This ABC news footage is very short and brings up the urban legend that the Lower 9th Ward levee was blown up to save richer neighborhoods. Before I present the video I want to present some facts to keep in mind while watching it. It’s named the “forbidden video” but it should be named the “how urban legends get started” video.

People often don’t comprehend that the strongest forces in the world belong to nature. People don’t have a real feel for the amount of energy of the water held back by the levees. They don’t have a real feel for the amount of energy of a raging hurricane. The forces involved are astronomical.

The forces the levees were built to withstand are extremely high as well, even though the levees failed after Katrina. There are still unanswered questions about exactly how all the engineering failures occurred, but one question is easy to answer. The levees were not blown up. The banging noises people heard were from the levees breaking as the structures gave way.

Let’s do a comparison of the energy released by a hurricane and the energy released by the first U.S. atomic bombs:

“Little Boy”, a Uranium-235 fission bomb, was dropped on Hiroshima and yielded the equivalent of 12 -15 kilotons of TNT.

“Fat Man”, a Plutonium-239 fission bomb, was dropped on Nagasaki and yielded the equivalent of 20 - 22 kilotons of TNT.

A hurricane on average yields the equivalent of 12,000,000 (12 million) kilotons of TNT per day.

That means it would take 800,000 “Little Boy” bombs or 545,455 “Fat Man” bombs to equal the amount of energy produced by a hurricane in one day!

Let’s do a few more comparisons to give everyone a really good picture. The rate of energy released by a hurricane in one day is also equivalent to:

70 times the world energy consumption of humans

200 times the world-wide electrical generating capacity

Exploding a 10-megaton TNT-equivalent nuclear bomb every 20 minutes (there are 1,000 kilotons in one megaton of TNT)

There is no way even a well-placed bundle of dynamite could do the kind of damage the New Orleans levees sustained. The video presented next contains an urban legend of legendary proportions.

Video posted on YouTube by chokes01.

See more pictures in theSee more pictures in the Hurricane Katrina Picture Book by Jeffery Morgan

Read Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne.

References:
Wikipedia on Tropical Cyclones
Wikipedia on Nuclear Weapons Yield

Technorati Tags: ABC News video, blown up, energy yield of hurricane, forbidden information, levee breach

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Posted on May 10th, 2008 by joubess
Filed under: Science, Videos