Words Whispered in Water is a rare story about how a tiny woman prevailed against a mammoth federal agency and won. When steel flood-walls built with inherent engineering mistakes broke in New Orleans, the responsible party, the Army Corps of Engineers, went into full-time damage control mode, but in the chaotic aftermath, Sandy Rosenthal uncovered evidence that the Army Corps had made egregious design mistakes in their steel floodwalls fifteen years before they buckled and failed, causing hundreds of deaths.