When the Army Corps of Engineers admitted in June that design flaws in the New Orleans levee system had caused most of the flooding during Hurricane Katrina, it seemingly left little to argue about.
But the fight wasn't over. The Corps is now engaged in an effort to predict how New Orleans would fare in the next big hurricane, and is once again being second-guessed by some of the nation's top civil engineers.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday January 07, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 34 words Type of Material: Correction
Levee-risk study: A Dec. 31 Section A article about engineers' criticism of a federal New Orleans analysis misspelled the name of Les Harder, levee chief at the California Department of Water Resources, as Harter.
The National Research Council complains that the Corps' official investigation into the levee failures reaches premature conclusions, glosses over problems, and fails in its most important task: giving the public the information it needs to make informed decisions about living in New Orleans.
The Corps' analysis will play a major role in determining the city's future -- including whether more than 200,000 former residents could rebuild abandoned neighborhoods and whether insurers can provide coverage at an affordable rate.
The stakes are high, not only for the integrity of the levees around New Orleans but for similar levees that protect millions of Americans who live along vulnerable coastlines and rivers across the nation. Many were built on the same mucky foundations and with the same flawed engineering assumptions as the notorious failed 17th Street levee in New Orleans.
The suspect levees stretch from Florida's Lake Okeechobee to the rivers of California's Central Valley and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which has 2,300 miles of levees that protect cities and farmland.
The Corps' investigation is essential to understanding California's situation, said Les Harter, the levee chief at the California Department of Water Resources.
"The floodwalls in New Orleans were 15 years old, and they failed," Harter said. "Our levees are 100 years old. We estimate we have one-half the level of protection that New Orleans had."
The Corps is about six months behind schedule in issuing an all-important "risk analysis," a massive body of work that is intended to tell the public how likely New Orleans is to flood again from a big hurricane.
The analysis is supposed to explain in precise detail how well specific sections of the city are protected against hurricanes, using evidence that hurricanes have intensified in recent years. The analysis would produce detailed maps.
Though the risk analysis has not been completed, the Corps did lay out the methodology it planned to use. Since then, the Corps' work has been scrutinized by two key groups, the National Research Council and the American Society of Civil Engineers.
