Forensic Engineering - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 191

A forensic engineer is very different from a design engineer, a building engineer, a
maintenance engineer, or a decommissioning engineer; it is akin to being an investig-
ative reporter. “You look at the dirt, the steel, the concrete, the water, to find out what
happened,” Bea explained. “And, crucially, you talk to the people,to find out who did
what, when, and where. I have done at least fifty of these investigations, and every one
has been chillingly interesting.”
Bea used lidar (a laser-based measuring tool) to take careful measurements of
breached levees and snapped photographs to document the different ways that the river
bored over, under, or through flood defenses. “Water is a beast,” said Bea. “It scours and
erodes and rips apart anything in front of it. It deepens channels faster than you can
believe. It cannot be stopped. We humans need to understand that we will never 'beat'
water, so we'd better learn to work withit.”
Which means building homes in sensible places, not in floodplains, and protecting
ourselves with sensible flood defenses, not “piles of sand and shells, like the levees the
Corps built here, and in New Orleans, and a lot of other places.”
When the man in the stilt house expressed his distrust and anger at the US Army
Corps of Engineers, Bob Bea knew exactly how he felt. “It was déjà vu,” Bea said in a
distinctive high, fluttery voice. “We've heard this tune before.”
As he toured the man's flooded house, Bea couldn't stop thinking about the Great
Flood of 1993 . In the aftermath of that deluge, a committee of well-regarded experts
issued a 272-page report that described Midwestern flood defenses as “a loose aggrega-
tion of federal, local and individual levees and reservoirs”; it predicted that “many levees
are poorly sited and will fail again in the future.” The report recommended that manage-
ment of floodwaters along the Mississippi be made the sole responsibility of the Corps
and that the agency make levee improvements a priority. The report was widely hailed,
but once the politicians and TV cameras left, no meaningful change occurred. The flood
of 2008 exposed the same institutional failings.
Now, Bea said, the Corps was trying to dodge its responsibility by tailoring and re-
tailoring its message about levee failures in 2008. First, the Corps said, “No federal
levees failed” in the flood. Then the message was adjusted to “Levee failures were due to
overtopping,” which was another way of saying that the Corps had built the levees cor-
rectly, but the water had simply risen too high, and thus any failures were not the fault
of the Corps.
Bea did not see it that way. He was angered by what he discerns as a long-standing
pattern: the Corps builds poor levees, maintains them badly, and, when they fail in a
flood, passes the blame or hides behind the 1928 law that protects it from prosecution
should its levees be breached. Indeed, the Corps had quietly begun to decertify some of