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There needs to be a little background info before making comments. In 1965 the flood protection of New Orleans was absorbed by the US Army Corps of Engineers (COE) as one of the elements of the Mississippi-Missouri flood control and water management system. At that time it ceased to be a responsibility of the Orleans Parish Levee Board. This switch may have been as a result of bargains struck by then Sen. Russell Long and LBJ over getting Long to sign on or at least not oppose funding Great Society programs as Long was the Senate Finance Committee chair. The COE took approximately five years to complete the flood control plan and design the structures. The key structures were not levees , which are large berm like structures but floodwalls to line the outfall canals which carry water away from the city and into Lake Pontchartrain. During the design a critical error was made in calculating load bearing resistance of these walls. The factor applied for the point of greatest stress the toe or forward edge of the bottom of the wall was switched with the factor for the point of greatest strength the point on the foundation of the wall directly below the apex of the wall. How this gross error was made has never been explained. It certainly had nothing to do with pricing the project. It is this gross error that led to the flood walls being designed to fail not through any particular corruption scandal. The scandal is that the US government's premier public works agency perpetrated such a gross and in some way elementary error. The flood walls failed on the London Ave and 17th Street Canals when a large but not excessive surge entered the canals from the lake. The understrength walls cracked due to the weight of the surge at several locations and what followed was like a dike breaking.

The concrete levee walls on the Inner Harbor Industrial Canal/Intercoastal Waterway were always a federal responsibility since the canal was built in the early 1920’s by the city and accepted into the Intercoastal Waterway system. Major overhaul of these structures had ben listed as a proposed COE project since the mid-1950’s but never made the funding cut in the annual COE water projects appropriation. Earth levees on the lake shore of St Bernard Parish were also part of the federal system, I presume as part of the Mississippi River -Gulf Outlet.(MRGO) This project was built in the 1950’s to cut distance off of the outward and inbound distance vessels traveling to New Orleans Port had to travel from the Gulf of Mexico. It was also a sort of roundabout to allow speedy entry into the inner harbor by larger cargo vessels appearing that could not use the Industrial Canal. Attempts to widen the canal had been tried since about 1950 but the hundreds of homes that would have been claimed along with commercial properties in any such widening caused politicians from the 7th and 9th Wards to keep the project from ever going anywhere. This also helped undermine overhauling the canal walls because the widening project kept being pushed by the Port Authority and shipping interests. When the storm came the canal and MRGO walls and levees were subjected to a heavier surge than the flood walls further east. Fracturing of the nearly 80 year old canal wall at Tennessee St. led to the mass flooding of the lower 9th Ward and much of St Bernard. The wall fractured above Tennessee St. also. Exact location i have forgotten. The earth berm levees on the MRGO had not been continuously upgraded because the MRGO never approached the activity levels anticipated and funding for it was always limited to normal maintenance, not major rebuild and upgrade.

There is an element of local malfeasance in this story. When the flood control responsibilities for Orleans Parish switched to the COE the Orleans Parish Levee Board ceased to be considered a serious organization as it had been. It's professional staff was absorbed mostly by the Parish Water Board and the positions became a classic empty political sinecure. The Levee Board began to focus on such trivia as getting funds for a portable bridge for one of the riverboat casinos. An alert Levee Board would have noted troubling evidence of leakage under the flood walls during periods of heavy rain and the aging nature of the Industrial Canal walls.

Corruption and as I have written incompetence has certainly been part of the problems of NOLA. However, the failure of the flood control system was more from errors by experts and inattention and complacency.after all New Orleans had come through a heavy storm in 1965 with extensive but non catastrophic flooding and no breaks in the flood control structures.