Army Corps says Condition of many levees a mystery

Across America, earthen flood levees protect big cities and small towns, wealthy suburbs and rich farmland. But the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that oversees levees, lacks an inventory of thousands of them and has no idea of their condition, the corps' chief levee expert told The Associated Press.

The uncertainty, amid an unusually wet spring that has already caused significant flooding across many states, is creating worry even within the corps.

"We have to get our arms around this issue and understand how many levees there are in the country, who's watching over them, what populations and properties are behind them," Eric Halpin, the corps' special assistant for dam and levee safety, said in an interview last month. "What is the risk posed to the public?"

Critics are troubled that the government doesn't know the answer.

Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley levee expert, said many levees are old, with rusting infrastructure and built to protect against relatively common floods - not the big ones like the Great Flood of 1993, when 1,100 levees were broken or had water spill over their tops.

"Once they do get an inventory," Bea said, "I think we're not going to like what we find."

Residents along the Mississippi River have been fighting floods with levees since the 19th century. After a devastating 1927 flood, Congress got involved, approving construction of levees and reservoirs along the Mississippi and Missouri river basins.

Today, about 2,000 levees are either operated by the corps or by local entities in partnership with the corps, generally protecting major population areas such as St. Louis and New Orleans.

Thousands of others - no one is sure how many - are privately owned, operated and maintained. The majority of those are "farm" levees keeping water out of fields, but some protect populated areas, industries and businesses.

For example, flooding in March breached private levees near the southeastern Missouri towns of Dutchtown and Poplar Bluff.

In 2006, prompted in part by the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans the year before, Congress provided funding for the corps to inventory the levees it maintains or helps fund. That initial inventory is complete, Halpin said.

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