Study shifts fault in Katrina floods

Paper places more blame on Corps for New Orleans disaster

NEW ORLEANS -- Nearly 10 years on, one might assume that the case of Hurricane Katrina is closed.

That the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans was caused not merely by a powerful storm but primarily by fatal engineering flaws in the city's flood-protection system has been proved by experts, acknowledged by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and underscored by residents to anyone who might suggest otherwise.

But efforts to establish responsibility with more precision -- to ascertain just how many of those flaws were due to engineering, politics or money -- have not stopped.

A pending article in the peer-reviewed journal Water Policy, written by experts involved in some of the most significant previous examinations of the catastrophe, sets out to refine some high-profile early versions of the factors that led to the disaster. The article rebuts assessments of the levee system's design process that had spread responsibility around to include local officials, and it contends that fault should fall more squarely on the Corps.

"All I'm trying to do is set the record straight," said J. David Rogers of the Missouri University of Science and Technology, the lead author of the article. "There's no bad guy that I'm trying to slap their hands."

Efforts aimed at ensuring definitive historical accountability are being complemented by a separate pursuit of legal liability. This month, a federal judge ruled that the federal government owed compensation to the owners of certain flooded property in and near New Orleans, raising the prospect that after a decade of legal setbacks, the goal for many -- some kind of restitution -- may be in sight.

The journal article focuses on a key debate that long preceded the storm. This debate centered on how best to prevent flooding from the city's three major drainage canals, which jut into the city from Lake Pontchartrain. The levees and flood walls along two of these canals failed during the hurricane, letting water pour through neighborhoods and drown scores of people.

A high-profile 2006 report, underwritten by the National Science Foundation, upheld a common refrain: that local officials in New Orleans had contributed to the disaster by forcing the Corps to build less-effective protection for the city than the Corps had wanted to build.

The Corps had proposed a plan that would have put gates at the mouths of the canals that could be closed as a storm approached. The city's levee board members and other officials pushed for an alternate Corps plan: the construction of several miles of levees and flood walls along the canals.

But Rogers, who was one of the authors of the 2006 report, has concluded that those earlier findings "may have been both historically and logically flawed."

The authors of the study looked through a more extensive record, including hundreds of pages of meeting minutes examined by researchers from Levees.org, a New Orleans activist group. They found nothing to suggest that local officials "behaved irresponsibly," or that the Corps or levee board "believed that the risk would be significantly increased" by raising the levees and flood walls instead of building the gates.

The Corps proposed the gates as an equally effective but far less expensive option, Rogers said, but once the flood walls were chosen, its engineers failed to notice some critical warning signs in their studies, with disastrous results.

The aim of the article, Rogers said, is a re-balancing. That the Corps was primarily at fault has not been contested, even by its leadership.

"We're not ducking our accountability and responsibility in this," Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, who was chief engineer of the Corps, said in a 2006 interview upon the release of a 6,000-page federal report that found that the flood-control complex surrounding New Orleans had been "a system in name only."

Admissions like these had generally not been seen as legally risky. Lawsuits brought by residents after the hurricane repeatedly ran up against federal statutes that guarantee immunity to the federal government for flood-control work.

But since 2005, a separate legal theory has been quietly tested in the courts. This theory states that the flooding of thousands of homes by levee breaches in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans -- flooding that was distinct from the canal breaches discussed in the journal -- constitutes an illegal taking of property by the government. The property owners are thus owed compensation.

On May 1, Judge Susan Braden of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington agreed. Although federal officials have not commented on a potential appeal, the judge recently gave the government until Aug. 10 to decide whether to appeal, enter mediation or wait for a judgment.

A Section on 05/24/2015

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