Report: levees not built to specifications

Posted by R. Neal

Studies Confirm New Orleans Levees' Flaws:

NEW ORLEANS - Government engineers performing sonar tests at the site of a major levee failure confirmed that steel reinforcements barely went more than half as deep as they were supposed to, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official said Wednesday.

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Baumy said the Corps cannot explain the disparity between what its 1993 design documents show was supposed to be there and what they've found.

The documents indicated that the steel reinforcements in the levee, known as sheet piling, went to a depth of 17.5 feet below sea level. Sonar tests indicated the pilings went only to 10 feet below sea level, meaning the flood wall would have been much weaker than intended.

The LSU team is working on a report for the state that will say there were serious, fundamental design and construction flaws at both the 17th Street and London Avenue canals. Both broke during Hurricane Katrina, flooding much of the city.

One surprise is that this is a surprise. NBC News reported back in September:

NBC News has obtained what may be a key clue, hidden in long forgotten legal documents. They reveal that when the floodwall on the 17th Street Canal was built a decade ago, there were major construction problems - problems brought to the attention of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

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Pittman won the contract in 1993. There already was an earthen levee made of soil. Embedded in that was a thin metal wall called sheet piling. The contractor was hired to pour concrete on top of all that to form the flood wall.

But the 1998 documents - filed as part of a legal dispute over costs - indicate the contractor complained about "weakness" of the soil and "the lack of structural integrity of the existing sheet pile around which the concrete was poured." The ruling also referenced the "flimsiness" of the sheet piling.

So, how can the Corps now say they "can't explain the disparity" when they were told about the problem ten years ago as the floodwall was being built? What's worse, it sounds like the problems boil down to the fact that nobody wanted to spend the money to do the job right.