Several of the levees that flooded New Orleans may have been built with shoddy materials or by contractors who took shortcuts to save money, an investigator told Congress Wednesday.
About a dozen people, including engineers and contractors, made the allegations of poor workmanship in recent weeks to investigators probing the levee failures, said Raymond Seed, the head of a National Science Foundation team examining the levees.
Seed would not identify the tipsters and he cautioned that the allegations may ultimately have nothing to do with the levee disaster that led to hundreds of deaths. But he said that investigators are taking the tips seriously and intend to turn them over to federal officials.
"What makes us nervous is we're hearing multiple accounts," Seed said after testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. The National Science Foundation, which gave Seed a grant to investigate the levees, is an independent federal agency charged with promoting science and the nation's welfare.
The complaints focus on two canals where levees topped with flood walls were built in stages over the past 15 years. One of the claims is that contractors used steel sheets - which were driven into the levees to prevent water seepage - that were shorter than what was called for in designs. If true, that could have made the levees weak and prone to failure.
Other tipsters complained that inferior materials, such as porous soil, were used to construct the levees.
Robert Bea, another University of California, Berkeley professor working with Seed, said in an interview that he talked on the phone with two women who said they had specific information from their late husbands on construction shortcuts taken on the levees.
Seed said other investigators received similar complaints.
He wants the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversaw design and construction of the levees, to dig up portions of them to make sure they were built properly.