City was warned levees wouldn’t hold

September 1, 2005

A number of Mississippi River engineers say they’ve been warning for years that New Orleans’ system of levees and dams could not defend against a weather onslaught like Hurricane Katrina.

The warnings were all but ignored by the federal government, which failed repeatedly to fund needed improvements, USA Today reports.

“This is horrible, terrible and devastating,” Claude Strauser, who retired from the Army Corps of Engineers earlier this year, told the paper. “But everybody knew it was vulnerable.”

To add to the mayhem, more water than anyone ever expected still is hammering the city three days after Katrina dispersed, turning the city’s rehearsed disaster responses into exercises in futility.

Joe Suhayda, a retired Louisiana State University engineering professor and oceanographer, said disaster planning in which he participated just last year clearly demonstrated a storm the size of Katrina would render useless the city’s flood fortifications. He said the problems were “an acknowledged, likely scenario that was not dealt with in the sense that [officials] solved the problem.”

In last year’s drill by city, state and federal officials, a fictitious Category 3 storm – “Hurricane Pam” – with 130 mile-per-hour winds, left a path of destruction that nearly mimicked Katrina’s damage: 1 million people left homeless, thousands needing rescue and about 600,000 buildings damaged or destroyed.

Katrina, by comparison, was a Category 4 storm with 140-mile-per-hour winds when it hit landfall Monday.

Despite the now-realized accuracy of last year’s disaster model, Suhayda said it is still hard to fathom such destruction.

“The circumstances, the personnel, the weather conditions, the size, the location – these are all factors that make the real world more complicated than your planning,” he told the paper.

Officials are working diligently to patch levees, pump out water and reinforce dams but, so far, are having only limited successes. Experts say the biggest need is to rid the city of as much excess water as possible so crews can gain access to sites requiring repair.

But the miscalculation will be costly in human and economic terms. Thousands of people are feared dead – trapped then drowned by the unexpected deluge of water now besieging the city – and billions of dollars worth of damage has been done.

Plus, much of the U.S. oil refining capability in the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding region, home to 30 percent of American production capacity, has been severely disrupted or disabled. That has led to domestic retail gas prices skyrocketing as high as $6 a gallon and to rationing of fuel at truck stops and other fuel stations.

In a statement to reporters Tuesday evening after viewing the damage to New Orleans during a helicopter tour, President Bush said one of the nation’s priorities will be to repair the infrastructure laid waste by Katrina.

“There’s a lot of work we’re going to have to do. In my flyover, I saw a lot of destruction on major infrastructure. Repairing the infrastructure, of course, is going to be a key priority,” he said, noting that included “repairing major roads and bridges and other essential means of transportation as quickly as possible.”