(Army) Corps Takes Blame for Katrina Flooding

0602dvs-blanco-fp A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data.

"This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, `We've had a catastrophic failure,'" Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season.

The Corps said it will use the lessons it has learned to build better flood defenses.

"Words alone will not restore trust in the Corps," Strock said, adding that the Corps is committed "to fulfilling our important responsibilities."

The $19.7 million report includes details on the engineering and design failures that allowed the storm surge to overwhelm New Orleans' levees and floodwalls Aug. 29.

Many of the findings and details on floodwall design, storm modeling and soil types have been released in pieces in recent months as the Corps sought to show it was being open about what went wrong. But the final report goes into greater depth.

The Corps, Strock said, has undergone a period of intense introspection and is "deeply saddened and enormously troubled by the suffering of so many."

Katrina damaged 169 miles of the 350-mile hurricane system that protects New Orleans and was blamed for more than 1,570 deaths in Louisiana alone.

Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineer and Corps critic, called Strock's comments and the report signs of "a leadership in growth."

"They're catching up with the 1,000 years of progress of the Dutch," Bea said, referring to the Netherlands' long, and mostly successful, history of battling the North Sea.

The much-anticipated report - prepared by the 150-member Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, assembled and headed by the Corps - is intended to serve as a road map for engineers as they seek to design and build better levees and floodwalls.

Serious work began on New Orleans' hurricane protection system in the 1960s after Hurricane Betsy flooded the city in 1965. But over the decades, funding slackened and many parts of the system were not finished by the time Katrina hit.

The result was a disjointed system of levees, inconsistent in quality, materials and design, that left gaps exploited by the storm, the report said.

Also, engineers did not take into account the poor soil quality underneath New Orleans, the report said, and failed to account for the sinking of land, which caused some sections to be as much as 2 feet lower than other parts.

Four breaches in canals that run through New Orleans were caused by foundation failures that were "not considered in the original design of these structures," the report said. Those breaches caused two-thirds of the city's flooding.

Thursday's report urged the Corps to shift its formulaic cost-benefit approach on how it decides what projects are worthwhile. The agency was urged to look at potential environmental, societal and cultural losses, "without reducing everything to one measure such as dollars."

The report did not directly address questions raised in other studies regarding the Corps' organizational mindset.

Last month, a report by outside engineers said the Corps was dysfunctional and unreliable. That group, led by experts from the University of California at Berkeley, recommended setting up an agency to oversee the Corps' projects nationwide.

In response to criticism after Katrina, the Corps has made fixing New Orleans' flood protection system a top priority and tried to incorporate the task force findings.

The Corps already has spent about $800 million for repairs and improvements and plans to spend $3.7 billion over the next four years to raise and strengthen levees, increase pumping capacity and install more flood gates.

A thorough assessment of the region's current flood defenses found no "glaring weaknesses," said Col. Richard Wagenaar, the Corps' district chief in New Orleans.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs through Nov. 30. William Gray, a leading hurricane forecaster, said Wednesday that the 2006 season should not be as destructive as 2005, which set records with 28 named storms and four major hurricanes hitting land. Gray's team is forecasting 17 named storms this year, nine of them hurricanes.

More News on the same topic from Aggregate Research Institute

In a sweeping new study of the causes of the disaster in New Orleans last year, the Army Corps of Engineers concludes that the levees it built in the city were an incomplete patchwork of protection, containing flaws in design and construction and not built to handle a storm anywhere near the strength of Hurricane Katrina.
Floodgate work continues on the 17th Street Canal, which separates New Orleans from Metairie, and drains into Lake Pontchartrain.
"The hurricane protection system in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana was a system in name only," said the draft of the nine-volume report, released yesterday in New Orleans.

Several outside engineering panels that have been critical of the corps have come to similar conclusions, and have found a more extensive chain of flaws in the design, construction and maintenance of the 350-mile levee system.

But the 6,113-page report is remarkable for being a product of the corps' own official investigation, which brought together 150 experts from government, academia and business to study what went wrong and how to build better systems for the future.

The region's network of levees, floodwalls, pumps and gates lacked any built-in resilience that would have allowed the system to remain standing and provide protection even if water flowed over the tops of levees and floodwalls, the report's investigators found.
Flaws in the levee design that allowed breaches in the city's drainage canals were not foreseen, and those floodwalls failed even though the storm waters did not rise above the level that the walls were designed to hold.

But the system was also overwhelmed in significant ways by Hurricane Katrina, and some degree of flooding would have happened even if the floodwalls had not been breached by the surging waters, the report stated.

"Regardless of breaching or no breaching, there would have been massive flooding and losses" from the hurricane, Lewis E. Link, the director of the study and a senior research engineer at the University of Maryland, said in an interview. "The losses were increased because of the breaching that occurred."

The investigators found no evidence of negligence or malfeasance by the corps or its contractors, but said the corps had failed to take into account the tendency of the local soil to sink over time, leaving some sections of levee lower than they should have been. The corps did not re-examine the heights of levees even after it had been warned about the degree of subsidence, the report said.

Similarly, the corps designed the system to protect New Orleans against a relatively low-strength hurricane, the report found, and did not respond to warnings over the years from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration that a stronger hurricane should have been the standard.

The report suggested the corps has had trouble keeping up with the fast-changing world of geotechnical engineering, and does not share critical information among its many parts.
Although the corps had indications that the floodwalls might fail under intense storm conditions, "the pieces were not put together to solve the puzzle," the report said. More must be done, it concluded, to share information among those who do research and those who design and build systems.

The report, which is already being used in the repair and improvement of New Orleans's flood protection, warned that the area "remains vulnerable" to any storm with surge and wave conditions like Hurricane Katrina's.

The chief engineer of the corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, said in an interview that the report showed that "we missed something in the design," particularly in the construction of the drainage canal floodwalls that caused so much of the flooding.

According to the report, the corps designers did not anticipate the way the floodwalls would fail as water climbed high against them: in several breaches, including the one at the 17th Street Canal, the force of the water pushed the floodwall back slightly, opening a gap deep into the earthen levee below that allowed water to course down under high pressure and push the wall aside.

General Strock did not go so far, however, as to apologize on behalf of the corps for the decades of decisions that went into the system.

"It is what it is," he said. "Call it a mea culpa, or call it a dry recognition, or admission, or whatever — but we're not ducking our accountability and responsibility in this."

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