Dr. Ed Link, top director of the Corps of Engineers’ IPET levee investigation recently opined on the future of New Orleans. But Dr. Link, a senior exec with the Corps for fifteen years (1986 – 2002) over-emphasized the strength of Katrina in New Orleans and understated the negligence of the Army Corps regarding the flood protection.
Dr. Link expounded at length on the storm’s strength, saying “Katrina was a monster…” In Mississippi it was indeed, but not in New Orleans. But then on the Corps’ misdesigned flood protection, Dr. Link said only this: “The system was also incomplete, had little resilience, and in the case of the canal floodwalls, was poorly designed.”
What about that the Corps’ incompetently built flood protection was the overwhelming cause of the horrific flooding in New Orleans?
Leave it to a former Corps employee not to mention that levee and floodwalls were too low, that the Corps knew it, and neither raised nor armored them. Levees protecting eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard were filled with hydrofill (erodable sand) instead of clay. Dr. Link also omits that the Corps ignored information that it was designing for far too weak a storm. And that it constructed a series of projects that, according to its own study, was “a system in name only.”
To ignore the incompetence of the Corps of Engineers does a disservice to New Orleans, to Louisiana and the whole nation. The mistakes of the Corps must not be buried.
Go to www.levees.org and demand the 8/29 Investigation, a truly independent analysis of the flood protection failures in metro New Orleans. Every citizen in the nation deserves it.
Sandy Rosenthal
Leave a Reply