Forensic Engineering - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 189

he 1928 Flood Control Act was drawn up in response to the disaster. The act led to
what is now called the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, the nation's first com-
prehensive flood-control and navigation provisions. The act also approved a controver-
sial plan, designed by the Corps's Major General Edgar Jadwin, to require that flood-
ing rivers be equipped with outlets that spill floodwaters out of the main channel into
floodplains. The 1928 act also contained a provision that immunizes the Corps from
prosecution when its levees fail, a provision at the center of much Katrina-based litiga-
tion today.
In 1936, Congress passed an updated Flood Control Act, which for the first time
declared that floods were a menace to the national welfare and that flood control was
a federal responsibility. Since then, the Corps has built 375 reservoirs and hundred of
miles of levees, floodwalls, and channel improvements. These significant engineering
projects compose one of the largest single additions to the nation's infrastructure,
rivaled only by the federal highway system.
Today, the Corps is known as the nation's handyman and performs all manner of
governmental odd jobs—from hazardous-waste cleanup at former military sites, to war-
fare logistics, ice management, power generation, and building horseshoe-crab nests. It
played key roles in the First and Second World Wars, in Korea and Vietnam. But in re-
cent years the Corps has been “streamlined” by Congress and has slowly become a de-
moralized and balkanized agency that is mostly stafed by civilians .
In the aftermath of Katrina, the Corps was heavily criticized by civilian engineers
for not knowing how many levees exist in the United States, where they are, and what
their integrity might be. In 2006, the Corps began to compile the first national levee
database. It took another two years for the agency to secure enough funding to include
private, nonfederal levees. By 2009, the index contained just ninety-eight hundred miles
of levees, or less than 10 percent of the estimated total. Tammy Conforti, manager of the
Corps's levee safety program, hoped to add another forty-two hundred miles to the in-
ventory within a year or so, which would complete the fourteen thousand miles of levees
over which the Corps has legal oversight. To assess the nation's remaining, privately
built levees—an estimated eighty-six thousand miles' worth—the Corps will have to ne-
gotiate with state and local government offices to share data and inspect levees.
The rehabilitation of America's levees has not begun and won't until their cataloging
is finished. That could take years. For now, the information used to predict how, when,
where, and why the next levee breach might occur is mostly anecdotal. Some levee sys-
tems are breached again and again, though, regularly causing deaths, mass evacuations,
and millions of dollars' worth of destruction. To the experts, this pattern is infuriating
and avoidable.