Forensic Engineering - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 195

cused on technical engineering issues, and the big, gruff USACE officers seemed genu-
inely interested in his critique. Some of the local pols debated about money for recon-
struction, while others rocked back to eye their BlackBerrys or to whisper. The meeting
was deemed a qualified success. “At least we're talking,” one participant said. “You gotta
start with that.”
A few weeks later, federal district judge Stanwood Duval upheld the Corps's im-
munity from the New Orleans class-action suit—thanks to the 1928 Flood Control
Act—while agreeing with Bea's assessment in a tartly worded opinion: “Millions of dol-
lars were squandered in building a levee system which was known to be inadequate by
the Corps' own calculations,” he wrote. In his lengthy opinion, the judge seemed to lay
out a road map for appeal, which the plaintiffs vigorously pursued.
In a significant 2009 ruling, Judge Duval blamed the Corps for mismanagement of
the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (known as MRGO), a channel dredged by the Corps
that flooded St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward, affecting at least one hun-
dred thousand people. The ruling set the stage for judgments worth billions of dollars
against the government for damages. “The Corps' lassitude and failure to fulfill its du-
ties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property … the wasting of millions
of dollars in flood protection and billions of dollars in Congressional outlays,” Duval
wrote.
The Corps had already spent $7.1 billion repairing New Orleans's lood defenses and
had requested twice that amount to defend the entire Gulf Coast against another Cat-
egory 3 storm. Bea continued to worry. “If another Katrina were to hit today, the levees
in New Orleans would fail just the same way,” he said. “It will. he question is not if,but
when.”
WHAT KATRINA AND THE DEEPWATER HORIZON HAVE IN COMMON
According to Bob Bea, the levees in New Orleans are only the third-most vulnerable in
the nation. The second-most vulnerable are in Texas City, Texas , near Galveston (which
was flooded by the Hurricane of 1900, the deadliest disaster in US history). In Texas
City, fifty thousand residents and $6 billion worth of property, including almost 5 per-
cent of the nation's oil-refining capacity, are surrounded by seventeen miles of levees.
The consequences of a failure there are high. But of all the levees in America, the most
vulnerable are in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta—the largest estuary on the West
Coast, which lies just north of San Francisco and west of Sacramento, and is not far
from Bea's house near Berkeley.