Talk about information overload. "Put the plans for the levees online, and have a real-time Wiki where people can suggest solutions."

You know what? There probably aren't 1,000 people on the planet who understand the problem well enough to really fix this. And I'll bet most of them know about each other already. Sure, a strange idea from left field might end up being the perfect short-term solution, but who's going to read through all the crackpot ideas and filter out the ones with real merit? And wouldn't that person have to be one of the thousand who know what they're talking about?

When California's I-5 collapsed, they put up [link|http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/fall95/p95a2.htm|temporary spans] by bolting railroad flatcars together and using them as a huge erector set. They had the first span opened only 8 days after the collapse. If you were helping moderate/edit a Wiki for that disaster, would you have called that idea crackpot or genius?