Engineers' warnings and pleas for money went unheeded

NY Times
Sep. 03, 2005

The 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate, aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically underfinanced that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years.

Often leading the chorus was Alfred Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps and a 30-year veteran of efforts to waterproof a city built on slowly sinking mud, surrounded by water and periodically a target of great storms.

Naomi grew particularly frustrated this year as the Gulf Coast braced for what forecasters said would be an intense hurricane season and a nearly simultaneous $71 million cut was announced in the New Orleans district budget to guard against such storms. He called the cut drastic in an article in the magazine New Orleans City Business.

In an interview Wednesday night, Naomi said the cuts had made it impossible to complete contracts for vital upgrades that were part of the long-term plan to renovate the system.

This week, amid news of the widening breach in the 17th Street canal, he realized that the decades-long string of near misses had ended.

"A breach under these conditions was ultimately not surprising," he said. "I had hoped that we had overdesigned it to a point that it would not fail. But you can overdesign only so much and then a failure has to come."

No one expected that weak spot to be along a canal that, if anything, had gotten more attention and shoring up than many other spots around the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls.

Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said it was particularly surprising because the break occurred "along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee. It had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick."

Now the corps is scrambling. After failing to close a 300-foot, or 100-meter, break in the canal through which most of the floodwaters were entering New Orleans, federal engineers decided to take the battle with Lake Pontchartrain to the lakefront.

They are preparing to drive corrugated vertical steel plates, called sheet pile, into the mud near where the narrow canal meets the lake, sealing it off so that the big breach farther in can be more methodically attacked, Naomi said.

The decision was made after a day of fruitless efforts to figure out how to drop concrete highway barriers or huge sand bags into the torrent. For the most part, the water between the lake and the filled bowl of the city has leveled off, officials said.

Weaknesses in the levee system were foreshadowed in a May report on the New Orleans-area hurricane protection plan and budget gap. The district headquarters concluded that "The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs."

They also meant that there was far too little money to conduct a thorough study of how to upgrade the city's protections from the existing standard, sufficient to hold back a hurricane at Category 3 on the five-step intensity scale, to a level of ruggedness sufficient to withstand floods and winds from a Category 5 storm.

Hurricane Katrina was on the high end of Category 4 and, despite the extreme flooding, is still seen by many hurricane experts as a near miss for New Orleans. Since 2001, Louisiana's congressional delegation had been pushing for far more money for storm protection than the Bush administration had been willing to accept.

Naomi said all the quibbling over the region's storm budget, or even over taking New Orleans to full Category 5 protection, which would cost several billion dollars, seemed tragically absurd.

"It would take $2.5 billion to build a Category 5 protection system and we're talking about tens of billions in losses, all that lost productivity, and so many lost lives and injuries and personal trauma you'll never get over," Naomi said. "People will be scarred for life by this event."

He said there were still no clear hints as to why the main breach in the flood barriers occurred along the 17th Street canal, normally a conduit for vast streams of water pumped out of the perpetually waterlogged city each day and which did not take the main force of waves roiling the lake.