “will not” and “cannot” fail. Most engineers, he said, “only
look at part of the risk and don't take the whole picture into account. But this is not
careful engineering, it's 'imagineering.' “
After the Mississippi flood of 2008, Bea and eight graduate students, professors, and
engineers had flown into the rising heat and dense humidity of St. Louis, then made
their way through flood-wracked towns, washed-out roads, and ruined fields across the
Midwest, like detectives scouring a crime scene. Just two weeks after the flood, they
were looking for clues as to why the levees had breached, where, and when, to prevent
such disasters from happening again.