NEW ORLEANS — Nearly 10 years on, one might assume that the case of Hurricane Katrina is closed.

That the catastrophic flooding of this city was caused not merely by a powerful storm but primarily by fatal engineering flaws in the city’s flood protection system has been proved by experts, acknowledged by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and underscored by residents here to anyone who might suggest otherwise.

But the efforts to establish responsibility with ever more precision — to ascertain just how many of those flaws were due to engineering, politics or money — have not stopped.

A pending article in the peer-reviewed journal Water Policy, written by experts involved in some of the most significant previous examinations of the catastrophe, sets out to refine some high-profile early versions of the factors that led to the disaster. The article rebuts assessments of the levee system’s design process that had spread responsibility around to include local officials, and it contends that fault should fall even more squarely on the corps.

“All I’m trying to do is set the record straight,” said J. David Rogers of the Missouri University of Science and Technology, the lead author of the article, whose view of the exact allocation of blame has shifted as he has come across new information. “There’s no bad guy that I’m trying to slap their hands.”