Levees not fully ready for hurricane season

By Anne Rochell Konigsmark

All day, every day and into the night, crews for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pour concrete into walls, pack dirt into hills and ram steel into the earth. They are scrambling to undo the damage Hurricane Katrina inflicted on the region's levee system.

Their task is urgent: Hurricane season begins June 1.

But even when the holes are plugged - a $2 billion endeavor - the entire 350-mile protection system remains flawed, the corps now admits. Flood walls are too weak in some places; earthen levees are too short in others. Locals say the only thing that will save the low-lying region from more flooding this summer is not getting hit with a strong storm.

"I think we can limp along through this hurricane season," says Julie Quinn, a state representative whose district includes the 17th Street Canal, which flooded the Lakeview neighborhood.

Then she laughs. "With some divine intervention, we'll be OK. I just can't imagine we're going to see another Katrina."

Corps officials are confident that by June, they will repair the breaches and other damage incurred along almost half the levee system. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the corps, announced April 12 that the agency wants to correct and strengthen the entire system to withstand storms stronger than Katrina, which was a Category 3 when it made landfall the morning of Aug. 29 in Plaquemines Parish.

Hurricanes are measured on a rising scale of intensity, from Category 1 (sustained winds of 74 mph or more) to Category 5 (156 mph or above).

By 2010, if Congress funds it, the corps will have made the system "better and stronger than it has ever been," Strock says.

That's years and at least $4 billion away. For this year's storm season, which lasts six months and promises to be active, the corps will not be able to upgrade the 181 miles of levees that remained intact during Katrina. An inspection of those undamaged areas began only last week, says Dan Hitchings, the corps' Director of Task Force Hope, which is overseeing levee repairs. Weaknesses, known and unknown, abound in those sections, the corps and other experts say.

"It's all a matter of reducing the risk as quickly as we can," says Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the corps' Director of Civil Works. "But a different storm (from Katrina) on a different track with a different speed could do different damage."

The difference between this year and last? Awareness, Hitchings says. Much of the levee system is the same as it was when Katrina hit, and that means it might fail again. "You're going to have what you had (before Katrina), and that's all you're going to get," Hitchings says. "The threat is the same."

The parts of the city that did not flood - well-known areas along the Mississippi River such as the French Quarter, the Garden District and the area around Tulane and Loyola universities - likely will remain safe, the corps says.

Strock says he is most concerned about the low-lying neighborhoods on the east side of the city, such as the 9th Ward, as well as St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. Levees in those areas could be topped again. And some flood walls along Lake Pontchartrain, on the north side of the city, likely are as weak as those that broke in other places.

Half the system destroyed

The corps designed and built the levee system after Hurricane Betsy, a Category 3 storm, hit and flooded New Orleans in 1965. That was the last major hurricane to strike the city until Katrina.

It took decades to build the system: It took only hours to knock almost half of it down.

In the chaotic, post-Katrina world, no issue unites New Orleanians like the levees. Trusting in the corps is not easy. "I'm very hopeful we're going to be safer," says U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La. "But based on the corps track record, I have grave concerns."

On this, most residents agree: Hurricane Katrina did not destroy hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and kill more than 1,000 people. Failed levees did.

"Our city has been destroyed, and it was the federal government that did it," says Rhett Accardo, a former nurse at a now-closed hospital. "People are as mad as they would be if al-Qaeda had hit us."

More than half the city's 450,000 residents have not come home since flooding nearly emptied the city eight months ago, according to Mayor Ray Nagin's office, and many say their decision to return and rebuild hinges on levee safety.

"When people think about getting hit by a hurricane, they feel like those things are inevitable, and just a chance you take in life," says Bob Thomas, director of the Center for Environmental Communications at Loyola University. "But after repeatedly being told by the corps that we were safe, this is different.

"The break in the levees caused people to lose faith in the government's ability to protect them. I gotta tell you, I'm nervous, more because of the frailty of the infrastructure than the power of any storm. The corps is saying the levees will not break now, but that's what they said last year."

As the corps works to repair levees, it also wants to repair the agency's reputation. Meeting the June 1 deadline is part of that effort. Riley and others say work of this scale has never been undertaken under such a tight deadline.

"We have absolute confidence in the repair of the damaged portions," Riley says. "We've got a great system in place that will go a long way to protect New Orleans."

The corps has asked three separate groups of experts to investigate what went wrong with the levees and to ensure that the current work is correct. The agency has invited the most outspoken critics to tour here and offer advice. There are frequent news conferences at levees and alongside flood walls. And the corps has taken the blame for mistakes. The agency admits design flaws led to the collapse of flood walls along canals that cut through the city. "Everyone at the agency feels shocked and numb," Hitchings says. "That was not supposed to happen."

Critics are impressed with the corps' repair work. Floodgates, placed at the mouths of three canals that cut through the north end of New Orleans, will prevent storm surges from entering the city from Lake Pontchartrain.

"The gates are beautiful," says Bob Bea, a University of California-Berkeley engineer who has been investigating the levees with a National Science Foundation grant. He has been an outspoken critic of the corps.

After a recent tour of levees in St. Bernard Parish, another expert said the soils being used to rebuild the earthen hills were much better than what was originally there. "Our concerns have been pretty well addressed," says Raymond Seed, a Berkeley engineer working with Bea.

Paul Kemp, with the Hurricane Center at the University of Louisiana, said he is "astounded" by the recent progress. But he remains worried about earthen levees along the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish, and along a shipping channel in St. Bernard Parish, saying they need to be reinforced or "armored" with concrete to prevent erosion. The corps plans to armor levees in coming years, but not for this hurricane season.

"Right now, these levees are not going to do well with a combination of wave and storm surge," Kemp says. "This is a work in progress, and we're going to have that progress perhaps interrupted by a hurricane."

About $1.5 billion in improvements to the levees, including armoring, is currently in a supplemental spending bill before Congress. President Bush has not yet asked for the $2.5 billion needed to provide protection from a "100-year storm" - that is, a storm that has a 1% chance of occurring in a given year. And the White House has announced it will not ask for the $1.6 billion needed to protect the lower part of Plaquemines Parish from such a flood.

Even at its best, the system would not withstand a Category 5 storm. That's why Louisiana's elected officials have been pushing the federal government to fund a complete makeover of the levees. The corps is studying what it would take to provide Category 5 protection; a report is due to Congress in December.

"This hurricane season makes me very uneasy," says Bea, who lived here in the 1960s and lost his home in Hurricane Betsy. "The corps is trying to do in a few months what it couldn't get done in 40 years. If I lived in New Orleans, I'd get a second-floor apartment and put my stuff in storage."

For some, the job is personal

Germaine and Shane Williams would like to see Category 5 protection before they feel truly safe. The two young brothers begin work every day at dawn, rebuilding a 4,000-foot section of the canal wall that collapsed and flooded the 9th Ward.

For the Williams brothers, the job is personal: They grew up here. Their mother's flood-ruined home, marked by the city as unsafe to enter, is walking distance from their work site. On both sides of the canal, the working-class neighborhood remains mostly uninhabited, a ghostly landscape of smashed houses and overturned cars.

"We're building it pretty strong," says Germaine, 23, about the steel-reinforced, concrete wall. "I feel better about it."

When asked if he would rebuild in this neighborhood, Germaine says: "I don't know about that. I wouldn't stay this close." Shane, 20, agrees: "It would take a higher wall."

Germaine now lives with his father in a travel trailer in St. Bernard Parish; Shane lives with friends in an area of the city called the West Bank.

Some residents who have chosen to rebuild in flooded areas say they're trusting the odds, not the corps.

"Katrina was once in 100 years," says Fred Yoder, who just moved back into his Lakeview home. "You can say we have to have Category 5 protection, but that's not going to happen right now. The levees won't be up to standard this year, but we just have to have faith."