La. report blames corps for levee breaks

[cal04]

Source: JANET McCONNAUGHEY, Associated Press Writer

Decades of mistakes — some as basic as not knowing the elevation of New Orleans — led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to believe its levees and floodwalls would protect the city from a storm as strong as Hurricane Katrina, a report released Wednesday concludes.

The corps used obsolete research to design flood-control structures that were built too low and improperly maintained, a group of engineers and storm researchers called Team Louisiana said in its 475-page report. The report was commissioned by the state Department of Transportation and Development.

The system was intended to be strong enough to handle a Category 3 hurricane like Katrina, which devastated New Orleans when levees broke.

Two major studies last year looked at the engineering problems that caused the 2005 breaches, but the new study also closely examines whether the problems could have been foreseen when the flood-control system was created.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070322/ap_on_re_us/new_orleans_levees_2

[merh]

1. How about this - the video congress didn't want you to see

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/224228/new_orleans_levee_break_during_katrina/

http://wizbangblog.com/2006/08/28/the-katrina-video-congress-didnt-want-you-to-see.php

The water didn't spill over, the levees broke and there was video to prove it.

:(

[youngdem]

2. The real issue was still height

The MRGO levee that protects New Orleans East had subsided, was no longer protected by much marsh, was paralleled by the MRGO deep water navigation channel and wasn't high enough even if none of this was the case. They 25 foot storm surge simply poured over the 15-20' levee creating a tidal wave heading West toward the industrial canal at nearly the same time that the Pontchartrain was overflowing and the Mississippi was backing up, creating a bathtub effect in New Orleans East where ALL sides of the levee were under impossible pressure and constant overtopping. It is not in doubt that the levees broke apart any longer. There are other videos that show horrid overtopping scouring the backside of the retaining walls out, then the concrete "I" walls collapse, tearing apart the top of the levee, and then it was on.

In Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parish, there can be NO doubt overtopping was the cause of the levee failure. It was simply 10' too short. The water in South Plaq was 25-30 high. I work (in New Orleans) and fish at Venice, the end of the earth at the mouth of the Mississippi and when going down there since the storm, you could simply drive down the Hwy and look at the river where before all you would see is an earthen wall. The levee had simply liquefied for more than 100 miles, due to being completely submerged under raging water for two days, then soaked for two months.

In New Orleans itself, the Corps, the New Orleans Commish and the LSU study group have ALL concluded that poor engineering and lack of proper height were responsible for the canal collapses that flooded New Orleans. There is video also of water pouring over the "I" walls in Lakeview, then scouring out the base, followed by collapse. (this is the breach by Paris road @ Robert E. Lee.)

A confluence of events led to the collapse, but don't rule out overtopping. We need taller levees - NO doubt about it.

[merh]

3. Look at the video

THE LEVY BROKE - it didn't spill over in that video, it came throw the huge crack, break in the levy.

[slackmaster]

4. Culmination of over a century of mismanagement of NO by the Corps

n/t

[maxsolomon]

5. what have they managed well?

i think the entire agency should be dissolved, just like the ATF & DHS.

dredging is not always the answer.

[Show_Me _The_Truth]

7. Actually the NO levees were managed by that corupt organization known as the Levee Board.

N/T

[Up2Late]

6. Here's the Un-Edited version of this report, and more!

(And, as usual, I recommend doing a "Google News" and compare and contrast the number of "news" outlets that picked up this story as compared to the the story, a few days later, where the Corp passes the blame to others (links below))

<http://www.publichealth.hurricane.lsu.edu/TeamLA.htm>

Team Louisiana Report

The Times-Picayune

Corps caused disaster, report says

State inquiry finds decades of blunders
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
By Bob Marshall

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

In a sweeping indictment of corps stewardship, the report alleges that 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, conducted by Team Louisiana at the request of the Department of Transportation and Development, 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 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."

(more at link)<http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1174456253193610.xml&coll=1>

Report Says Corps Miscalculated on Levees

Agency Denies Sole Responsibility, Calls System a Cooperative Effort

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 22, 2007; Page A03

The design and construction of the New Orleans hurricane levee system was flawed because the Army Corps of Engineers ignored warnings about the power of potential storms and made critical engineering miscalculations, according to a long-awaited investigative report from a team of Louisiana engineers and scientists.

The "Team Louisiana" report echoed many of the findings of previous engineering inquiries but offered them in sometimes sterner terms, while highlighting some of the political forces that affected the flood system's formation.

Army Corps of Engineers officials appear to have shortchanged the construction of essential flood protection systems to save money, according to the report, while at the same time, under local pressure, expanding the project's reach so that more low-lying land could be developed into new suburbs.

"The problem is that hurricane protection has no lobbyists," said Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane researcher at Louisiana State University, who led the team.

(more at link) <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/21/AR2007032101963.html>

<http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,260464,00.html>

Army Corps of Engineers: We Aren't Only Ones at Fault for Levees in Katrina Disaster

Thursday, March 22, 2007 (Article at link above)