IEEE Spectrum March, 2007 - 6

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Foster, a corps engineer who is chairing a major task force on hurricane risk,
considers a kind of circularity.
"They've got money to build to the
100-year level," but "they can't do that
[carry on effectively with the work]
unless they know what the 100-year level
is," observes Foster, who is based in the
corps' national offices in Washington,
D.C. The people at the front lines
"desperately need information," but the
people responsible for providing that
information-including Foster's own risk
group, which is about eight months late
with its report-aren't in a position to
cough it up yet.
The job that Congress has given the
corps is comparable to the task it was
given after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and
which, 40 years later, it still had not
completed when Katrina struck. In a
massive nine-volume, peer-reviewed
interagency report that the corps issued in
draft form last June, the engineering organization rendered a scathing verdict on
its own post-Betsy work. "The hurricane
protection system in New Orleans and
southeast Louisiana was a system in name
only," said the Interagency Performance
Evaluation Task Force (IPET).
Among many damning findings, IPET
reported that the system was incomplete,
provided inconsistent levels of protection,
didn't provide enough backup protection,
and lacked integrated control. Pumping
stations-built originally to drain standing water and rainfall-were not hardened
against big storms and generally had no
reserve power. Levees, floodwalls, and
water gates often were not as strong
as they were meant to be, and in many
cases levees had subsided so that their
actual elevations were much lower than
intended. In the big drainage canals and
a navigation canal where the most catastrophic breaches occurred, both foundations and protective wall structures failed,
revealing severe design deficiencies.
In all, some 50 serious failures
occurred throughout New Orleans's web
of canals and shorelines, so that the whole
system was overwhelmed. Even if the
three major breaches on the drainage and
navigation canals had not occurred, about
40 percent of the areas flooded by Katrina
still would have flooded, says Walter
Baumy, chief engineer for the Army
Corps' New Orleans district. The Katrina
flooding exceeded levee design levels by
as much as two meters in much of the city
[see photo, "Devastation"].
During recent visits by this reporter
to the New Orleans district office and

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to the corps' major group of engineering
laboratories, in Vicksburg, Miss., leaders of the district's hurricane protection
operations described the challenges
they face and the implications of the
IPET report.
In many ways, as the corps' top managers describe the situation, it's a recipe
for haste-makes-waste decision making.
Having already spent more than $1 billion in barely more than a year and now
well into its second $1 billion, the corps
undoubtedly will run into problems with
contractors and specifications. Some
work, decided on too quickly, will have
to be redone. And no doubt some work
already completed will turn out to have
been misguided to begin with, as the
corps resolves issues of what's needed
for 100-year protection.
For example, in some areas of the city
where waterways branch like veins in
a hand, the corps already is raising the
levees along them to higher levels. But
it may discover on further analysis that

next, they are bound to be controversial.
To begin with, defining 100-year
storm levels is an immensely complex
task in analysis, computation, and simulation. Katrina, which corps experts
believe may have been something like a
300- or 400-year storm, threw off all the
received risk estimation curves, which
are historically based. Then, too, history
is continuing to change before the simulators' eyes. With climate change, hardly
anybody still expects the next 100 years
to be just like the last 100.
A group headed by Don Resio of
the Corps' Engineers Research and
Development Center, in Vicksburg,
has been working since last summer
to define a family of worst-case
scenarios-basically, maximum wave
heights and storm surges to be expected
in a 100-year interval, given a variety of
storm conditions. Some of the group's
conclusions will feed into Foster's risk
assessment, which is part of the IPET
endeavor, though Resio's team is not,

DEVASTATION: A house in the hard-hit Ninth Ward was lifted onto a pickup truck by Katrina flooding.

it would have done better to build single
dikes closer to potential flooding sources,
to protect whole neighborhoods. The
absence of effective local government,
combined with a lack of strong leadership
from the federal government, will make
it all the harder for such difficult and
sometimes unpopular choices to be made
correctly and in time.
But surely the thorniest of all
dilemmas for the corps is the need to
proceed with planning and contracting
to meet Congress's 100-year mandate,
without knowing just what that mandate
means. And even when the reports
assessing storm probabilities and risks
are more or less complete, this month or

strictly speaking, part of that project.
Resio and a second researcher have
done a study of Gulf hurricanes, in
which they found two major peaks in
hurricane activity: in the 1960s and in
the last decade. Though they discerned
no long-term trend, as a what-if exercise
they asked what the effect would be
if the number of high-activity years
doubled in the future. Their conclusion
is that while the results would be
serious, they would not be apocalyptic-
expected 100-year surge levels would
increase 15 percent and 100-year
maximum wave heights 12 percent.
Resio's group has discarded the
obsolete concept of thinking in terms of

March 2007 | IEEE Spectrum | NA 11

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum March, 2007