Louisiana and the nation deserves an independent analysis of the flood protection failures – and the decision making that led to those failures – in August of 2005 because:

• the official levee investigation, the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET) was managed by and led by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the same agency responsible for the flood protection’s performance – a clear conflict of interest.
• two significant non-governmental levee analysis teams, the Independent Levee Investigation Team and Team- Louisiana have yielded results that conflict with the IPET in five (5) of seven (7) of the major levee failure mechanisms including the Industrial Canal breach.
• a task force led by retired Congressman Sherwood Boehlert NY-R has recently faulted the organization responsible for peer reviewing the IPET with major shortcomings in their peer reviews in general including conflict of interest, lack of transparency and questionable funding sources.

For the above reasons, there is intense controversy surrounding the integrity of the official IPET. The levees are too important, and what happened when they failed too horrible for us to rely on a self-study.

The Army Corps of Engineers cannot predict the future and properly develop a flood protection system if it does not understand the past.