New Orleans levee report finished by panel including University of Texas at Austi...( tem. As part of assessing the ri...),Health

As part of assessing the risk and making recommendations for future improvements, the panel considered factors that included:

- how inconsistencies in the features of the levees and floodwalls including their varying heights and construction from erodible materials resulted from their piecemeal development and disjointed oversight, and how this fed into the failure at 50 locations along the system during Hurricane Katrina; - how the hurricane protection system was under-designed to handle a major storm surge produced by hurricane winds that would reach New Orleans. No one had ever estimated the height of the surge likely to reach different points of the levee system using the standard benchmark a major hurricane that would hit an average of every 100 years.

Despite the importance of engineering improvements, Gilbert cautioned that fortification steps alone arent enough.

It isnt just about improving the reliability of the levees and making them taller, he said. Spending federal money towards developing a way to evacuate people effectively is crucial, and very little emphasis has been put on this or on determining how to rebuild the city in a way that will keep people and property safe.

Relying only on levees isnt the answer, Gilbert said, because upgrading them is expensive, and its difficult to anticipate the magnitude of future storms, which can impact a small portion of a levee system and have catastrophic consequences. He also noted that higher levees can create greater danger because of the higher wall of water that is released if they fail.

Im hopeful that getting this report out into the public forum about all these challenges will help motivate the people involved in making tough decisions about the future of New Orleans to start doing so.

In August 2006, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the ASCE External Review Panel each published lists of steps to take to protect New Or
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Contact: Barbra Rodriguez
brodriguez@mail.utexas.edu
512-471-7541
University of Texas at Austin
4-Jun-2007