New Orleans levee design faulted in report

Much of the devastating flooding of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was caused by errors in the design of levees, according to a blue ribbon report released Wednesday.

During a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, experts said while some flooding was caused by storm surges overtopping flood walls, many other breaches were caused by the water ripping through the levees built on sandy, porous soil.

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, and ranking member Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., blamed the poor construction on "human error."

Collins said: "The widespread failures throughout the levee system were not solely the result of Mother Nature. Rather, they were the result of human error in the form of design and construction flaws, as well as confused and delayed response to the collapse."

Lieberman added that it was "shocking" to hear that much of the flooding should not have occurred. A National Science Foundation-funded interim report on the flooding citied soil erosion as a cause for much for what occurred.

"Although it is somewhat customary to expect levee failures when overtopping occurs, the performance of many of the levees and floodwalls could have been significantly improved, and some of the failures likely prevented, with relatively inexpensive modification of the levee and floodwall system details," according to the report authored by a team of experts and scientists from the American Society of Civil Engineers, GEO Institute, University of California at Berkley and others.

"Most of the flooding of New Orleans was due to man's follies," said Ivor van Heerden, head of the Louisiana state Forensic Data Gathering team and deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center.

"Society owes those who lost their lives and the approximately 100,000 families who lost all an apology." Van Heerden said the failure of the 17th Street and London Avenue canal levees "was due to a design that did not account for the very weak nature of the soils." He called it "a geo-technical failure," and added that, "Not to have given the residents the security of proper levees is inexcusable."

Van Heerden also has been critical of the Army Corps of Engineers' repair efforts since Katrina. A Corps official said efforts are being made to make improvements while repairing the levees.