Overestimated the Ability of Their Levee Systems. A damning new report commissioned by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development has found the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) grossly overestimated the ability of their levee systems to protect New Orleans in the face of strong storms. A wide range of miscalculations and oversights by […]
Overestimated the Ability of Their Levee Systems. A damning new report commissioned by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development has found the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) grossly overestimated the ability of their levee systems to protect New Orleans in the face of strong storms. A wide range of miscalculations and oversights by the Corps, says the report, led to the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In addition, the report concludes that the system today remains insufficient to protect the city against major storm surges.
The cadre of scientists and engineers, known as “Team Louisiana,” was led by Ivor van Heerden, director of the LSU Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. The highly anticipated, nearly 500-page report, offers a slew of data and evidence related to the failure of several federal levee systems, including those on the east and west banks of the Industrial Canal, east and west banks of the London Avenue Canal, the east bank of the 17th Street Canal, the north bank of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW), and the west bank of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO).
Among the criticisms of the Corps’ levee systems:
Perhaps most critically, the report determined that the Hurricane Protection System “still provides a substantially lower level of protection than that originally authorized in 1965.” The report also says, “It is evidence of how pervasively under-built the system was that it has cost as much after Katrina to repair the GNO HPS to a marginally stable pre-storm condition as was spent in the previous 40 years.”
Tellingly, the authors also felt the need to add the following passage in their executive summary: “One way to look at the Katrina event is as a catastrophic natural disaster, and, with respect to the magnitude of the storm surge, it was. This approach tends, however, to minimize the engineering contribution to the direct and indirect loss of as many as 1,500 Louisiana residents.”
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