Project Katrina

The Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA ) will pay to demolish the remaining eligible structures in New Orleans after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ ( USACE ) mission assignment ended more than two months ago.

The FEMA funds will pay a contractor to work with the City of New Orleans Legal Housing Unit to supervise and document the demolition and debris disposal of the remaining eligible structures. The contract should be awarded sometime this month. FEMA had paid USACE under mission assignment to perform this function prior to Aug. 29, 2007.

Approximately 1,800 homes remain to be demolished, creating around 630,000 cubic yards of debris. Demolitions should be completed by Feb. 29, 2008. Under mission assignment, USACE had supervised the demolition of 4,248 homes, totaling 1.5 million cubic yards of debris.

“This recent funding shows FEMA’s commitment to New Orleans and the region since these damaged homes remain a threat to public safety and have to be removed for this city to recover fully,” Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office Director Jim Stark.

Yesterday the Senate joined the House in an overwhelming majority to override the Bush veto of the The Water Resources Development Act [H.R.1495.RH]. The act will now authorize $23 billion in new water projects. authorizing projects to rebuild the Gulf Coast after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, restore the Everglades and Great Lakes fisheries and build flood-control projects nationwide.

Bush is truly a work of art. One of the reasons he cited for his veto despite its overwhelming bipartisan support, calling it too costly and complaining that the 900 projects it authorized would overtax the Army Corps of Engineers.

Some of the most celebrated levee repairs by the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina are already showing signs of serious flaws, says Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He warns that heavy storms may cause massive failures.

The most troubling, Dr. Bea said, was erosion on a levee by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation canal that helped channel water into New Orleans during the storm.

Breaches in that 13-mile levee devastated communities in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, and the rapid reconstruction of the barrier St. Bernard Parish hailed as one of the corps’ most significant rebuilding achievements in the months after the storm.

But Dr. Bea, an author of a blistering 2006 report on the levee failures paid for by the National Science Foundation, said erosion furrows, or rills, suggest that “the risks are still high.” Heavy storms, he said, may cause “tear-on-the-dotted-line levees.”

Dr. Bea examined the hurricane protection system at the request of National Geographic magazine, which is publishing photographs of the levee and an article on his concerns about the levee and other spots on its Web site.

At times you wonder if our government can do anything right.

I have lived on the Mississippi River (St. Louis and Baton Rouge) for much of my 36 years. For those of you that don’t live on the Mississippi or near swamps in Florida, you might not know that much about the Army Corps of Engineers. Well they have always be a fairly disfunctional organization. Case in point is this story in the Washington Post. Keep in mind this is the organization that is supposed to protect New Orleans.

In 2000, when I was writing a 50,000-word Washington Post series about dysfunction at the Army Corps of Engineers, I highlighted a $65 million flood-control project in Missouri as Exhibit A. Corps documents showed that the project would drain more acres of wetlands than all U.S. developers do in a typical year, but wouldn’t stop flooding in the town it was meant to protect. FEMA’s director called it “a crazy idea”; the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional director called it “absolutely ridiculous.”

Six years later, the project hasn’t changed — except for its cost, which has soared to $112 million. Larry Prather, chief of legislative management for the Corps, privately described it in a 2002 e-mail as an “economic dud with huge environmental consequences.” Another Corps official called it “a bad project. Period.” But the Corps still wants to build it.

The rest of the story is worth a read, but keep in mind that last month, the Corps commander acknowledged that his agency’s “design failure” led to the floodwall collapses that swamped New Orleans. So my question is, why isn’t everyone asking questions about the
Corps?

I guess the below story shouldn’t really surprise anybody following the aftermath of Katrina.

The cost of restoring levee protection in the New Orleans area to pre-Hurricane Katrina levels will be about $6 billion, twice as much as the Bush administration and Congress have appropriated to date, Donald Powell, the federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding, told members of the state’s congressional delegation Wednesday.

Powell also told the delegation that he would not commit to a financing source or whether the Bush administration would seek the traditional 35 percent local share for the work. He said that “will be part of the deliberations” in coming weeks. Can these people not do anything right?

I’ve have written again and again about how Bush’s statement, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” is just false. The evidence was there. Government organizations raised a “red flag” many times. Scientific America did a long feature story on the topic. Heck, ask anybody that has lived in New Orleans that has a brain bigger then an acorn and they knew the danger. And now we have yet more evidence.

More then 20 years ago: “The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ built a levee and floodwall system to test a design similar to the 17th Street Canal in 1985, which indicated that failure was imminent, according to a statement from Raymond B. Seed and Robert G. Bea, in charge of the National Science Foundation’s Independent Levee Investigation Team.”

On Friday, according to USA Today, the Corps said the breach at the 17th Street Canal was the result of water working its way between the floodwall and the earthen levee into which it was set, and of soft subsurface clay. Once the levee split, the force of the high water pushed the floodwall, and the half of the levee behind it, backward on the clay, the corps task force said.

Do I think Bush and his staff should have known all of this info off the top of their head? Of course not. The government produces thousands, if not million of reports a year. But when it was clear Katrina was about to hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, you’d think mid-level staffers would have accessed this data and passed it up the chain of command.

The government wasted millions of dollars in its award of contracts, including spending $10 million to renovate and furnish 240 rooms in Alabama that housed only six occupants before being closed. The Associated Press reports that the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) review of 13 major contracts—many of them awarded with little or no competition—offers one of the the first analysis of the post-Katrina Hurricane procurement process. Some of the findings include:

• Nonexistent communication with local officials led to misjudgments on the need for temporary housing. They included $3 million that FEMA spent for 4,000 base camp beds that were never used and $10 million to renovate and furnish 240 rooms in Alabama that housed only six occupants before being closed.
• Poor coordination between FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers contributed to waste in an Americold Logistics LLC’s contract for ice. “The local Corps personnel were not always aware of where ice might be delivered and did not have authority … resulting in inefficient distribution,” it said.
• Inadequate planning led to the award of a Mississippi contract for classrooms without competition. “Information in the contract files suggests the negotiated prices were inflated.” A review of that specific contract, with Akima Site Operations LLC, was continuing.
• FEMA had only 17 of the 27 monitors it deemed necessary to oversee the installation of temporary housing in four states, leading to inadequate controls.

The 13 Katrina contracts reviewed by the GAO include: C. Henderson Consulting; Americold Logistics; Clearbrook LLC; CS&M Associates; Gulf Stream Coach Inc.; Morgan Building & Spas Inc.; Bechtel National; Fluor Enterprises Inc.; CH2M Hill Constructors Inc.; E.T.I. Inc.; Ceres Environmental Services Inc.; and Thompson Engineering Inc. You can download a copy of the report here (PDF format).

Bush supporters and FOX news likes to argue there is a different between a topped levee and a breached levee. And of course, anybody with a dictionary knows there is a difference.

In fact, they love this debate, cause it takes away from the real issue, which is why the levees throughout New Orleans failed and nobody seemed prepared. In fact Bush said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

So why did they fail? According to Peter Nicholson, who leads the American Society of Civil Engineers’ levee-assessment team.

“Katrina’s storm surge over-topped some sections. The cascade eroded soils from the base of the landward side of some levee sections, causing them to fail.”

The Army Corps of Engineers investigation into the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is overlooking one of the most important causes: organizational failures, according to an outside engineering group working officially with the corps.

The corps is spending about $20 million to understand the physical causes of the levee breaches that left more than 75 percent of New Orleans flooded. But the engineering group said the corps should also be looking into “discontinuity and chaos” in the creation and maintenance of the levees, according to a letter from the group to Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the chief of the corps.

“No one person or organization is in charge of the New Orleans hurricane protection system,” the group wrote. Local levee boards, parish governments, state agencies and bureaucracies within the corps operate independently and sometimes in conflict with one another, and they are all but destined to miss danger signs and perpetuate mistakes, said the group, known as the External Review Panel, or the E.R.P.

This Wednesday a 600-plus-page report, produced by the House select committee, will indicated that the White House didn’t engage the president or “substantiate, analyze and act on the information at its disposal,” failing to confirm the collapse of levee system on Aug. 29. I think we all already know this, but it is still nice to see it in an “official” report chaired by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.). The Washington post has the rest of the story.

Hurricane Katrina exposed the U.S. government’s failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives, according to a blistering report by House investigators.

A draft of the report, to be released publicly Wednesday, includes 90 findings of failures at all levels of government, according to a senior investigation staffer who requested anonymity because the document is not final. Titled “A Failure of Initiative,” it is one of three separate reviews by the House, Senate and White House that will in coming weeks dissect the response to the nation’s costliest natural disaster.

The 600-plus-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council, according to a 60-page summary of the document obtained by The Washington Post. Regarding Bush, the report found that “earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response” because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.

The report, produced by an 11-member House select committee of Republicans chaired by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), proposes few specific changes. But it is an unusual compendium of criticism by the House GOP, which generally has not been aggressive in its oversight of the administration.