[StBernard] Scientists rebuke Corps over 'Mister Go' report

[Westley Annis]

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A group of scientists on Thursday accused the Army Corps
of Engineers of endangering this city's future by failing to take steps to
immediately close a shipping channel blamed for widespread flooding during
Hurricane Katrina.
 
The rebuke was aimed at a preliminary report the Corps sent Congress on Dec.
15, urging it to close the 76-mile Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet but
stopping short of saying when.
Locals have dubbed the 76-mile channel a "hurricane highway" because it has
been blamed for funneling storm surge into the city.
 
The Corps report denied that the channel contributed to the flooding of the
Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The Corps says storm surge modeling
shows that the channel did not act as a funnel. 
 
Those statements have baffled, and exasperated, many locals and scientists.
 
"The Corps has been working on this channel for 54 years, and they have egg
on their face and it's hard to admit," said Mark Madary, a St. Bernard
Parish councilman who appeared with the scientists at Thursday's news
conference denouncing the Corps report.
 
The channel is "a ticking time bomb in the heart of Orleans and St. Bernard
Parishes," the scientists said in a letter to House Speaker-designate Nancy
Pelosi and incoming-Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
 
The scientists called for building storm barriers to keep storms' waves from
entering this network of canals that they call "the funnel." They also said
the Corps report omitted detailing ways to rebuild marsh and swamp forests
ruined by the channel, which is known, from its initials, as the "Mr. Go."
 
G. Paul Kemp, a Louisiana State University engineer and one of several
forensic engineers examining what caused the flooding during Katrina, said
the Corps' modeling mistakenly excludes a 6-mile stretch where the canal
merges with the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway to explain how the channel did
not cause the flooding.
 
The combined waterway travels through eastern New Orleans and joins the
Mississippi River near the Lower 9th Ward, the neighborhood that saw the
worst flooding in the wake of Katrina.
 
Besides Kemp, two other LSU professors - Ivor van Heerden, a levee expert
and author of a book on the levee failures during Katrina, and John Day, a
coastal scientist - signed the letter. Sherwood Gagliano, an independent
scientist who pioneered several studies on coastal Louisiana, and Robert
Bea, a levee expert with the University of California at Berkeley who has
become one of the Corps' most vocal critics since Katrina, also signed the
letter.
 
The scientists are being employed as experts by a team of lawyers suing the
Corps and held their news conference in the office of some of the lead
attorneys in the case.
The scientists said they hope the new congressional leadership will make
closing the channel a priority and also make headway in overhauling the
Corps' management style.
The MRGO was dug in the 1960s as a shortcut to New Orleans and a way to
kick-start the development of reclaimed swampland east of the city that
wound up drowned by Katrina.
Since its construction, the channel has destroyed hundreds of square miles
of wetlands and killed stands of cypress forests.
 
The Corps said any decision on what to do with the channel should be
incorporated into a state master plan due out next December. That plan is
coming up with ways to protect south Louisiana from monster storms, coastal
land loss and sea level rise.