8 Quotes by Richard Wagenaar

Under perfect conditions -- with no rain and all the pumps working -- you're talking at least 20 days in the areas that have 20 feet of water. And we know we don't have perfect conditions. It rains an hour nearly every afternoon.

It is gone. It is literally leveled in places. The power of the surge in this storm was greatly underestimated.

There's still a significant amount of the city under water.

There's a whole bunch of lessons to be learned about the actual physical construction of this system. Do we even need canals? Why not just build 20-foot-wide pipelines to the lake to act as conduits for storm water?

That is not true. The same process that was used to fix these breaches (at 17th Street and London Avenue) was used to fix the breaches in the Inner Harbor Canal.

It took a lot more sandbags than we thought.

I know people want to dump the blame on the corps, and that's fine with us, but there were a lot of design features we wanted on those canals that were ultimately accepted by sponsors.

The enormity of the disaster is hard to put in words, especially if you've flown over the areas.