“Contrasted with the light Hurricane damage - but destruction of New Orleans because of incompetent management of the levy system”
Corps chief admits to ‘design failure’
Thursday, April 06, 2006
By Bill Walsh
Washington bureau The Times-Picayune
WASHINGTON — In the closest thing yet to a mea culpa, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged Wednesday that a “design failure” led to the breach of the 17th Street Canal levee that flooded much of the city during Hurricane Katrina.
Lt. Gen. Carl Strock told a Senate committee that the corps neglected to consider the possibility that floodwalls atop the 17th Street Canal levee would lurch away from their footings under significant water pressure and eat away at the earthen barriers below.
“We did not account for that occurring,” Strock said after the Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing. “It could be called a design failure.”
A botched design has long been suspected by independent forensic engineers probing the levee failures. A panel of engineering experts confirmed it last month in a report saying the “I-wall” design could not withstand the force of the rising water in the canal and triggered the breach.
But until Wednesday the corps, which designed and oversaw construction of the levees, had not explicitly taken responsibility for the mistake.
“We have now concluded we had problems with the design of the structure,” Strock told members of the subcommittee that finances corps operations. “We had hoped that wasn’t the case, but we recognize it is the reality.”
And about 93 billion Federal Tax dollars went into many pockets.