Cost-cutting and poor planning behind New Orleans levee failures

Ray Seed, a geotechnical engineer at the University of California-Berkeley and head of the team, said at a press conference in New Orleans on Sunday, “People didn’t die here because the storm was bigger than the system could handle...People died because mistakes were made and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced costs.”

“New Orleans flooded not so much because there was a hurricane, but because of human error, poor decisions and judgments, and failed policies,” Seed said.

The investigation team included 36 engineers, scientists and other experts from universities and private firms. Some of the funding from the panel came from the National Science Foundation, a government agency. A final version of the over 700-page report is due out by the end of June, including several additional appendices.

The conclusions of the panel differ significantly from another investigation carried out by the Army Corps of Engineers, which concluded that much of the flooding resulted from the fact that the levees were overpowered by a hurricane they were not designed to withstand. In contrast, the independent panel concludes that while the overtopping of the levees was one factor, more significant were poor construction and maintenance, and inadequate funds.

The difference is significant. Not only was New Orleans potentially left helpless in the face of a major hurricane—a Category 4 or 5 storm—that the levee systems were never designed to withstand, the city was also vulnerable to a less powerful hurricane because the levee system in place suffered from several major flaws. According to the Independent Levee Investigation Team, the Hurricane Katrina disaster fell into the latter category. If Katrina had been a more powerful storm when it struck land, or if it had struck the city head-on, the consequences would have been even more devastating than they were.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/katr-m23.shtml