A massive eight-month investigation of New Orleans' hurricane defence system has come to a conclusion that will surprise no one. It didn't work.
"The system did not perform as a system: the hurricane protection in New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana was a system in name only," say the authors of a 1,531-page report commissioned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The document — described as a "draft final report" — was issued on Thursday, the first day of the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season and nine months after hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, flooding much of New Orleans and killing more than 1,500 people.
Cars sit stranded in New Orleans after Katrina came ashore on Aug. 29, 2005. A report into the city's hurricane defence system later found that some flood-wall heights were overestimated by nearly one metre.
(Dave Martin/Associated Press)
It describes a system in which protection levels varied from place to place and where there was no second line of defence when barriers failed.
"Flood protection systems are an example of a series system — if a single levee or floodwall fails, the entire area is impacted," the report says.
The Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for designing and maintaining most of the system, escapes accusations of wrongdoing.
"There was no evidence of government or contractor negligence or malfeasance," the report says.
But it offers no praise and says Katrina's ferocity is no excuse for failure. "The storm exceeded design criteria, but the performance was less than the design intent," it says.
It lists plenty of mistakes, including these:
- In some cases, the stability of the soil beneath flood walls was calculated on the basis of widely spaced samples and average strength figures that failed to take weak spots into account.
- Some flood-wall heights were overestimated by as much as three feet (just under a metre because of poor measurement techniques or failure to allow for sinking terrain.
The report is based on the work of 150 scientists and engineers from government, universities and private firms recruited into what is called the Interagency Evaluation Task Force. Its conclusions are subject to revision before a final version is published in September.
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