Levee Repairs Behind Schedule?

Just what New Orleans needs. Yet another government infrastructure/rebuilding project that is behind schedule. And this one may not even meet the structural/engineering requirements set forth by Congress:

The Army Corps of Engineers seems likely to fulfill a promise by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans's toppled flood walls to their original, pre-Katrina height by June 1, but two teams of independent experts monitoring the $1.6 billion reconstruction project say large sections of the rebuilt levee system will be substantially weaker than before the hurricane hit.

These experts say the Corps, racing to rebuild 169 miles of levees destroyed or damaged by Katrina, is taking shortcuts to compress what is usually a years-long construction process into a few weeks. They say that weak, substandard materials are being used in some levee walls, citing lab tests as evidence. And they say the Corps is deferring repairs to flood walls that survived Katrina but suffered structural damage that could cause them to topple in a future storm.

The Corps strongly disputes the assertion -- by engineers from a National Science Foundation-funded panel and a Louisiana team appointed to monitor the rebuilding -- that substandard materials are being used in construction. Agency officials maintain that the new levees are rigorously inspected at each step. But they acknowledge that much more work will be needed after June 1, the beginning of hurricane season, and that the finished system still will not be strong enough to withstand a storm the magnitude of Katrina.

"The people of New Orleans need to get back to at least the level of hurricane protection we had before Katrina," Corps spokesman Jim Taylor said. "We were authorized to do that, and do it quickly. It's up to Congress to decide to take it to a higher level."

But Ivor van Heerden, a Louisiana State University engineering professor and leader of a state-appointed team of experts investigating the failure of the levee system during Katrina, charged that "the government is trying to create a sense of security that doesn't exist."

The Corps says that they're going to meet the June 1 deadline, but what good is meeting the deadline if the levees aren't sufficiently hardened against the category 3 storms they're meant to defend against?

Add to that the fact that thousands of people are still dislocated and the locals are getting tired of the dislocated New Orleans residents mighty quick. Houston received an influx of a large number of Katrina refugees, and a portion of those refugees have repaid Houston with a jump in the crime rates. Lovely.

Katrina fatigue definitely has set in.