TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Sunday, October 02, 2005

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune Sept. 30:

As the Army Corps of Engineers begins an investigation into the causes of concrete floodwall breaches that swamped large portions of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the stakes could not be higher.
If the failures are ultimately traced to flaws in design or construction, it would . . . spark a rush to hold individuals, institutions, and companies accountable; to file multibillion-dollar lawsuits from affected residents and businesses; and to make political recriminations.

Some Corps critics already are questioning whether the Corps – with its reputation and billions of dollars in financing on the line – has a conflict of interest in investigating itself.

"It will have no credibility. If I were the Corps of Engineers I wouldn’t want the job. You would want to have the best and most independent analysis of something like this," said Steve Ellis, vice president for programs at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an advocacy group that has often criticized the Corps' big projects as wasteful.

Ivor van Heerden, the deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center who is studying the levee breaches with other LSU scientists, says the Corps already has compromised some evidence with its temporary fixes and should not conduct a completely internal investigation. [...]

The only way to conclusively determine what happened is to conduct a forensic investigation, which involves collecting evidence and documents and making a detailed analysis of what led to the failures. The Corps has announced it’s doing that, but has offered no details. Corps officials did not respond Thursday to requests for more information on the probe.
[...]
Temporary berms built by the Corps at the sites of levee breaks have covered, and may have destroyed, evidence crucial to the investigation, Van Heerden said.

"Some of the critical evidence to finding out what went wrong so we can make sure this doesn’t happen again – evidence we saw on our first inspections – is under that berm, or it may already have been taken away," van Heerden said after inspecting the levee breaks this week. He said he has inspected the breaks 10 times since Katrina battered New Orleans on Aug. 29, including five trips on foot.

[...]
it may be difficult for the Corps to point the finger at itself or contractors it employed. The Corps and its contractors can be sued under the Federal Tort Claims Act, said Mark Dombroff, a Washington lawyer and former chief of the torts branch of the Justice Department who defended the Corps in court actions.

The Corps also has often been criticized by a number of impartial government studies for tweaking the numbers. . .

Said Scott Faber, a lawyer with the group Environmental Defense, who monitors the Corps. "There is no doubt in my mind that the Corps will not find itself at all responsible for the failure of the levees. It is ludicrous for the administration or Congress to expect the agency to review its own conduct."

[...]
Faber, Ellis and van Heerden all said they would like to see some sort of independent federally authorized commission look into the levee breaches, in addition to the Corps.

"This investigation should include the Corps, but it also must be totally independent to ensure there is accountability but also public acceptance for whatever it discovers and recommends," van Heerden said.
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Labels: Katrina

| Posted at 06:22 | PERMA-LINK |

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