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An engineering firm involved in the design of the 17th Street Canal levee and floodwalls said Friday that the Army Corps of Engineers overruled its recommendation to drive sheet piling to a depth of 35 feet below sea level along a stretch of the floodwall that failed during Hurricane Katrina, causing massive flooding in Lakeview and other parts of the city. William B. Conway, chairman of the Metairie engineering firm Modjeski and Masters, in a letter to The Times-Picayune, said the corps plan eventually led to pilings that were driven just 10 feet below sea level. Modjeski and Masters was...

Young, now helping to rebuild three damaged New Orleans canals between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, said design drawings show that steel pilings reinforcing the levees should have been driven to a depth of 17 feet below sea level. That does not appear to have been the case, based on preliminary findings by an investigative team led by Louisiana State University civil engineering professor Ivor van Heerden. Using sonar, his tests have shown sheet pilings at the canal went to only 10 feet below sea level. Steve Spencer, chief engineer for Orleans Parish levees, said his agency did the...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Government engineers performing sonar tests at the site of a major levee failure confirmed that steel reinforcements barely went more than half as deep as they were supposed to, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official said Wednesday. "We've come up with similar results" to those from earlier tests performed by Louisiana State University engineers, said Walter Baumy, the Corps' chief engineer for the New Orleans District. Baumy said the Corps intends to pull out pieces of the remaining wall along each edge of the breach at the 17th Street Canal to verify the sonar test...

Today in Iraq Archive11/23/05 The completion of the a Fire Station in Khan Bani Sa'ad, Diyala Province will now provide local residents increased fire security, fire fighting capability, and a training facility for firefighters. The completion of two border forts in Maysan Province will increase security along the border with Iran, allow for proper training of border police, and provide additional logistical support for border patrols. 1,100 students will have a better learning environment and a brighter future with the completed renovation of a school in Basrah, Basrah Province. 11/22/05 The completion of the a Fire Station in Altun...

NEW ORLEANS - Engineers responsible for monitoring the levees that failed following Hurricane Katrina were never told that canal water had been pooling in yards beside a flood wall months before the storm, an Army Corps of Engineers manager said Friday. Residents living along the 17th Street Canal told The Times-Picayune newspaper in an article published Friday that they had complained to the city Sewerage and Water Board nearly a year ago about water pooling in their yards. City workers came out and concluded environmental testing was needed to determine if water was seeping through the levee, said Beth LeBlanc,...

After five months on the job, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq said that nation is turning a corner in the U.S.-backed effort to establish a democracy there and American patience would be rewarded in the next year. "In my experience, 99 percent of the Iraqi people want us there to keep providing stability for the time being - regardless of what Iraqi or American political leaders might say about a timetable for withdrawal," Brig. Gen. William McCoy Jr. said Tuesday. "It's already beginning to happen, but you are going to see more Iraqi troops taking...

In a stunning case of déjà vu, residents of the Ninth Ward were delivered another blow hampering their efforts to clean up their homes and begin the process of rebuilding. Water was found ponding in some areas of the flood ravaged neighborhoods, leaving many to believe that the levees had once again been topped. The Army Corps of Engineers said 8 to 12 inches of water were discovered in selected parts of the Ninth Ward; the result of a weak pumping system. National Guardsmen were blocking all entrances into the neighborhood while the Army Corps of Engineers monitored the situation....

Sluice Gate Releases Planned at Center Hill Dam Nashville, Tenn. [Aug. 18, 2005] — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to take measures next week at Center Hill Dam to increase the dissolved oxygen content of releases to the Caney Fork River. This action will benefit aquatic life downstream. Sluice gate releases will be concurrent with generation of electricity in the hydropower plant beginning Monday, August 22. By scheduling sluice releases during periods of power generation, the Corps will be able to meet downstream water-quality objectives and minimize impacts to fishermen and power interests. The measures are considered the...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6, 2005 – The "dewatering" of New Orleans should be complete today, the Army's top engineer said during a news conference here today. "The city is essentially dry now," Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Army's chief of engineers and commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said. "There may be some small pockets (of water) here and there." The recent dewatering was an effort necessitated by the Sept. 23 reflooding of the city as a storm surge created as Hurricane Rita spun through the Gulf of Mexico toward Texas topped New Orleans' already compromised levee system. With...

NEW ORLEANS (Army News Service Sept. 29) – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced today it is establishing a new team here to begin restoring federal elements of New Orleans’ battered hurricane-flood system to provide pre-Hurricane Katrina protection. The team – dubbed Task Force Guardian – consists of a cadre of Corps personnel from the Mississippi Valley Division’s St. Louis District as well as a larger group from the New Orleans District. Initially, this mission has been assigned to Col. Lewis F. Setliff III. Setliff normally serves as commander and district engineer in St. Louis. As the New Orleans...

After Hurricane Betsy swamped New Orleans in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson... pledged federal protection. The Army Corps of Engineers designed a Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Barrier to shield the city with flood gates like those that protect the Netherlands from the North Sea. Congress provided funding and construction began. But work stopped in 1977 when a federal judge ruled, in a suit brought by Save Our Wetlands, that the Corps' environmental impact statement was deficient.... Speaking for environmentalists, the Center for Progressive Reform called the charges in the Los Angeles Times "pure fiction" because the judge stopped construction only until the...

NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Rita's wind and rain breached two of New Orleans' battered levees Friday and sent water gushing into already-devastated neighborhoods just days after they had been pumped dry. In the impoverished Ninth Ward, water streamed through gaps at least 100 feet wide in a levee and was soon waist-deep on a nearby street. It began covering buckled homes, piles of rubble and mud-caked cars that Katrina had swamped with up to 20 feet of water nearly a month ago. Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers said other levees appeared secure, including those breached during Katrina, but...

As helping refugees from New Orleans continues, a few people are turning some attention to the long-term future of that City. Begin with this: there must be a new New Orleans. As I write this, New Orleans is flooding again, from the long distance effects of Hurricane Rita. There is a law of hydraulics that great masses of water can be controlled or channeled, but not absolutely stopped. This law is as inexorable as gravity. Thomas Jefferson understood the vital importance of the Mississippi River and the Port of New Orleans to the whole nation. Aaron Burr recognized the same...

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Sept. 16, 2005) -- President Bush promised "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" in his speech to the nation Sept. 15 and just a few hours earlier, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded contracts totaling up to $4 billion for debris removal in areas hit by Hurricane Katrina. One contract was to clean up the state of Mississippi and another three were for Louisiana. Each of the four contracts had a value of up to $500 million, officials said, with the option to add an additional $500 million each. The Corps...

Mississippi Debris Pick and Blue Roof in High Gear The Army Corps of Engineers’ Task Force Hope Mississippi has 703 personnel from around the nation focused on recovery operations in the Mississippi Recovery Field Office (RFO), with weekly for the next several weeks. This number could eventually reach 1000 at peak recovery as the Vicksburg District sets up a district-size team to execute assigned FEMA missions. Debris Removal: Current Mission Pick Up Level, 21% Complete FEMA estimates that there are currently about 18 to 20 million cubic yards of debris in the hurricane impacted area of Mississippi. This equates to...

The Hurricane Katrina fiasco has been blamed on President Bush, on poorly prepared or corrupt state and local governments, and even (by Rush Limbaugh) on a “culture of entitlement” that persuaded people they should stay in their homes and let the feds take care of them. But blaming it on environmentalists? That’s a new one. The latest wrinkle in the blame game comes in a September 8 article from a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) scribe that charges “environmental activist groups” (specifically American Rivers and the Sierra Club) with opposing flood protection by filing lawsuits against levee construction as an “artificial...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15, 2005 – The Army Corps of Engineers continues working with New Orleans' authorities to repair levees damaged by Hurricane Katrina and to pump out remaining floodwater in the city, the corps' senior official said today. The Army's military and civilian engineers are in New Orleans as part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to the disaster, said Army Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commanding general of the Corps of Engineers, told reporters at the Pentagon. Besides fixing damaged levees and ensuring that the Mississippi River is navigable, the engineers also are providing emergency electric power, as well...

Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show. The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys' offices: "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."

BATON ROUGE, La.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 9, 2005--The Shaw Group Inc. (NYSE: SGR) announced today that it has been awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to aid in the recovery and rebuilding efforts. Shaw will provide supervision, equipment, materials, labor, logistics, and all means necessary to provide the Corps of Engineers an immediate response for construction contract capability. The contract will provide construction and related services including program planning, scheduling, design, engineering, transportation, construction management, and quality control. Under this contract, Shaw has received its first task of pumping floodwater from the city of...

New Orleans, LA -- Divers inspecting the ruptured levee walls surrounding New Orleans found something that piqued their interest: Burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall! One diver, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, saw the burn marks and knew immediately what caused them. He secreted a small chunk of the cement inside his diving suit and later arranged for it to be sent to trusted military friends at a The U.S. Army Forensic Laboratory at Fort Gillem, Georgia for testing. According to well placed sources, a military forensic specialist determined the burn...