Millions of acres totally submerged in muddy Mississippi River water. Crops ruined. People sent fleeing from their homes. Schools shut down, mom and pop corner stores wiped out. Why do you think my fellow students and I want to become engineers? We think we can come up with better, safer and more reliable solutions to flooding. Why didn't the levees hold along the Mississippi River? Why didn't the levees around New Orleans hold during Hurricane Katrina? Why did so many people die in Katrina?

The plain and simple answer is shoddy engineering. The Army Corps of Engineers did an incomplete job and messed up in New Orleans. The engineers that built the levees along the Mississippi River did not protect the citizens. There will be more flooding in the future, and the time is now to train competent students to think...

What happened? The bridge was 40 years old and gradually got too old, gained a lot of weight, and went down at rush hour. Why? The National Transportation Safety Board said it had a flaw in its design. A flaw. Do you think today's engineers could come up with a better, safer design? You better believe it. That's why we study engineering, not to go out and make a whole supertanker full of money, although that would be nice.
Engineers study hard to build the backgrounds of competence to be able to make this world a better and safer place. I'm on board with that. Thanks for listening.