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Water goes, questions stay

As repairs help dry out New Orleans, experts ask what role bias and flawed designs played

BY JOHN RILEY | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

September 29, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - When he arrived three weeks ago, 80 percent of the city was under water and the devastation was unfathomable. The damage is still "apocalyptic," but as he watches the last pockets of water drain from New Orleans' Ninth Ward and anticipates a dry city by this weekend, Col. Duane Gapinski feels a certain sense of satisfaction.

"It's pretty cool," says Gapinski, 46, a Huntington native and Walt Whitman High School graduate who was brought in from the Army Corps of Engineers' Rock Island, Ill., office to oversee water-removal efforts after Hurricane Katrina. "You can see these big vortices as the water comes through these culverts under the railroad trestle. ... There's a sense of accomplishment. We've done something."

For Gapinski and others who came to help the understaffed New Orleans division, it has been nonstop madness. Operating out of a headquarters beside the Mississippi River on the oddly named Leake Avenue, they have worked 18-hour days, sleeping on cots, monitoring progress in an operations center filled with laptops and maps coded in pink and blue to show areas that are drained and areas that aren't.

Through "human will," Gapinski says, they have beaten early projections that the dry-out would take months.

"They have nothing to be ashamed of," says Mitch Frasier, spokesman for the New Orleans Corps office, "and a lot to be proud of."

But as the floodwaters recede, the Corps is hearing as much criticism as praise - ranging from questions about why the levee system massively failed in the first place, to suspicions that repair work was biased to favor nicer neighborhoods, to concerns that - even as the city moves to repopulate - planned repairs will leave it as vulnerable next year as it was a month ago.

"That's the one thing they've got to do," noted Keefe Cloid, as he surveyed the deserted street outside his French Quarter bar, Ol Toone's Saloon, this week. "Levees that are reliable. Denmark did it. Why can't we?"

The causes of the Katrina failure are now the subject of a full forensic investigation by the Corps. But hurricane experts from Louisiana State University and others have already raised questions about the Corps' initial assertions that floodwalls in two key drainage canals at 17th Street and London Avenue were overtopped by water from Lake Pontchartrain that eroded away their earthen bases.

Corps officials said that was the predictable consequence of government decisions decades ago to pay for a system that was only high enough and strong enough to protect against Category 3 storms - not a Category 4 hurricane like Katrina. The LSU experts, however, have concluded through sophisticated computer modeling and inspections of debris lines on Lake Pontchartrain's earthen levees that Katrina's surge was not, in fact, high enough to top the canals' 14-foot floodwalls.

They point a finger, instead, at possible design flaws. Unlike the earthen levees surrounding the lake, the canal floodwalls are essentially concrete barriers that sit atop berms, attached by rods to metal sheetpile driven into the earth. The structures, LSU experts say, may have been unable to withstand the pressure of rising water because of defective construction. Water pressure may have blown out the earthen foundation at the bottom. Or designers may not have anticipated the velocity of water being driven into a narrow canal by Katrina's surge.

"There's a number of ways levees can fail," said John Pardue, a civil engineering professor at LSU. "But overtopping that was an act of God and not a design problem is not what happened based on what we saw."

Corps officers like Gapinski and Col. Richard Wagenaar, the commander of the New Orleans district, say they'll await the results of forensic studies. But they say they have seen other evidence - debris on the land side of the 17-foot lake levees, for example - that supports an overtopping theory, and question the computerized surge models.

"These are meteorologists," says Wagenaar, "reporting on concrete structural issues."

When Rita hit last week, the Corps repairs of the 17th Street and London Avenue canal breaches sprung some leaks, but held. But similar repairs at a third major breach along the Industrial Canal failed, and water flowed through, reflooding the battered Ninth Ward. And that produced new criticism, reflecting just how prickly New Orleanians have become about the Corps.

Officials in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, which was flooded along with the Ninth Ward, complained the government engineers had done more to protect the rich areas of town than the poor. A Ninth Ward resident named Terence Butler Sr., in a letter to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, went a step further, observing that in years past the Corps had wanted to expand navigation locks in the area of the breach and might now get the land cheap.

"It almost makes you wonder," he wrote, " is all this by design?"

Wagenaar and Gapinski say there was no bias in their repair efforts, but securing the navigational passage of the Industrial Canal is a harder engineering task, because its depth made it impossible to wall off storm surge with sheetpile, as they did at the drainage canals.

The controversy, however, illustrated a deeper problem: After Katrina, the people of New Orleans may want more than the Corps has the capacity to deliver. Tuesday night, when Wagenaar appeared before the New Orleans city council and said his goal was to restore pre-Katrina protection by the June 1, 2006, start of the next hurricane season, some greeted the plan with dismay.

"Pre-Katrina is not going to work for us," said one councilwoman. "We need to go one step above."

That, experts say, isn't going to happen in eight months. Fuller protection of New Orleans, says Pardue, is going to cost tens of billions of dollars and take years. It will have to involve not only higher walls, but better walls, a system of sensors to let officials know about breaches when storms hit, and movable floodwalls to reduce surges into Lake Pontchartrain and the canals.

It will take years. And if another Katrina hits next month or next year, Corps officers like Gapinski say, they may have to go to work again. "There's never any concrete assurances," he says, "that nothing is going to happen."