No single decision doomed levees

A comprehensive study of the 50-year history of decisions involving New Orleans' hurricane-protection levee system concludes that no single decision shaped its failure to protect the area from the devastating flooding resulting from Hurricane Katrina.

Rather, the Army Corps of Engineers-financed report, released today, spreads blame over a complex combination of political, economic and engineering decisions made without a routine review of how the individual decisions affected the hurricane protection system as a whole.

"Over the 50-year period of time (that the levees were being built), there was a tyranny of incremental decisions at all levels -- not just by the federal government, but by local and state officials, too -- and over a period of time, those incremental decisions led to the loss of a vision of the project as a system," said Tom Waters, chief of planning and policy for the corps.


The authors emphasize that they avoided placing blame, and in several cases take pains to report that they found no evidence indicating corps officials knowingly made decisions that would weaken the hurricane-protection system. Yet the report paints a picture of the corps failing to employ the best available science on the strength of storms and the height of surge, often because of political and financial obstacles from Congress and local officials, as well as from industrial and environmental lobbies.
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