Questioning the Safety of the Levees

A wide range of design and construction defects in levees around New Orleans raise serious doubts that the system can withstand the pounding of another hurricane the size of Katrina, even after $3.1 billion in repairs are completed, a team of independent investigators led by UC Berkeley's civil engineering school said Sunday.

The findings undermine assurances by the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers that the federal levee repair program due to be completed in June will provide a higher level of protection to New Orleans, which sustained 1,293 deaths and more than $100 billion in property loss from Katrina.

The team's 600-page report disputed most of the corps' preliminary findings about what caused the levee breaches, saying the investigators had made critical errors in their analysis.

The mistakes raise concerns about whether the corps is competent to oversee public safety projects across the nation, said Raymond Seed, a UC Berkeley civil engineering professor who led the investigation, which the National Science Foundation sponsored shortly after Katrina struck.

"People think this is a New Orleans problem," Seed said. "It is a national issue."

Considering that there are thousands of miles of levees scattered throughout the country, from locations all along the Mississippi River to central California, this report should be a wakeup call to other communities around the country that are protected by levees. They need to ask serious questions about the viability of our nation's levees:

As I noted when California was hit with heavy rains that caused some levees to fail:

Were those levees built up to code? How many others could and would fail under similar circumstances, and were they properly maintained?

You know, the usual questions asked (and still not adequately answered about the levee failures around New Orleans).

These are questions that should be asked before the failures - not after. State and local communities should make sure that their flood control programs are sufficient and that the infrastructure is functional and sufficient to deal with flood situations.