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Well, it only cost us another $20 million for them to figure out they ed up.
June 2, 2006
Army Builders Accept Blame Over Flooding
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
In a sweeping new study of the causes of the disaster in New Orleans last year, the Army Corps of Engineers concludes that the levees it built in the city were an incomplete patchwork of protection, containing flaws in design and construction and not built to handle a storm anywhere near the strength of Hurricane Katrina.
"The hurricane protection system in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana was a system in name only," said the draft of the nine-volume report, released Thursday in New Orleans.
Several outside engineering panels that have been critical of the corps have come to similar conclusions, and have found a more extensive chain of flaws in the design, construction and maintenance of the 350-mile levee system.
But the 6,113-page report is remarkable for being a product of the corps' own official investigation, which brought together 150 experts from government, academia and business to study what went wrong and how to build better systems for the future.
The region's network of levees, floodwalls, pumps and gates lacked any built-in resilience that would have allowed the system to remain standing and provide protection even if water flowed over the tops of levees and floodwalls, the report's investigators found. Flaws in the levee design that allowed breaches in the city's drainage canals were not foreseen, and those floodwalls failed even though the storm waters did not rise above the level that the walls were designed to hold.
But the system was also overwhelmed in significant ways by Hurricane Katrina, and some degree of flooding would have happened even if the floodwalls had not been breached by the surging waters, the report stated.
"Regardless of breaching or no breaching, there would have been massive flooding and losses" from the hurricane, Lewis E. Link, the director of the study and a senior research engineer at the University of Maryland, said in an interview. "The losses were increased because of the breaching that occurred."
The investigators found no evidence of negligence or malfeasance by the corps or its contractors, but said the corps had failed to take into account the tendency of the local soil to sink over time, leaving some sections of levee lower than they should have been. The corps did not re-examine the heights of levees even after it had been warned about the degree of subsidence, the report said.
Similarly, the corps designed the system to protect New Orleans against a relatively low-strength hurricane, the report found, and did not respond to warnings over the years from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration that a stronger hurricane should have been the standard.
The report suggested the corps has had trouble keeping up with the fast-changing world of geotechnical engineering, and does not share critical information among its many parts. Although the corps had indications that the floodwalls might fail under intense storm conditions, "the pieces were not put together to solve the puzzle," the report said. More must be done, it concluded, to share information among those who do research and those who design and build systems.
The report, which is already being used in the repair and improvement of New Orleans's flood protection, warned that the area "remains vulnerable" to any storm with surge and wave conditions like Hurricane Katrina's.
The chief engineer of the corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, said in an interview that the report showed that "we missed something in the design," particularly in the construction of the drainage canal floodwalls that caused so much of the flooding.
According to the report, the corps designers did not anticipate the way the floodwalls would fail as water climbed high against them: in several breaches, including the one at the 17th Street Canal, the force of the water pushed the floodwall back slightly, opening a gap deep into the earthen levee below that allowed water to course down under high pressure and push the wall aside.
General Strock did not go so far, however, as to apologize on behalf of the corps for the decades of decisions that went into the system.
"It is what it is," he said. "Call it a mea culpa, or call it a dry recognition, or admission, or whatever — but we're not ducking our accountability and responsibility in this."
Nonetheless, he made it clear that he believed outside influences had played a role in the problems of the flood protection system, though he said that did not absolve the corps. As one example, he cited plans by the corps in the 1970's to put large barriers at the narrow openings between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico.
The corps backed off from that plan after a court challenge from environmental groups and then proposed floodgates at the city's drainage canals. But local officials of the levee boards and sewerage and water boards blocked that plan, as well. So the corps went with the next fallback plan of building floodwalls in the canals.
"Each time, we backed off," General Strock said. "Each time we did that, we assumed an increment of risk. I don't think anybody looked back and said, 'Risk, risk and risk adds up to unacceptable levels.' "
He said this was not an effort to lay blame at the feet of others, because ultimately the corps had responsibility for what it built.
"At the end of the day, we have to stand by the decisions," he said. If the corps builds floodwalls, he said, those floodwalls have to stand up to the test and the system has offer the intended level of protection. "And we didn't get there," he said.
The corps announced this week that it had substantially met its goal of repairing the city's hurricane protection system by June 1, the beginning of hurricane season, though there was significant work still to be done, including on two of the three enormous gates at the mouths of the city's major drainage canals.
If an unseasonably early hurricane approaches with threats of a storm surge, corps officials say, they will drive sheets of steel across the mouths of the canals and remove the rainwater with portable pumps. That could lead to street flooding, but should prevent the catastrophic breaches that allowed Lake Pontchartrain to pour billions of gallons into the center of the city.
A setback was announced this week as a 400-foot section of levee in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, shifted as it neared completion. The marshy soil of the area could not support the weight of the earthen levee structure, which slumped and bulged. It is being repaired.
.
Robert G. Bea, an engineering expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been critical of the corps, said he was impressed by the level of criticism in the report.
"This report has got a tone in it that is not like anything we have seen before," Dr. Bea said. "They're coming forward now."
But he said he wished that the corps had admitted other failures and gone further in delving into the internal reasons for those failures. A report by Dr. Bea and colleagues, released last month, said organizational dysfunctions within the corps had created an environment with little responsibility or accountability, and within which safety concerns could be easily played down.
The Thursday report did not address that question in depth, but General Strock said it would be dealt with in a subsequent study.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
===============================================
The Corps of Engineers seems actually to be a Corps of Incompetent Clowns and Pork-Barrel Experts.
Well, it only cost us another $20 million for them to figure out they ed up.
Not sure what the point of this thread is. That they should've never tried to save a city that was destined to sink anyway?
"destined to sink anyway"
Intelligence never seems to infect the Corps of Eningeers. It's a joke. That the CoE was even permitted by the WH to admit its royal ups is newsworthy. The WH makes sure all blame is NEVER placed on the WH. The CoE is a ing laughingstock, and anybody whose looked it or worke with it knows it.
=======================
Par for the Corps
A Flood of Bad Projects
By Michael Grunwald
Sunday, May 14, 2006; B01
In 2000, when I was writing a 50,000-word Washington Post series about dysfunction at the Army Corps of Engineers, I highlighted a $65 million flood-control project in Missouri as Exhibit A. Corps do ents showed that the project would drain more acres of wetlands than all U.S. developers do in a typical year, but wouldn't stop flooding in the town it was meant to protect. FEMA's director called it "a crazy idea"; the Fish and Wildlife Service's regional director called it "absolutely ridiculous."
Six years later, the project hasn't changed -- except for its cost, which has soared to $112 million. Larry Prather, chief of legislative management for the Corps, privately described it in a 2002 e-mail as an "economic dud with huge environmental consequences." Another Corps official called it "a bad project. Period." But the Corps still wants to build it.
"Who can take this seriously?" Prather asked in his e-mail. That's a good question to ask about the entire civil works program of the Corps.
It came up occasionally in 2000, when Pentagon investigators, the Government Accountability Office and the National Academy of Sciences were do enting the agency's ecologically disastrous, economically dubious, politically inspired water projects.
Then the Corps failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, despite spending more in Louisiana than in any other state. Last month, the Corps commander acknowledged that his agency's "design failure" led to the floodwall collapses that drowned New Orleans. So why isn't everyone asking questions about the Corps and its patrons in Congress?
Somehow, America has concluded that the scandal of Katrina was the government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage -- even though a useless Corps shipping canal intensified Katrina's surge, even though poorly designed Corps floodwalls collapsed just a few feet from an unnecessary $750 million Corps navigation project , even though the Corps had promoted development in dangerously low-lying New Orleans floodplains and had helped destroy the vast marshes that once provided the city's natural flood protection.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency's failures didn't inundate a city, kill 1,000 residents and inflict $100 billion in damages. Yet FEMA is justifiably disgraced, while Congress keeps giving the Corps more money and more power. A new 185-point Senate report on what went wrong during Katrina waits until point No. 65 to mention the Corps "design and construction deficiencies" that left New Orleans underwater. Meanwhile, a new multibillion-dollar potpourri of Corps projects is nearing approval on Capitol Hill.
That's because the Corps is an addiction for members of Congress, who use its water projects to steer jobs and money to their cons uents and contributors. President Bush has opposed dozens of the most egregious boondoggles, but Congress has kept funding them and the Corps has refused to renounce them -- while New Orleans has remained vulnerable.
Even Prather, the agency's public representative on the Hill, complained in that private e-mail that the Corps has sacrificed its credibility by defending its indefensible projects -- he called them "swine" -- just as the Catholic Church defended its wayward priests.
"We have no strategy for saving ourselves," he wrote. "Someone needs to be supervising the Corps."
The Torporific Pork Barrel
The Corps is one of the oldest and oddest federal agencies.
It got its start as an engineering regiment during the Revolutionary War, building fortifications at Bunker Hill. It is still run by Army officers, and it still oversees military projects such as the reconstruction of Iraq. But most of its 35,000 employees are now civilians working on civilian projects -- deepening ports; replenishing beaches; draining wetlands for agriculture and development; and taming rivers for barge traffic, flood control and hydropower. Officially the Corps is a Pentagon agency, but it functions like a congressional preserve; its civil works budget consists almost entirely of earmarks requested by individual members of Congress and endorsed by the Corps.
So the United States doesn't really have a water resources policy; just a pork-barrel water resources agency that builds pet projects in congressional districts across the country.
But the pressure goes both ways. The Corps motto is " Essayons ," French for "Let us try," and its leaders have always pushed Congress to let them improve on nature's work. Even in the pre-Earth Day era, executive-branch officials complained that Corps leaders exploited their Capitol Hill connections to secure funding for projects that served their clients in the shipping, dredging, farming and building industries. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's interior secretary excoriated the "reckless and wastrel behavior" of the "insubordinate and self-seeking" Corps, attributing its popularity to "the torporific effect of the pork barrel." President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared that "I cannot overstate my opposition to this kind of waste of public funds."
All modern presidents have tried to rein in the Corps, but Congress has jealously protected it. In 2000, after I wrote about a secret "Program Growth Initiative" that Corps generals had devised to try to boost their budget, the Clinton administration was so embarrassed by the reaction of its assistant Army secretary for civil works -- "Oh my God. My God. I have no idea what you're talking about" -- that it announced a modest plan to reaffirm the Pentagon's authority over the Corps. A week later, after a ferocious backlash from congressional leaders, the plan was meekly withdrawn.
The Corps is allowed to endorse projects whenever it calculates that the economic benefits to private interests -- even one private interest -- would exceed the costs to taxpayers. And without executive-branch oversight, the Corps has traditionally inflated benefits, low-balled costs, and otherwise justified projects that keep its employees busy and its congressional patrons happy.
The Corps predicted its Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway would cost about $300 million and float 28 million tons of cargo in its first year; the actual totals were $2 billion and 1.4 million tons. And that was before the Program Growth Initiative ordered Corps analysts to "get creative" with economic studies.
The result was the kind of boondoggles that Larry Prather called "swine," such as the Yazoo Pump project, a plan to build the world's largest flood-control pump in the Mississippi Delta even though it would cost more than buying the soybean farms it is supposed to keep dry. Or the similarly destructive plan to build jetties to protect private fishing boats off North Carolina's Outer Banks, at a cost of about $500,000 per boat. Or a proposal to deepen the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to attract cargo ships that had no interest in using it.
The biggest Corps scandal of 2000 involved a $1.2 billion navigation project on the Mississippi River. The Corps economist studying it had concluded that the numbers didn't add up, so his bosses reassigned him and pressured his team to concoct a new economic justification. The Army inspector general later concluded not only that the Corps had skewed that analysis, but that it had a systemic bias in favor of big projects. Generals were reprimanded, the National Academy of Sciences urged more modest approaches and the Corps went back to the drawing board.
In December 2004, the Corps came back with its modest proposal: a $7.7 billion project.
Again and Again
Today's Corps leaders say their agency is more ecologically sensitive and fiscally sensible; in recent interviews, they promised "more credible" analyses. Bush has proposed zero funding for most of the zaniest Corps projects; he also shut down the Outer Banks debacle, and fired an assistant Army secretary who complained publicly about the proposed budget cuts. The deepening of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal seems dead, and the Corps has stopped dredging some of its little-used waterways.
For the most part, though, Congress has ignored Bush's proposed cuts. And the Corps still defends its clunkers, including a Delaware River deepening that was savaged by the and a Columbia River deepening that was debunked by the Oregonian newspaper .
The Corps recently admitted in court that its bizarre Missouri flood-control project was justified by a basic math error, and a new study suggests that a multibillion-dollar Corps navigation project on the Ohio River will make the Mississippi project look cost-effective by comparison. The Corps is also struggling with its $10 billion effort to restore the Florida Everglades, the project that was supposed to turn around the agency's environmental reputation; one Corps manager complained in a 2005 memo that it's over budget and behind schedule, and that it isn't restoration at all.
"We continue to see the same systemic problems at the Corps, again and again, the same recurring themes," GAO analyst Anu Mittal said.
Themes such as unintended consequences, environmental destruction, shoddy economics and selfish politics.
The same themes that drowned New Orleans.
A City Drowned
After Katrina, the Corps said that all of its failed floodwalls had been overtopped by a hurricane too powerful for the Category 3 protection authorized by Congress, while Bush's critics said the administration's budget cuts had hamstrung the Corps.
Both were wrong. Katrina was no stronger than a Category 2 when it hit New Orleans, and many Corps levees collapsed even though they were not overtopped. Bush's proposed budget cuts were largely ignored, and were mostly irrelevant to the city's flood protection. New Orleans was betrayed by the Corps and its friends in Congress.
The Corps helped set the stage for the disaster decades ago by imprisoning the Mississippi River behind giant levees. Those levees helped protect St. Louis, Memphis and even New Orleans from river flooding, but they also reduced the amount of silt the river carries to its delta, curtailing the land-building process that creates marshes and swamps along the Louisiana coast. Those wetlands serve as hurricane speed bumps -- in Katrina, levees with natural buffers had much higher survival rates -- but they have been vanishing at a rate of 24 square miles per year.
After Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the Corps also began building levees to protect the city from the Gulf of Mexico, but its misguided plan led to even more destruction during Katrina. The Corps put most of its levees around undeveloped and highly vulnerable floodplains instead of focusing on protection for existing developments -- partly because Corps cost-benefit analyses did not consider the cost of human life or environmental degradation, and partly because powerful developers owned swampland in those vulnerable floodplains. Katrina destroyed many of the houses built on those former swamplands.
The Louisiana delegation and the Corps also deserve blame for the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, an alternative shipping route to the Port of New Orleans. The outlet was always popular with port officials and a few shipping executives, but it destroyed more than 20,000 acres of wetlands, created a "hurricane superhighway" into the city and never attracted much traffic. Now computer models suggest it amplified Katrina's surge by two feet.
And the outlet was only the most destructive of the pork projects the Corps has been building in Louisiana when it should have been upgrading levees and pursuing its plan to restore the state's coastal wetlands. In 2000, I described how the Corps had spent $2 billion wrestling the wild Red River into a slack-water barge channel that wasn't being used by any barges; four of its dams had been named for Louisiana members of Congress, and the entire channel had been named for former Louisiana senator J. Bennett Johnston (D). The Corps was also spending $750 million to build a lock that was supposedly needed to accommodate increasing barge traffic on the New Orleans Industrial Canal -- even though barge traffic was steadily decreasing. The Corps spent $1.9 billion in Louisiana in the five years before Katrina, more than it spent in any other state. But all that money didn't keep New Orleans dry.
Ever since Katrina, independent engineers have been pointing out grave problems with the Corps levee designs, and criticizing the agency for building on unstable soils. In congressional testimony last month, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the commander of the Corps, finally acknowledged "design flaws." But his damning admission got nowhere near as much attention as former FEMA director Michael Brown's e-mail about being a "fashion god."
Where's the Outrage?
So why aren't Americans angry? Because water resources policy is so boring? Because they're counting on the Corps to protect New Orleans from the next storm? Because they assume all the other Corps flood-control projects are properly designed and constructed?
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) are pushing a Corps reform bill that would require independent reviews of large projects, but they aren't getting much traction. By contrast, 81 senators have urged swift passage of a bill approving $12 billion in new Corps projects. And the Louisiana delegation has tried to use Katrina to pour billions into unrelated Corps pork, including a port-deepening project that even the Corps concluded would return just 30 cents on every taxpayer dollar.
Meanwhile, the Corps is rebuilding its New Orleans levees to mere Category 3 levels.
Maybe Americans will get angry after the next disaster.
[email protected]
Michael Grunwald is a Washington Post staff writer.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Wow, lets fire this administration and while were at it we must hold all the administrations before them accountable for the failed levies. Everyone know this was a problems since the 70's due to the fact N.O. was under sea level. Lets all get our heads out of our behinds and quit being Rep or Dems and start being Centrist and fix problems instead of pointing fingers. I'm so jaded with politics its not even funny. We are all blind.
"fix problems"
That would take serious commitment and leadership. Not only do I think the Exec and Legislative branches are so broken that nothing will be done, the brokenness is the responsibility of both parties.
Wonderful examples of pandering to knee-jerk asshole chauvinists:
What's at the top of spineless, gutless Frist's list? An anti-flag-burning amendment.
Now dubya comes today out supporting a anti-gay-marriage amendment.
100s of $Ms to get these amendments written AND passed by the states, and 100s of 1000s of hours wasted at all levels. total bull .
Both issues that pander to SIGs, but advance the country not one bit. They don't even stop the country from regressing. It's stupid-as- pandering to tiny groups of voters.
The US survived flag-buring in the 60s and 70s, and it will now. yawn.
Work on national real problems, like the medical system buggering the entire country?
Run the govt and allocaton of resources better?
no! support bull Cons utional amendments.
Geeze Bout, a freaking city that lives below sea level getting flooded by a hurricane aftermath is the Bush Admins fault?
You're really reaching now.
You live in a pothole, don't when it rains.
You can't *fix* something that's going to be continually broken due to the geography of the area. They're in a ing swamp, land sinks in a swamp, and nothing's going to stop that from happening.
croutons, you're idiocy never ceases to amaze me. Do you realize how much infrastructure in this country the Corps of Engineers has built over the last 60 years?The Corps of Engineers seems actually to be a Corps of Incompetent Clowns and Pork-Barrel Experts.
This country wouldn't be near what it is without their projects.
Damn you are one ed up son of a .
AHF, lick my ass, you less twerp.
Please list all the projects that offset all the ups.
C of E is nothing but pork barrel heaven.
And WTF is the C of E doing in this business anyway?
I have a better idea, let's hold them accountable at the ballot box. Yes, everyone knew long ago that N.O.'s time was coming, and we knew, but were afraid to admit, that 1000's of people would likely stay behind, either by choice or neccessity and many would likely perish if the levees were breached. None of that was surprising.
What was surprising was the W.H. lack of attention to the national disaster - Dubya stayed on Vacation in Crawford, Chertoff was also on vacation, and Brownie gave his head FEMA guys two days to get to N.O. after Katrina hit. It took the army 5 days to get to N.O.. Meanwhile, a guy in a two-wheel Hyduai evacuated 5 people from N.O. in the first 2 days after Katrina hit.
Please list all the projects that offset all the ups.
C of E is nothing but pork barrel heaven.
And WTF is the C of E doing in this business anyway?
Ever heard of the Mississippi River you dumb ? The Corps maintains it, from flood control to dredging the channels. This country pretty much wouldn't function without the Mississippi and all the shipping that is done up and down it.
Straight from their web site:
That's just the obvious one. They clean up shut down nuclear sites (cleaning up something like 10-12 sites in the US right now), they manage about 500 lakes/dams (i.e., Canyon Dam), deal with environmental spills here in the US, the list goes on and on.Today, the Corps maintains more than 12,000 miles (19,200 km) of inland waterways and operates 235 locks. These waterways -a system of rivers, lakes and coastal bays improved for commercial and recreational transportation - carry about 1/6 of the Nation's inter-city freight, at a cost per ton-mile about 1/2 that of rail or 1/10 that of trucks. The Corps also maintain 300 commercial harbors, through which pass 2 billion tons of cargo a year, and more than 600 smaller harbors. With more than 13 million American jobs dependent on our import and export trade, these ports are vital to our economic security. Detailed information on the commerce handled by the Nation's ports and waterways is available from the Corps' Navigation Data Center.
Needless to say though, we'd be ed without their management of the Mississippi River.
Off the top of my head other 'showpiece' projects they handle - The I-10 bridge over Lake Pontchartrain and restoration of the Everglades down in Florida. I know there's much more, but maybe the Mississippi River will get your attention.
Right, I'm sure Bush has no phones or communications equipment at his ranch in CrawfordWhat was surprising was the W.H. lack of attention to the national disaster - Dubya stayed on Vacation in Crawford, Chertoff was also on vacation, and Brownie gave his head FEMA guys two days to get to N.O. after Katrina hit.
Katrina's Unlearned Lessons
A government agency admits error, and Congress wants to reward it.
Wednesday, June 7, 2006; A22
LAST WEEK the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted responsibility for much of the destruction of New Orleans. It was not true, as the Corps initially had claimed, that its defenses failed because Congress had authorized only Category 3 protection, with the result that Hurricane Katrina overtopped the city's floodwalls. Rather, Katrina was no stronger than a Category 2 storm by the time it came ashore, and many of the floodwalls let water in because they collapsed, not because they weren't high enough. As the Corps' own inquiry found, the agency committed numerous mistakes of design: Its network of pumps, walls and levees was "a system in name only"; it failed to take into account the gradual sinking of the local soil; it closed its ears when people pointed out these problems. The result was a national tragedy.
You might think that the Corps' mea culpa would fuel efforts to reform the agency. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) are pushing a measure that would do just that, requiring that future Corps proposals be subject to technical review by an independent agency. But the stronger current in Congress goes in the opposite direction. A measure urged by Louisiana senators and written by Sens. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) would loosen oversight of the Corps. Billions of dollars may be spent in ways that ignore the most basic lessons from Katrina.
Congress has already passed laws with language directing the Corps to design a new flood-protection plan for Louisiana. The language encourages the construction of Category 5 protections for the whole state, a project that could cost tens of billions of dollars; it advertises its own profligacy by laying down that the flood-protection plan should be exempt from cost-benefit analysis. The new measure, which is reportedly part of a revised version of a water projects bill that will be unveiled shortly, would lower the bar for congressional approval of whatever Louisiana defenses the Corps sees fit to propose. Rather than requiring full votes in both chambers of Congress, the Corps' plan could be authorized by votes in two committees that tend to rubber-stamp such projects.
In the wake of Katrina, this is almost beyond belief. The Corps' admission of its own technical shortcomings points to the need for tougher oversight, not less. And the New Orleans disaster has illustrated the folly of building flood defenses for vulnerable low land: Some of the worst-hit areas would not have been developed in the first place if the Corps hadn't decided to build "protections" for them. Encouraging the Army Corps of Engineers to build Category 5 defenses for all of Louisiana, including parts that are sparsely populated for good reason, would not merely cost billions that would be better spent on defending urban areas. It would encourage settlement of more flood-prone land and set the stage for the next tragedy.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Except, bush is the boss. moron. crappy comparison.
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