Editorial: Corps Says It’s Guilty, But Aren’t We All?

After 150 experts issued their nine-volume, 6,113-page report highlighting deficiencies of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in dealing with the New Orleans region’s levee system, there’s not much the agency could do but accept blame. We suggest that rabid Corps critics not become too exuberant over the findings, which mirror deficiencies in government from local to the federal level. After all, the report did not find the Corps negligent or guilty of malfeasance.

“We missed something in the design,” said Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, chief of engineers. As befuddling to all of us as it may seem, the Corps did not consider the tendency of the soil in the area to sink over time. That’s disappointing, because we believe that factor has been known for decades. The dead are buried above ground at New Orleans for that very reason. It is difficult for us to understand how it could have been ignored.

Some daily news reports attribute the study just to the Corps. That tends to suggest the report is an inside job. But it was Gen. Strock who commissioned the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET) and said that the results would be used to improve present and future operations. The 150 who took part included engineers, scientists, and other experts from government, academia and industry from across the nation and world. How could he have been fairer?

A rather major, but not surprising, criticism was that the Corps has had difficulty keeping up with the fast-changing world of geotechnical engineering and has not shared critical information among its many parts. Compare that to government offices across the nation that have not kept up with technology and struggle with obsolete computer systems. That’s one reason much vital information, even in law enforcement work, is not always shared. (Obviously the cost of keeping up is a factor, and the Corps’ budget has been too low for too long.)

One need only to reread news reports of the last decade to realize that some deficiencies attributed to the Corps are pretty common among other entities both in and out of government. Even school systems are guilty of it. Among the major criticisms against our intelligence-gathering network has been that various government agencies have not been sharing their findings with each other. Because of this, major failures have taken place. The news media remind us frequently of congressmen who sign off on legislation that they have not even read. Every day we learn of office holders, particularly at lower levels of government, who have criminal records and who serve in responsible positions. Why no criminal background checks? We’ve certainly not heard such things about the Corps.

The criticisms of the Corps are not to be taken lightly, however, and Gen. Strock knows it. But the general, in saying publicly that the Corps is responsible, is only doing what one would expect him to do. He can’t very well say, “George did it!” He’s the general at the helm. He knows it was a critical oversight. Perhaps equally critical is the IPET criticism that the Corps ignored warnings from other government agencies that the protection-system construction standard should have been for a stronger hurricane. (But they tried to get funding to improve the system.)

Building a single lock and dam on an inland river is a far cry from trying to protect a three-century-old city whose patchwork levee system dates back so far. It also doesn’t help that the Corps has been under constant attack since the 1970s by critics whose environmental goals differ from many in the rest of the country, thus resulting in opposition to projects in the area.

There never has been long-term, total-concept planning for the New Orleans levee control system, which is a patchwork of smaller projects that date back virtually 300 years. Thousands of people who worked on, criticized or supported it have been dead for decades. Did any of them consider sinking soil? We don’t know. We do know from recent reports that the soil is sinking much faster than was once thought—about an inch a year. Unfortunately, levees and floodwalls were not measured to see if they were sinking.

From the beginning of time, flood-protection system decisions were based on economics. The politics in this instance has been particularly nasty, because everyone knew that New Orleans was built in a bowl and shouldn’t have been. It has been the talk of the town for decades. Yet even now thousands of people want to build in the same place again. Everyone, including the Corps, knew that a better flood-control system was needed. But Congress did not fund it to the extent required, and sometimes money was redirected to other projects. As a result the job simply didn’t get done. Yet, as New Orleans grew over the past 300 years, the largest share of the new geotechnical advances were unknown.

The blame game will continue we suppose, but there are urgent matters at hand. The hurricane season began anew on June 1, and New Orleans has been featured as the No. 1 target to be subjected to strong hurricane-strength winds and storm surges, easily reaching Category 3 level. Plans for improved evacuation are rolling off the presses, but as for New Orleans being ready for the hurricane season, it is not. That is the problem that needs solving.

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