It’s commendable of the Army Corps of Engineers to shoulder blame for the disastrous flood-control failures exposed when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, but a task force’s assertion that there was “no evidence of government or contractor negligence or malfeasance” is absurd.
An executive summary of the 6,000-plus-page report of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force catalogs enough failings to frame an indictment by history, if not the law. We’re also forced to note that while seeming to accept responsibility, the Corps of Engineers did so with more excuses than a jailhouse lawyer.
“This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, ‘We’ve had a catastrophic failure,”‘ said Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the Corps commander. “Words alone will not restore trust in the Corps.” He got that right.
The final report of the task force culminates a $20 million, eight-month investigation of the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history and of the flood-control system that was supposed to protect the greater New Orleans area.
“We say this was a system failure in that the system designed to protect New Orleans failed on many levels, but it also shows how the system – the business model – we use to build these things is so flawed,” Ed Link, the University of Maryland senior research engineer who headed the task force, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “The way we determine need, assess risk and go about funding and approving these things is based on a model that might have been appropriate for the way we lived 50 years ago but is sorely out of date today.”
Particularly troubling is the task force’s finding that the “hurricane protection in New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana was a system in name only.”
Such a system should have a second tier of protection (pumping stations) in case the first tier (levees) fails, the summary said. But the pumping stations weren’t designed to operate in hurricane conditions.
Although Katrina exceeded the system’s capacity, “the performance was less than the design intent: sections of the hurricane protection system were in many ways overwhelmed by the conditions created by Hurricane Katrina.”
A record high surge and long-period waves devastated levees. Also, impact was exacerbated because some parts of the flood control system hadn’t been completed; some structures were lower than they should have been, and some levee sections had erodible materials.
Structures in some areas weren’t anchored well enough to resist Katrina’s waves. In some places, the water ate away the ground on which the structures stood, while in others, water rushing over the tops caused failure.
Especially disturbing is the IPET finding that assumptions about how high the barriers had to be were outdated and didn’t take into account that much of the ground level had subsided by two or more feet in the last three and half decades.
The federal government resolved to build a hurricane protection system in the mid-1960s, but congressional support waxed and waned, and it was never completed. The most glaring failure was not seeing how the component parts of the system would perform as a whole in a hurricane as potent as Katrina. The Corps of Engineers should have considered that factor but didn’t. To our way of thinking, that’s negligence, as was Congress’ failure to adequately fund the project.
