Mud in mouth test for New Orleans levees

NY Times:

Robert G. Bea reached down, picked up a bit of dirt and popped it into his mouth.

Professor Bea's engineering training has taught him that a few moments spent pressing clay between his tongue and teeth quickly reveals the presence of silt or sand. Sandy clay is less strong than the purer kind, and rebuilding the levees here for St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans, requires very good dirt.

The gunmetal-colored clay, he said with the assurance of a grit gourmet, would do. "Good stuff," he said.

It was an assessment not just of the clay in his mouth, but also of the work going on all around him.

And coming from Professor Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been one of the most persistent critics of the Army Corps of Engineers' work on the levees, it was an important turnabout. His praise of the levee work gives an important endorsement to the corps's desperate struggle to improve flood control around New Orleans and its suburbs before the hurricane season begins on June 1.

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There is more. At least it is not just a matter of taste.