[StBernard] Another report confirms that corps failures caused disaster

Westley Annis westley at da-parish.com
Tue Mar 20 23:39:44 EDT 2007


Another report confirms that corps failures caused disaster

By Bob Marshall
Staff writer

Decades of incompetence and neglect by the Army Corps of Engineers allowed
Hurricane Katrina's storm surge to devastate New Orleans, according to the
long-awaited report by Team Louisiana, the state's only official
investigation into the causes of the disaster.

In a sweeping indictment of corps stewardship, the report alleges: agency
supervisors ignored increases in the threat level for their project;
knowingly built levees and floodwalls lower than Congressionally mandated;
failed to detect or ignored glaring errors during the review process;
underestimated the impact of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet on the city's
defenses; and failed to properly maintain the system.

The report echoes many points made in other probes last year, including that
of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, led by the University of
California-Berkeley, and the interim report from the corps' own Independent
Performance and Evaluation Team. But while those efforts focused largely on
the technical aspects of the structural failures, the LSU-based Team
Louisiana sought to pinpoint the decisions that caused those failures.

"It's one thing to use modern, state-of-the-art computer modeling and
determine what happened, and the other teams did a very good job of that,"
said Ivor van Heerden, a director of the LSU Hurricane Center who led Team
Louisiana. "But the only way to really understand if mistakes were made, was
by relying entirely on using the (engineering) tools the corps would have
used - or should have used - when they did their designs."

The 10-member investigative team, including seven LSU engineering and storm
researchers and three private sector engineers, spent almost 18 months and
$200,000 on the effort, including a $100,000 grant from its major backer,
the state Department of Transportation and Development. Among the key
findings: ---By ignoring two increases in the severity of the Standard
Project Hurricane - the model storm the system was designed to thwart - the
corps knowingly failed its 1965 Congressional charge to protect the city
against "the most severe combination of meteorological conditions reasonably
expected."

The original model was based on research through 1959. But the corps did
nothing to strengthen the system in response to two increases in the
projected strength of the model storm, in 1972 and 1979.
"The standard set by Congress in 1965 was very specific - 'the most severe
threat that could be expected,' " said van Heerden. "Our research shows very
clearly that the standard was changed, but the corps just kept going about
its business as if nothing happened.

Katrina, a Category 3 storm when it made landfall, fell far short of the
expectation of the most severe hurricane.

--In 1985, the head of the project ordered his staff to ignore an official
reduction in the elevation of the land they were building on, which meant
the corps finished levees and floodwalls it knew were as much as two feet
lower than claimed. That decision ultimately helped turn Katrina from an
inconvenience into a catastrophe.

"Had the walls been built as high as called for, the floodwalls in the Lower
9th Ward would have been over-topped for 1.5 hours, but instead water poured
over them for 4.5 hours," said van Heerden.

He said the extra three hours resulted in deep trenching on the protected
side of the floodwalls, contributing to the catastrophic collapse that sent
a wall of water roaring through the neighborhood, killing more than 100
people and displacing an entire sector of the city.

Below-design walls and levees contributed to many of the more than 50
breeches the system suffered during Katrina, the researchers said.

--Applying the corps' own design manuals in use at the time, Team Louisiana
found instances where the agency missed glaring engineering mistakes made by
subcontractors, which led to breeches including those on the 17th Street and
London Avenue canals.

In one instance, local firm Eustis Engineering botched a standard
engineering formula in deciding a thin layer of clay at the bottom of the
London Avenue Canal could prevent water from seeping into highly porous
sands below, the report said. During Katrina water pushed through the clay,
quickly traveling through the sand to the dry-land side of the sheet
pilings, weakening the levee and leading to a catastrophic breech.

"Had the corps caught that error - as it is supposed to - and required the
work to have been done properly, in all likelihood the design would have
been changed, which could have prevented this failure," said van Heerden.

"We found several stances where (better) designs were originally proposed -
T-walls instead of I-walls - and then changed for no apparent reason."

--The corps failed in its responsibility to properly maintain the parts of
the system, including keeping pace with subsidence. Moreover, the agency
ignored advances in engineering knowledge and technology that could have
prevented the flood.

The system "was managed like a circa 1965 flood-control museum," the report
reads, pointing out that the corps made no improvements to account for
well-known changes in elevations, sea-level rise or even gaps left in the
system.

Paul Kemp, who was part of Team Louisiana as an LSU storm modeler, said he
was "struck by the fact that the corps showed no sense of mission on this
project, even thought it was involved with it for more than 40 years."

Instead, the agency showed "absolute adherence" to obsolete standards - a
1959 model for the Standard Project Hurricane. And yet the corps seemed
willing, Kemp said, to make other wholesale changed mid-stream, such as
abandoning a proposal to install floodgates at the canals in the mid-1980s,
which might have stopped the Katrina surge that ultimately broke through
their walls.

"It looked like no one was really in charge," he said.

The report also calls for the state and Congress to hold "8-29 Commissions"
for a full investigation of the disaster, passage of a "Katrina Recovery
Bill" to ensure coastal restoration and flood protection are fully federally
financed, and more transparency on the part of federal and state authorities
when discussing flood protection plans.

"Citizens of New Orleans were never told by those with both knowledge and
responsibility just how vulnerable they were to flooding, or the public
safety compromises made in designing and building structures," the report
states.

Bob Marshall can be reached at rmarshall at timespicayune.com or at (504)
826-3539.



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