Broken: The Army Corps of Engineers
Plodding, complacent, careless—the agency whose lapses led to the near-destruction of New Orleans now must fortify the entire U.S. coast for an era of rising seas, global warming, and more powerful storms. But first it must fix itself.
Hurricane Katrina exposed terrible flaws not just in the New Orleans levees, but within the agency that designed and built them, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After the storm, investigators discovered that design errors were to blame for the collapse of several floodwalls—breaches that accounted for most of the flooding of the city. For the first time in its storied history, which dates to the Revolutionary War, the Corps admitted to committing fundamental engineering mistakes. The Corps' internal investigation also found the city's levees and floodwalls riddled with problems, "a system in name only" whose individual elements were sloppily constructed and didn't even fit together—a big problem when you're surrounded with rising water.
Corps officials say they've learned their lesson. But it's not clear they've had the opportunity do so, or the inclination. The Corps has been handed billions of dollars in emergency appropriations and has been working flat out since Katrina—first to clean up its own mess, then repairing and upgrading the levee system to meet the most basic safety standards, so New Orleans won't get washed away this year or next.
Of course, those tasks are simple compared to the longer-term challenges the agency faces. It will have to figure out how to protect sinking, exposed New Orleans in an era of global warming, rising seas, and, according to some scientists, bigger hurricanes. It will have to fortify other coastal communities as they too grow more vulnerable to high water. In its current form, the Corps isn't up to these tasks. But right now it's all we've got.
Here are four problems with the Corps that led to the near-destruction of New Orleans—and four obstacles the Corps must overcome in order to face its future challenges.
Skewed priorities. The Corps' traditional domestic mission is to aid navigation, and for more than a century its bread and butter has been big-ticket projects that promoted shipping: river levees, locks, dredging harbors, and channels. Not surprisingly, these are also the projects most favored by shipping-industry lobbyists—and members of Congress eager to get federal money spent in their districts. Hurricane levees, by contrast, have no political constituency except the public. Their principal economic benefit is warding off total destruction, something people and politicians often don't fully appreciate until it's too late. The Corps squabbled endlessly with other agencies over the levees, all losing sight of the bottom line: safety. At one point, for example, the Corps could not agree with the New Orleans Sewerage and Water board on how to join a canal floodwall to a pumping station. So they simply stopped building the wall 200 feet short of the station, leaving a gap—a man-made breach.
Backward science. The Corps designed the hurricane levee system in the 1960s and never updated its basic layout, despite 40 years of progress in hurricane forecasting and computer modeling that revealed many weaknesses in those designs. Meanwhile, Corps officials also downplayed the mounting data that showed just how easily New Orleans could be destroyed. They even managed to ignore their own experiments. A group of Corps scientists did a study in the 1980s that predicted exactly how the New Orleans floodwalls could breach if not anchored firmly enough—but few in the agency paid attention and the results were all but forgotten.
Funding. As construction of the levees dragged on for decades, Congress and successive presidential administrations starved the system. Corps officials and Louisiana politicians protested at times, but generally went along with the cuts and shortfalls. In the 1980s, for example, the Corps got new data showing that New Orleans and surrounding areas were sinking into the Gulf of Mexico even faster than previously thought—meaning completed levees would be too low. Instead of pursuing a system-wide upgrade, the engineer in charge decreed that only new projects would take the data into account. In a flood, what happens if only half your floodwall is built to the correct height?
Outsourcing. The Corps practically invented the now-common technique of outsourcing government work to private contractors. As the years passed, the number of working engineers at the agency gradually fell, especially in the areas of levee design and construction. Outsourcing weakens accountability by spreading responsibility around. The flawed floodwalls, for instance, were designed by an outside firm and then approved by Corps reviewers. And these problems continue. In the massive repair job that followed Katrina, outside investigators found Corps contractors were using sand—not the stronger, required muddy clay—to rebuild levees to the east of New Orleans.
Obstacles for the future:
Abortive Reform. After Katrina, the Corps was handed the task of getting to the bottom of what went wrong with the levees—in other words, investigating itself, something that experts in government accountability say is a recipe for trouble. The investigation was vetted by outside engineers and did find serious engineering errors. But its narrow, purely technical scope may come back to haunt the agency. Investigators never attempted to answer why the mistakes were made or analyzed the institutional flaws that set the stage for them. The Corps has made some changes—finally doing a thorough computer analysis of the flood risk New Orleans faces, for example. It's hard for any institution to reform itself. The White House and Congress could restructure the Corps, or at least shake it up. But they haven't shown much interest. So the Corps is still basically the same agency it was before the storm—only now it has vastly more money and power over the future of New Orleans.
The Vision Thing. Traditionally, Corps projects come about from a combination of lobbying, pork, and questionable analyses of costs and benefits. If the United States means to protect New Orleans and other vulnerable coastal areas, it needs to junk this process. The Corps needs a vision for coastal protection, one that incorporates the effects of shifting populations, global warming, and rising seas. Historically, though, the Corps has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a new era. In the 1970s, for example, the agency fought attempts by New Orleans community groups to force it to do detailed environmental impact studies of its projects—until a federal judge finally ordered it to get with the program.
Politics. Even if the Corps gets its act together, it can't act independently. It gets its marching orders from Congress and the White House, and their priorities shift depending on who's in power. A project may start out with a bang, only to lose momentum 5, 10, or 20 years down the line. The New Orleans levee system was begun under President Lyndon Johnson, and it was an incomplete and incongruous mess when Katrina hit 40 years later during the second Bush administration.
Nature. The Corps' stock-in-trade for two centuries has been controlling nature—shifting river courses and diverting floods. Often, it has failed. What happens if nature becomes progressively more uncontrollable?
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I'm afraid only more distasters of the same or greater magnitude will have to happen to change anything.Humanity, especially Americans, will have to be reminded brutally that we don't control nature.Perhaps if all tax-payer subsidization of flood insurance programs is stopped and any person(s) and/or businesses that insist on building in these areas are forced to pay the real costs themselves they won't build there.
I strongly believe we Americans should learn once again to bring right people in such critical places, including the White House.
The wetlands that protect New Orleans are being eroded because the Army Corps of Engineers channelized the river without consideration of its long-term effects. They protected the City of New Orleans with poorly designed, maintained and constructed levee system. The ACOE now wants the public to feel safe with their temporary fix in place. I know first hand that the ACOE is manned by incompetants, political
The wetlands that protect New Orleans are being eroded because the Army Corps of Engineers canalized the river without consideration of its long-term effects. They protected the City of New Orleans with poorly designed, maintained and constructed levee system. The ACOE now wants the public to feel safe with their temporary fix in place. I know first hand that the ACOE is manned by incompetents, political YES MEN, ineptitude. I think that we need a new care keeper for the Country's water infrastructure. At least it needs to be gutted and a minor frontal lobotomy preformed.
All of the thinks that you have discussed are at work; marginalizing future success.
This is a great article and I agree with a lot of what is written. I worked for the Corps of Engineers from 1986 to 2006 when I recently retired. As an engineer in Portland District, a similar disaster on a smaller scale than Katrina could have happened in the 1996 flood for the same reasons you state for New Orleans. The program that would have helped fix these flooding problems had no politic proponents for the last 18 years. The difference is that in the Willamette Valley and Portland in 1996, the day after the 1996 flood event, the Oregonian published headlines "The Corps saves Portland". How did this happen? In 1994 I took over the Engineering Operations coordinator position and in looking at the program, realized many problems with how the program monies are prioritized and allocated. As your article states, it is true that outside proponents influence the decision making process internal to the daily workings of the Corps offices. I recognized that what we called the "Hydromet system" which controls the water level and river flow information to the water regulators was so out dated that failure was imminent. An expensive system replacement (in the millions of dollars) request had been denied for the last 8 years prior to my review. Now at this point most managers would not stick their neck out for a seemingly low priority, static system that appears to be working fine. I recognized that this was an emergency waiting to happen and took steps and negotiated with several program and supervisory managers to provide a small pot of funds to start slowly planning, collaborating and replacing the system. At that time I told managers that I believed that it would take 10 years to do systematic replacements at an affordable cost and with contrators and Corps personnel doing the work. My first action item was to organize key people to list and prioritize equipment and to identify what types of failures may occur during a flood. I tasked people to come up with an emergency plan for the current system in case of failure, a long range replacement plan and a communication network between the engineers, the project people and dam operators, and the upper level engineers at the Division office that would allow open discussion of current issues. In 1996 when Portland almost flooded due to an unusual snowfall followed by warm winds, these plans were in place. The main Hydromet computer did go down for several hours during the flood but due to heroic actions at the project, they were able to get it back on line. Water regulators were ready for this and could still function and communicate with the 13 dam operators along the Willamette River to avoid the flooding. So yes, your article points out the weakness in the Corps to service the lobbyists but there are many folks in the Corps like me who are not "responsible" for the problem such as the Hydromet but are sticking their neck out and going beyond to insure the safety of the American People. At least we are in Oregon and Washington.
The very root of the problem is that engineers should be in charge of making decisions for these improvements, not the bean counters (non engineering types) that need all the paperwork from us and don't include engineers in the decision making process for allocating funds. The Corps upper management is not made up of engineers and scientists any more, they are historians, business majors, finance and accountants. The remaining engineers who are in upper management don't stop to think about who should be making these decisions and who should be accountable for these failures. You can't blame a committee or corporate board when there are billions of dollars of damage and hundreds of lives lost. And the sad part is that these managers don't feel responsible even if they were the very ones who voted on what direction the Corps should take. I guess ignorance is bliss.
All of these mid 50's-60's efforts of the Corps are suspect. Our whole infrastructure has not been maintained and we can expect more and more collapsed bridges, failed dams and levies and dead citizens. Diana
Here's a future project of the Corps of Army Engineers that sounds like another destructive mistake.
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Wildlife Alert
Whooping Cranes Need Help
Whooping Crane, FWS
There are only about 200 whooping cranes left in the wild. Don't let this endangered species become the victim of reckless development plans.
Urge the U.S. Army Corps to deny the Seadrift Ranch proposal until independent research can be done.
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Dear Wildlife Supporter,
We need your help. The only wild flock of endangered whooping cranes in the world is at risk. A development plan near Aransas National Wildlife Refuge could destroy the habitat they need to survive.
Take action now. Tell the Army Corps of Engineers to put this development project on hold until unbiased research can be conducted.
Each year, the world’s last wild whooping cranes begin a 2500-mile journey from the Northwest territories of Canada to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast of Texas.
These endangered birds count on finding safe wintering and feeding grounds at Aransas. And the Refuge and the surrounding areas provide vital habitat for several other endangered migratory birds.
But a development project might change all that. Seadrift Ranch Partners, Ltd. has petitioned the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a 700-acre housing development next to the Refuge right in the middle of the habitat these whoopers count on for survival.
One study has been conducted so far. There’s only one catch: The company who conducted the study is on the Seadrift Ranch payroll! They obviously can’t be trusted to make an impartial assessment based on sound science.
With just over 200 whooping cranes left in the wild, they can’t stand to lose any more ground in their fight for survival.
Urge the Army Corps of Engineers not to grant the permit these developers need to start their project until an independent environmental assessment can be made.
Whooping cranes are shy, secretive birds and very sensitive to human disturbance. While these cranes depend on the refuge for nesting, they regularly forage on lands outside its boundaries for food including those targeted by the developers. This development plan is simply a bad idea.
It’s important to act today. The deadline for comments is this Friday, August 31st! This flock represents hope for the survival of this struggling species. Help us protect them.
Thank you for your ongoing dedication to imperiled wildlife and wild places they need to survive
Sincerely,
Noah Matson Noah Matson
Vice President for Land Conservation
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The Army Corps of Engineering is not broken. You are, however, beyond repair!
Great piece! I've read a lot about the role of the Corps in America's flood history, and I'm amazed at the arrogance, intransigence and cowardice the Corps has exhibited over the years. I keep hoping that van Antwerp will be able to do more for New Orleans than his predecessors. Though I spend a lot of time in New Orleans, I live in the Boston area. I write a senior column for a local newspaper, and my readers here are very interested in helping the Gulf Coast to recover from disasters like Katrina, and preventing future tragedy. Closing the MRGO is a good step. Next, restoring the wetlands. Finally, learning where housing is safe and where it isn't, or never will be, and acting on that knowledge, is key to a solution.
John makes one great error is his comment under funding. Only new projects not in the Hurricane Protection project used the new latest datum. Go to HPDC Draft Report and view the reference documents for use of PBM's between 1985 and later. All hurricane projects were to hold to the PBM elevation at the start of the project.
A major deficiency that no one identifys is the "Critical Structures" or Pumping Stations incorporated into the project. To do so they must comply with EM 1110-2-3102 & ER 1110-2-401. Neither were followed as to working floor elevation, two positive cut-offs for each discharge lines, and having qualified operators on duty when faced with emanent danger. No operation manual approved by the COE can be found as well. This situation exists in Orleans Parish as well as Jefferson. Reporter Robert Rainey wrote an article in June that showed the gated wall were not in place and would not be until 2010 or later. This situation was known since 1970 and never fixed. The problem of the PBM's was addressed in numerous suggestions one of which in 1995 made it to Washington with comments by Division Headquarters citing the problem and to notify FEMA, NOAA and the state as a minimum and this also was never done.
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