Les Jones

News > Contractor Warned Army Corps About New Orleans Floodwalls

From the NY Times via Jim Miller:

Questions of soil quality at the 17th Street Canal levee have come under scrutiny in recent days because of a contractual dispute from the 1990's between the Corps of Engineers and a contractor, Pittman Construction, that was building the flood walls on top of the earthen levees.

According to documents related to the case, the Corps complained that several sections of the flood wall had shifted during construction. The company contended that the soil was unstable and said the Corps should have discovered that through tests before the project began. Professor Bea said that in retrospect, it appeared that Pittman "kind of telegraphed the problem."

And this, which says that some floodwalls were overtopped:

Dr. Mlakar said the Corps now agrees that the levees at 17th Street and London Avenue were not destroyed by being overtopped. Dr. Seed said the water did not appear to have risen any higher than two and a half feet from the top of the flood walls at those canals.

Other levees were overtopped, including those on the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. The surge of water over the levees along the Gulf Outlet canal extended for thousands of feet, Dr. Mlakar said. The waters from those two canals inundated the city's Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish, causing some of the worst flooding.

(Technically, these were floodwalls, not levees, but the two terms are endlessly mixed up in news reports.)