Judge rules Corp of Engineers Failure led to Katrina Flooding

The issue of the The Corps is the age old issue of man's dominion over nature.

In general, man's efforts to control nature pale in scope compared to the forces nature exerts to continue her pattern. We can mitigate nature but not control it. And, our efforts at mitigation almost always have unintended consequences.

In the case of New Orleans I would argue that whatever The Corps did was faced with inevitable failure. A city built below sea level in a hurricane zone is the height of folly.

(and someday the Mississippi will flow down the Atchafalaya basin ... book it)

 

i don't necessarily disagree with this. i was arguing the very same thing after the hurricane hit.

but if that's the case, then the negligence (or worse) is telling the residents, "yeah, we've got it under control in a Cat. 3" when you don't.

 

I disagree, and I believe historical efforts to quantitatively ascertain such an opinion are firmly on my side. See, for example:

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it Changed America by John Barry

 

I guess the legal question will come down to defining The Corps fiduciary duty and whether they breached it.

It seems that an "Act Of God" defense would absolve everyone involved.

 

Not if your duty is to protect against that Act of God. If it were a private entity saying, "hey, i have these windows that are hurricane proof...they'll withstand up to 100 mph of wind!" and they can't deliver..that's actionable, in spite of the Act of God.

The bigger trump card, as I see it, would be governmental immunity.

 

They had an admirable history until they started working on civilian water projects. You could argue that the unintended or ignored ecological effects of dams and levees are the fault of the public and politicians rather than the Corps, but any objective look at their civilian works would have a tough time tallying up more pro stuff than con. (Same goes for the Bureau of Reclamation, which has a similar mission in the West.)

If you haven't read this book you should...



It's a brilliant combination of history, politics, and engineering as well as a surprisingly fast read.

Also, in addition to the previously mentioned book on the Great Mississippi Flood, two books by John McPhee are good reads on dams and water control projects (as well as other fascinating engineering undertakings)...

Encounters with the Archdruid
The Control of Nature

 

^^^^

Wow - someone else who has read Cadillac Desert. Weird.

Agreed with rimmy - I may have been overzealous in my generic comment, judoka - the Corps has really failed massively on water projects. Period.

Where they "succeeded", it was only after insane efforts by non-corps people to convince the corps not to go through with or to abandon their own ego-fueled disasters-in-the-making.

I honestly don't know enough about non-water related corps projects to even comment.

 

Knowing the West is a large part of my job. That said, Cadillac Desert is one of the best books I have ever read.

 

It's no impossible to design for something stronger, but it is impossible to pay for such a design.

 

This is one of the reasons but there were a lot of design failures. The walls that failed were simply set on clay soil which is why the fell over since the forces of the waves and wind over took them. However, the other walls which were a huge metal being driven down to the earth were perfectly fine. The problem with these is that constructing them is insanely expensive.

One of the problems with walls that were simply set on clay soil simply failed because when water was going over the wall, the soil on the other side simply eroded away which led to the failure of the wall. One of the ways they have attempted to fix the problem with the remaining walls (since most of the levees are designed for walls to be simply on soil) is to put concrete therefore when water splashes over, the concrete is not going to erode and they are hoping the walls will not fail as easily or at all. So far, the walls survived Hurricane Gustav.

 

How many of those projects have been tested in extreme conditions? Every snowmelt/rainy season in the Midwest, we hear of levees failing.

Agree to some extent. However, during the go-go years, the Corps would look for and propose questionable projects to pols looking to spend money in their state or district. The Corps were not innocent bystanders who just did what Congress told them to do. The Corps was and still is a definite political force.

 

Fine, I retract the comment. It was too broad, I admit.

But I don't trust the corps to make the right design choices or to properly assess the impact of their design choices. Having worked for a large civilian branch of the government (NASA) I know how the designs get hamstrung and totally messed up. True, a lot of it is politically motivated, but a huge amount is also just plain ego-based idiocy - with no accountability.

In hindsight, I don't think they were necessary, frankly. A good deal of what they accomplished was (again, in hindsight) unnecessary or over the long term, ecologically and engineering-wise foolish. Even when things were done well, most of the time it was do to civilian efforts, and not the corps directly. It's an interesting saga (the mississippi flood control system), but it's virtually impossible to look back at it and think highly of the corps.

 

How about suing the people that decided to build a major city below sea level ?