Engineers criticize holes in the analysis, which could affect waterways from Florida to the Sacramento Delta.

The suspect levees stretch from Florida’s Lake Okeechobee to the rivers of California’s Central Valley and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which has 2,300 miles of levees that protect cities and farmland.

The Corps’ investigation is essential to understanding California’s situation, said Les Harter, the levee chief at the CA Department of Water Resources. “The floodwalls in New Orleans were 15 years old, and they failed,” Harter said. “Our levees (CA) are 100 years old. We estimate we have one-half the level of protection that New Orleans had.”

Perhaps the sharpest criticism has come from academicians led by two UC Berkeley engineering professors, Raymond Seed and Robert Bea. Since the early days after Katrina, Seed and Bea have dogged the Corps with their own technical investigation, financed with grants from the National Science Foundation. Bea, a pioneer in engineering risk analysis for the petroleum industry and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, thinks the Corps is failing to account for the biggest risk of all: the potential for human error in the design, construction and maintenance of levees.

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