[Undertoad]

Engineering News-Record:

Leaders of the Army Corps of Engineers say the city's flood walls were in excellent shape before the storm but weren't designed to handle a hurricane of Katrina's magnitude.

In a phone briefing Sept. 1, the Army's Chief of Engineers, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, addressed some of the issues that have surfaced about Corps-built structures around New Orleans. Strock said that the project that resulted in the levees along Lake Pontchartrain was designed to protect against a 200-to-300-year storm, which equates to about a Category 3 hurricane, but Katrina was more severe.

Al Naomi, senior project manager in the Corps' New Orleans District, says, "The [project's] design was not adequate for a storm of this nature." He adds that to cover a Category 5 storm, work on storm protection improvements would have had to start 20 or 25 years ago.

The levee breaches occurred in areas that were "in excellent condition" before the storm and were inspected, said Naomi. He said there was nothing the Corps could have done involving the completed floodwalls that could have prevented the breaches.

Another question concerned the allocation of national resources during a war. The war in Iraq has not had an impact on the Corps budget, said Strock. According to his analysis, Corps funding "has been fairly stable" since the early 1990s and the Corps has spent more than $300 million since 2002 on storm protection in the New Orleans area. "We were just caught by a storm of an intensity which exceeded the design of the [flood protection] project we have in place," he said.

Some Corps contracts in the area had been delayed, but Naomi says those contracts were not in the sections of the levees that failed.