Investigation of the performance of the New Orleans flood protection systems in Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005

Following an eight-month study of the New Orleans levee system and its performance during Hurricane Katrina, a 30-person team of researchers led by Raymond Seed and Robert Bea of the University of California, Berkeley, released a near-complete draft of their findings in a "town hall" meeting in that Gulf Coast city. Seed received two National Science Foundation grants to collect perishable data and to conduct an independent field investigation of the performance of the New Orleans levee systems with the intent the findings would prove vital for gauging the performance of levee systems distributed across the United States.