KATRINA DISASTER Army Corps leery of levees all along

Money for upgrading levees kept being denied, former officials said.
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- Former officials of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers got a sick feeling last week as two levees collapsed and floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina surged across New Orleans.
Corps engineers had known for years that the mostly earthen levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain were designed to protect the city from a weak Category 3 hurricane -- not a Category 4 with Katrina's punch.
The port city's defenses had been further weakened because federal funding shortfalls had delayed for 30 years completion of a project to raise the levees' height.
The result: The two breaches caused the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Its mounting toll set off a storm of criticism and political finger-pointing, and left former officials of the nation's premier public works agency wrestling with self-doubt.
Forced out as leader
Mike Parker, who was forced to end his brief reign as head of the Corps in 2002 after publicly criticizing the Bush White House for cutting his budget requests, said additional funding in recent years might have reduced the flooding.
Parker blamed bureaucrats in the Office of Management and Budget in both Democratic and Republican administration for cutting the Corps' budget requests. The Bush White House has cut $400 million from Corps requests for southeast Louisiana flood control money, according to the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.
Parker said he wonders whether he could have made a difference "if I had been more forceful, if I were smarter [or] more politically astute. I'm as much at fault as anybody else."
As the casualty count and property losses rose, congressional Democrats and other critics assailed Bush for slashing by millions of dollars the Corps' requests for funding to upgrade the New Orleans levees while spending billions of dollars in Iraq. The president fueled the criticism when he told ABC: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."
Danger has been known
Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, now the Army Corps' chief of engineers, later acknowledged to reporters that his agency has long "understood the potential impact of a category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans.
Strock defended its decision not to shift funding from other Corps projects to shield the key shipping hub at the mouth of the Mississippi, calling a hurricane of that magnitude a low-probability, "200- to 300-year event."
"How can you agree with that? How does that make any sense?" asked Joseph Suhayda, a Louisiana State University engineering professor who worked part time in the Corps' New Orleans district office from 1996-2000.
After Hurricane George sent a scare through the city in 1998, Suhayda said, he proposed a plan to create a "community haven" by installing 12 miles of flood barriers shielding the city's business district and providing emergency shelter to residents. He said the Corps put up a few hundred thousand dollars for a study into his idea, but he could never get funding.
New Orleans' vulnerability may have been preordained by decisions made generations ago, after massive flooding inundated the city and the Southeast in 1927.
It led to the creation of the Corps, which soon began to build levees to protect the city but also built channels that led to coastal erosion.