2006 Report on Canal Burst By Katrina Gets to Engineers More Than a Year Later

Thursday, August 9th 2007, 9:33 pm

By: News On 6

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A 2006 Army Corps of Engineers inspection report that highlighted flaws with a canal that burst during Hurricane Katrina got lost in the shuffle and landed on the desks of top engineers more than a year later.

Stevan Spencer, a top engineer with the Orleans Levee District, said he only recently saw the May 2006 report, the first careful analysis of the full length of the 17th Street Canal after Katrina.

Now, he wants to know whether similar reports exist for two other drainage canals, the Orleans and London Avenue canals. The 17th Street and London canals broke during Katrina and caused much of the flooding. He has asked the Corps to furnish reports if they exist.

``I've not seen anything,'' Spencer said Thursday. ``It's important to find out if there is some major problem.''

The fact that the straightforward 30-page report never reached top Corps personnel and city engineers suggests serious flaws continue to plague the matrix of checks and balances and transparency levee officials promised would be set up after the devastation of Katrina.

The report is a laundry list of problems, including cracks in flood walls and several spots of bank erosion, identified by a team inspecting every foot of the 17th Street Canal.

Vic Harris, a corps spokesman, said the inspection report may have fallen through the cracks when Task Force Guardian was dismantled last year. Guardian was a division set up after Katrina to log and repair storm damage.

``Some information wasn't conveyed in that hand-over. That's what happened I suspect,'' Harris said.

The Corps offices in New Orleans have undergone a dizzying array of personnel changes and strategies since Katrina as hundreds of workers from around the nation were cycled in and out.

Edmond Preau Jr., an assistant secretary at the state transportation department, called the misplaced inspection report ``a plain sign that the Corps has too much work and too many people down there to keep tabs on it all.'' He said he got a copy of the report just Thursday morning.

The Corps says none of the flaws listed in the report were so grave as to threaten the stability of the canal's walls. It says some of the problems have been fixed. Preau agreed and characterized the problems as standard.

But doubts persist among many officials about the safety of the canals.

``They all need to be replaced. The Corps can't certify they'll hold anything,'' Preau said.

The Corps, though, has no plan to yank the walls out. Instead, it has built flood gates at the canal entrances to stop storm surge. It says the gates take the weak walls ``out of play.''