[StBernard] Corps of Engineers addressing repairs made during rapid-response phase

[Westley Annis]

Corps of Engineers addressing repairs made during rapid-response phase
by Sheila Grissett, The Times-Picayune 
Sunday March 09, 2008, 10:31 PM
The Army Corps of Engineers is repairing a number of the emergency repairs
made by a rapid-response task force deployed military-style after Katrina to
quickly fix storm damage before the next hurricane season. 


Most of the repairs, which involve only a minute percentage of all task
force projects, address cracking and separation of concrete scour and
erosion protection in multiple locations, but mostly in eastern New Orleans.
Other fixes address grass-growing problems that have left some earthen
levees partially bare and pitted with ruts and rills, especially in St.
Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. 

Corps officials also disclosed that some follow-up work may be needed along
the 17th Street Canal, where corps personnel must determine the source of
what is called "a small wet area" on the protected side of the east
floodwall at the repaired breach site. 

The water doesn't seem to be coming from the breach repair itself, said
Kevin Wagner, the corps' senior project manager for levees and floodwalls in
Orleans Parish.

As part of that original repair work, which was completed last summer at a
total cost of about $25 million, Wagner said extra clay was added to the
site. 

"But the water is still showing up in a small area," he said this week. 

Wagner said the next step may be testing to determine whether water is
seeping through the joints that connect the wall's massive concrete panels. 

The corps already is doing similar testing along portions of the West Return
Canal floodwall in Kenner to determine the genesis of small amounts of water
that show up from time to time. 

"We're monitoring the area, and we'll keep investigating to find the
answer," Wagner said, adding there's no cause for alarm at the 17th Street
Canal. 

About $250,000 worth of repairs already have been made to work performed
under the corps' Task Force Guardian, and an additional $200,000 worth are
anticipated, said corps Protection and Restoration Office branch chief Brett
Herr. 

"This may sound like a lot," Herr said. "But it is less than (a fraction) of
the total cost of the work performed by Task Force Guardian." 

Task force work on the crippled hurricane protection system, compared at the
time to battlefield triage, has cost about $1.13 billion to date -- an
amount that includes all repairs and construction of surge protection gates
and temporary pumping stations on three outfall canals, a corps spokesman
said. 

The remaining repairs are to be completed by the June 1 start of this storm
season, though Herr and other corps supervisors suggested these aren't the
kinds of issues that would trigger catastrophic levee failures. 

"We are going to finish these repairs, but I don't think a 1-inch separation
between a floodwall and a slab of concrete 10 to 20 feet wide would let
enough water in to cause a catastrophic failure," Wagner said. 

Most of the repair work in St. Bernard Parish requires scarifying deeply
rutted crowns along a 2.5-mile stretch of levee and then establishing a
healthy grass cover to defend against erosion from rainfall or storm-driven
surges and waves. 

St. Bernard engineer Bob Turner, executive director of the Southeast
Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, said he'll sleep a lot better
when the work is done and the grass is thick and green. 

Turner, while still executive director of the Lake Borne Basin Levee
District last year, told corps personnel that his agency wouldn't accept
bare levees, rebuilt by Task Force Guardian, until they were properly
grassed. 

"To their credit, they agreed and set about fixing things, although it's
taken a lot longer than I would have hoped," he said. 

"The lack of vegetative cover on a levee that is not armored (against water
damage) is an invitation for disaster," Turner said. "Even though Guardian
used better materials to rebuild the levees in St. Bernard, they still need
a good grass cover." 

Wagner and Herr said the cracking and separation of slope paving,
particularly prevalent in eastern New Orleans, occurred primarily because of
soil settlement. 

"In hindsight, sure, some things could have been done differently," Herr
said of the 59 post-Katrina contracts that Task Force Guardian was ordered
to execute by the 2006 hurricane season that opened June 1. 

"But Guardian was designing in days instead of months," he said. "We were
going so fast, from one project to the other. In some of the earlier
contracts, we used techniques that didn't work well. But through trial and
error, we learned what worked best." 


Herr said most of the repairs are being made to the earliest work done by
the task force that, by design, was dissolved in mid-2006 after corps
operations in New Orleans were reorganized and expanded to take over work on
the 350-mile system. 

Herr said the breakdowns in concrete work, such as concrete slabs pulling
away from floodwalls or transition structures, didn't start showing up until
at least six months or so after the work on individual projects was
finished. He said there was more ground settlement than had been
anticipated. 

Most often, the concrete was poured onto ground that had been built up to
provide extra elevation along I-walls, the floodwall design now considered
the least robust, and at transitions. 

Transitions are the points at which floodwalls, floodgates, utility
crossings or other hard structures meet earthen levees. Much of Task Force
Guardian's work focused on I-walls and transitions, which had proved so
vulnerable during Katrina. 

"We had slope paving that either pulled away from walls or cracked, just
like driveways and sidewalks crack," Herr said. 

The separations had to be addressed so that neither rainfall nor storm surge
could erode and potentially undermine a structure. 

In some cases, expandable grout was pumped in through openings and crevices
to fill the voids created by settling soils and adhere to the paving. In
more difficult spots, Herr said concrete was cut away and more concrete was
poured using different techniques. 

Much of the task force work was considered interim and will either be
replaced over the next few years or will become less critical to system
integrity as new structures are built to reduce storm surges. 

Levee officials in Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines are not assuming
responsibility for the task force projects until all deficiencies are
resolved. That acceptance is the standard protocol before levee districts
assume responsibility for routine operation and maintenance of projects the
corps has built or, in this case, rebuilt. 

"When we see these kinds of things, we recommend that the levee districts
not accept them. But the guys with the corps realize they have a problem,
and they agree that these things have to be made right before they get
turned over," said Larry Ardiron, director of the state transportation
department's Hurricane Protection Operations, which provides engineering
services to the state's levee districts. 

"Most of that Guardian work was just done so fast that I don't know how much
design or forethought could have gone into it," Ardiron said. "I think
they're probably doing the best they can, and they probably have too much to
do, but sometimes they do things that just don't make sense." 

Corps work crews are about to begin the remaining levee repairs by disking
and smoothing the rutted crowns, then sowing and feeding grass seed in hopes
of having substantial stands by the time that hurricane season begins to
peak at mid-summer. 

"We did the work south of Bayou Dupre last summer, and although it's still a
little spotty, we're getting pretty good grass coverage there," said Chris
Gilmore, corps project manager in St. Bernard. 

He said equipment and supplies are now being mobilized between bayous Dupre
and Bienvenue, jobs that are accessible only by water. Gilmore said the
earthwork will take only three to four weeks, then grass-seeding will begin
with help from an LSU AgCenter grass specialists. 

"We'll do whatever we have to get a good stand of grass out there," Gilmore
said. "We're confident that if we have a storm this season, those levees
won't wash away." 

Getting grass to grow on new and newly lifted levees is an old challenge in
southeast Louisiana, but only since Katrina has the corps begun to create
new guidelines tailored to this region and these levee soils. LSU AgCenter
authorities are providing both immediate aid and the research-based,
long-term recommendations that will help inform modern grass-growing
specifications the corps is writing for contractors. 

"Oh, you're going to see a lot of improvement," corps Assistant Operations
Chief Jerry Colletti told regional levee commissioners in January. 

"We believe that when we get new specs that we're comfortable with, we can
cure the long-term problem," he said. "All that rutting goes with the lack
of grass, and we're going to fix that."

Of 59 Task Force Guardian contracts, 47 were for work that must ultimately
be turned over to the levee districts for operation and maintenance. To
date, Herr's figures show that 38 of them have been accepted by the
districts, including seven handed off to the Orleans Levee District this
week after a final inspection showed that work was complete. 

Of the nine projects still in limbo and some stage of repair, five are in
New Orleans, three in St. Bernard and one in Plaquemines Parish. 

Orleans Levee District Executive Director Stevan Spencer is cautiously
optimistic that there won't be any more major settlement-related damages to
task force repairs in his jurisdiction. "You hope that most of the
subsidence has already occurred by now, but we'll watch it closely to see,"
he said. 

Corps officials sound equally confident that the lingering Task Force
Guardian issues won't put the system at risk in the coming season. 

"All the known Task Force Guardian repairs that would cause us concern are
being addressed before the season," said Bill Maloz, corps project leader in
Plaquemines Parish. 

"Task Force Guardian put things in the best shape they could. They didn't
come back to a project once they finished. They weren't required to, and
they had to go on to the next one," he said. "But we're here taking care of
these things now."