S. Hrg. 109–526

HURRICANE KATRINA:

WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL?

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON 

HOMELAND SECURITY AND 

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

NOVEMBER 2, 2005

Printed for the use of the 

Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

(

HURRICANE KATRINA: WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL?

U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

WASHINGTON : 

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office

Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800

Fax: (202) 512–2250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402–0001

24–446 PDF 2006

S. Hrg. 109–526

HURRICANE KATRINA:

WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL?

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON 

HOMELAND SECURITY AND 

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

NOVEMBER 2, 2005

Printed for the use of the 

Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

(

(II)

COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman 

TED STEVENS, Alaska 

GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio 

NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota 

TOM COBURN, Oklahoma 

LINCOLN D. CHAFEE, Rhode Island 

ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah 

PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico 

JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia 

JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut 

CARL LEVIN, Michigan 

DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

MARK DAYTON, Minnesota 

FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey 

MARK PRYOR, Arkansas

MICHAEL D. BOPP, Staff Director and Chief Counsel 

THOMAS R. ELDRIDGE, Senior Counsel 

JOYCE A. RECHTSCHAFFEN, Minority Staff Director and Counsel 

DAVID M. BERICK, Minority Professional Staff Member 

TRINA DRIESSNACK TYRER, Chief Clerk 

(III)

C O N T E N T S 

Opening statements: Page 

Senator Collins ................................................................................................. 1

Senator Lieberman ........................................................................................... 2

Senator Voinovich ............................................................................................. 24

Senator Akaka .................................................................................................. 27

Senator Warner ................................................................................................ 30

Senator Carper ................................................................................................. 32

Senator Coleman .............................................................................................. 36

WITNESSES 

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2005

Ivor Ll. van Heerden, Ph.D., Head, State of Louisiana Forensic Data Gathering Team, Director, Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of 

Hurricanes, and Deputy Director, Louisiana State University Hurricane 

Center, Baton Rouge, Louisiana ......................................................................... 5

Paul F. Mlakar, Ph.D., P.E., Senior Research Scientist, U.S. Army Research 

and Development Center, Vicksburg, Mississippi ............................................. 8

Raymond B. Seed, Ph.D., Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 

University of California at Berkeley, on behalf of the National Science 

Foundation-Sponsored Levee Investigation Team ............................................. 10

Peter Nicholson, Ph.D., P.E., Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental 

Engineering and Graduate Program Chair, University of Hawaii, on behalf 

of the American Society of Civil Engineers ........................................................ 14

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES

Mlakar, Paul F.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 8

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 98

Nicholson, Peter: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 14

Prepared statement with attachments ........................................................... 121

Seed, Raymond B.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 10

Prepared statement with attachments ........................................................... 102

van Heerden, Ivor Ll.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 5

Prepared statement with attachments ........................................................... 49

APPENDIX

Letter and e-mail from Raymond B. Seed ............................................................. 208

Preliminary Report on the Performance of the New Orleans Levee Systems 

in Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 ......................................................... 224

Questions and Responses for the Record from: 

Mr. van Heerden ............................................................................................... 162

Mr. Mlakar ........................................................................................................ 166

Mr. Seed ............................................................................................................ 170

Mr. Nicholson .................................................................................................... 206

(1)

HURRICANE KATRINA: 

WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL? 

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2005

U.S. SENATE, COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, Washington, DC. 

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:37 a.m., in room 

342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Susan M. Collins, Chairman of the Committee, presiding. 

Present: Senators Collins, Voinovich, Coleman, Warner, Lieberman, Akaka, Carper, Dayton, Lautenberg, and Pryor. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN COLLINS 

Chairman COLLINS. The Committee will come to order. Today, 

the Committee continues its investigation into the preparation for 

and response to Hurricane Katrina. Our focus at our fifth hearing 

this morning will be on why the levee system in and around New 

Orleans failed. 

This flood-control system was not constructed as Katrina bore 

down on New Orleans. It is a project that dates back 40 years and 

was first authorized by Congress in the Flood Control Act of 1965. 

It is a project that has consumed $458 million of the taxpayers’ 

money. Yet the project still is not complete, and key elements failed 

when put to the test. 

While some of the floodwalls and levees were overtopped, something much more catastrophic happened that was not anticipated. 

Some levees and floodwalls failed outright, leaving gaping holes 

through which water rushed uncontrollably into the neighborhoods 

of New Orleans. 

The result was a city more than 80 percent underwater. Estimates by experts tell us that this was approximately twice the percentage that would have flooded solely from overtopping and that, 

even in those parts that were expected to flood, the levee breaks 

caused the floodwaters to be far deeper. 

This flooding caused enormous destruction and tragic loss of life. 

It made inoperable a land-based relief plan and aggravated the suffering and deprivation of the survivors. It caused far more devastation than would have occurred if the levees had held. 

Our four witnesses today are the leaders of forensic teams that 

are investigating why the levees and floodwalls failed. These teams 

are sponsored by the State of Louisiana, the National Science 

Foundation, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the U.S. 

Army Corps of Engineers. The National Science Foundation and 

2

1The report appears in the Appendix on page 224. 

the American Society of Civil Engineers teams will be releasing a 

joint interim report detailing their initial findings at this hearing.1

The testimony we will receive today demonstrates that many of 

the widespread failures throughout the levee system were not solely the result of Mother Nature. Rather, they were the result, it appears, of human error in the form of design and construction flaws, 

as well as a confused and delayed response to the collapse. 

For example, at the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals, the 

evidence suggests that the design and construction of the floodwalls 

did not adequately account for layers of unstable soil beneath these 

walls that became, literally, ‘‘slippery when wet.’’ Built on a weak 

foundation, these floodwalls could not stand up to the force of the 

water brought by the storm. 

We will hear that the flooding east of the Industrial Canal in 

New Orleans East and in the lower Ninth Ward was caused in part 

by the storm surge from the hurricane that flowed over the top of 

the levees and floodwalls protecting those parts of the city. But we 

will also hear that this flooding was made worse by poor design 

and a lack of a uniform, comprehensive approach to levee construction. 

In addition, our witnesses will testify that some of the levees in 

St. Bernard Parish apparently were built with inferior material 

that washed away as Katrina hit, allowing the surge waters to flow 

more easily into that parish. 

We will also hear troubling concerns that the Army Corps’ ongoing repair and reconstruction efforts have been insufficient. At 

least one of the team’s leaders believes that these rebuilt levees 

may be at risk of failing in another storm, a disturbing finding that 

raises serious questions about the safety of the city’s returning 

residents. 

This Committee’s investigation of Hurricane Katrina has already 

exposed many flaws in what we thought was a coordinated homeland security system that has been built during the past 4 years. 

Our hearing today will demonstrate that these flaws go beyond ineffective coordination and communication among the various levels 

of government to the very structures that are supposed to protect 

the residents of New Orleans. 

The people of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes put 

their faith in the levee system, and many of those people have lost 

everything. Unless the cause of this failure is investigated thoroughly and addressed, New Orleans will remain a city in jeopardy. 

Katrina was a powerful hurricane, but it will not be the last hurricane. 

Senator Lieberman. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LIEBERMAN 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. 

Thanks to the expert witnesses that are before us today. 

I do want to stress that these are expert witnesses. These aren’t 

political people or elected officials. I must say, therefore, the collective weight of their expert testimony, as I have read it in preparation for this hearing, makes this, in my opinion, a very important 

3

hearing because the collective weight of the testimony and the findings that they will bring before us today, for me is as disheartening, as heartbreaking, as infuriating, and ultimately as embarrassing as the scenes of human suffering and degradation that we 

saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. 

This was a powerful hurricane. Our Committee’s investigation 

began to determine why the Federal Government and the State 

and local governments failed to adequately prepare for and respond 

to the hurricane so that some of the human suffering that we saw 

on television from this distance would not have occurred. 

But today, your testimony tells us something different, which 

really is—it is just shocking, which is that, notwithstanding how 

strong Hurricane Katrina was, a lot of the flooding of New Orleans 

should never have happened if the levees had done what they were 

supposed to do. What we kept hearing leading up to the hurricane 

hitting landfall and, of course, afterward was that the levees had 

been built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane. 

The testimony we are going to hear this morning, as I have read 

it in preparation, tells me that Hurricane Katrina may have been 

as weak as Category 1 when it hit the canals along Lake Pontchartrain. But the bottom line point here that cries out from your 

testimony is that, in fact, it was human error in the design and 

construction of the storm surge barrier system that caused nearly 

all of the flooding of downtown New Orleans from the Lake Pontchartrain canals. And that a significant amount of the flooding of 

the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, the lower Ninth Ward and of socalled New Orleans East, occurred from the storm surge, but a lot 

of it occurred because of the failure of the levees on that part of 

town to do what they were supposed to do. 

This ultimately has to lead our Committee to ask some very 

tough questions of the Army Corps of Engineers since the Army 

Corps of Engineers, not singularly but significantly, as a Federal 

agency, was in charge over a long period of years of the construction of these levees. We will ask those questions. 

I must say that I am troubled also to hear from some of the witnesses in the testimony and in remarks to the staff that investigators from the three independent teams feel that they have not had 

the kind of cooperation that they should have had from the Army 

Corps of Engineers in providing access to important facts and evidence. I hope that lack of cooperation will end. We will have a witness before us in a couple of weeks from the Army Corps of Engineers administrative wing, and I hope before then that the frustration that the investigators are feeling with the lack of cooperation 

from the Corps will end. 

Also, as the Chairman has said, your expert investigations have 

now found that some of the work done to repair the levees, the reconstruction efforts after Katrina, was done, we all understand, in 

haste and in very urgent circumstances, was plagued by a lack of 

engineering oversight and perhaps by the use of substandard materials, and therefore, may not adequately, from what I read in your 

testimony, protect the City of New Orleans from high tides, let 

alone another hurricane. 

Gentlemen, I truly appreciate what you have done here and what 

you are going to tell us this morning. It is not pleasant to hear it, 

4

but it is important to hear it. Because as we said at the beginning, 

the only way we are going to make sure that, to the best of our 

ability, the suffering that occurred as a result of Hurricane Katrina 

in New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast region doesn’t happen again is by pursuing the truth of what happened here and then 

fixing it. 

I thank each of you—forensic teams operated under the auspices 

of the State of Louisiana, the National Science Foundation, the 

American Society of Civil Engineers, and the U.S. Army Corps of 

Engineers. Respectively, from all that I know, you include many of 

the foremost experts in this country in the design and operation of 

levee systems and the impact of hurricanes and storm surge upon 

them. We are also very privileged to have the benefit of the joint 

preliminary report of the teams from the National Science Foundation and the American Society of Civil Engineers that is scheduled 

to be released this morning, and I want to extend a special thank 

you to Drs. Seed and Nicholson and their teams for their hard 

work in finishing that report in time for today’s hearings. 

I thank all the witnesses for rearranging also what I know are 

very demanding schedules to be here this morning. 

As a Committee, we are going to ask some tough questions about 

why the levees failed and what needs to be done to repair and reconstruct them now to protect the people of New Orleans and to 

enable the reconstruction of that great American city. We ask that 

you answer those tough questions with the same frankness that 

you have shown in the testimony that you have prepared for this 

morning. Thank you very much. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator. 

I want to welcome, officially, our witnesses to this hearing. As 

Senator Lieberman indicated, we have assembled what is truly a 

world class panel of scientists to help us understand this issue. 

Dr. Ivor van Heerden is the Deputy Director of Louisiana State 

University’s Hurricane Center and Director of the Center for the 

Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. He has an undergraduate degree in geology and both a Master’s and a Ph.D. in marine sciences. He currently is the lead investigator selected by the 

State of Louisiana to review the levee failures in the New Orleans 

area. 

Dr. Paul Mlakar is a West Point graduate. He has both a Master’s and a Ph.D. in engineering science. Dr. Mlakar has served as 

the Chief of the Concrete and Materials Division of what is now 

called the Army Engineer Research and Development Center. Dr. 

Mlakar led the Corps’ performance study of the Pentagon after the 

September 11 attacks. He is the leader of the Army Corps of Engineers data gathering team investigating the levee failures. 

Dr. Raymond Seed is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He is an expert 

on the stability of dams, embankment soils, and buried structures. 

He holds an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and both a 

Master’s and a Ph.D. in geotechnical engineering, which I have 

never even heard of before. Dr. Seed is leading the National 

Science Foundation’s investigation of the levees. 

And finally, we will hear from Dr. Peter Nicholson, who is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and Chair 

5

1The prepared statement of Mr. van Heerden with attachments appears in the Appendix on 

page 49. 

of Graduate Programs at the University of Hawaii. He has undergraduate degrees in geology and geophysics and in civil engineering, and both a Master’s and a Ph.D. in civil engineering, as well. 

Dr. Nicholson, who chairs the American Society of Civil Engineers 

Geo Institute Committee on Embankments, Dams, and Slopes, is 

leading the Society’s investigation of the levee failures. 

I spent some time going through the credentials of our witnesses 

to demonstrate what an extraordinarily well-qualified panel we 

have this morning. I think it is unusual for us to have four scientists testifying before this Committee, and we very much appreciate your sharing your expertise with us this morning. 

I am going to ask that you all stand and raise your right hands 

so that I can swear you in. 

Do you swear that the testimony that you are about to give to 

this Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but 

the truth, so help you, God? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I do. 

Mr. MLAKAR. I do. 

Mr. SEED. I do. 

Mr. NICHOLSON. I do. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Dr. van Heerden, we are going 

to begin with you. 

TESTIMONY OF IVOR LL. VAN HEERDEN, PH.D.,1 HEAD, STATE 

OF LOUISIANA FORENSIC DATA GATHERING TEAM, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF PUBLIC HEALTH IMPACTS 

OF HURRICANES, AND DEPUTY DIRECTOR, LOUISIANA 

STATE UNIVERSITY HURRICANE CENTER, BATON ROUGE, 

LOUISIANA 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Can I have the first slide, please? This is a 

product from a model that we used to determine the surge, and 

this gives you an idea of what the flooding would have been in New 

Orleans if there hadn’t been a breach in the levee. It is a model 

we run on our supercomputer. This was actually the first warning 

that we put out 30-odd hours before landfall that New Orleans 

would flood. Next slide, please. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Could you describe that just a little more? 

In other words, how different would the flooding in New Orleans 

have been if the levees did not break? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. As a result of the breaches, a whole lot—the 

flooding was double what you see on that slide. 

The next slide actually is a satellite image that will show you the 

extent of the flooding. That is all the blue. So if we hadn’t had the 

breaches, this area wouldn’t have flooded and large sections here 

and in here wouldn’t have flooded. Next slide, please. 

This gives you an idea of the water depth, and you see the maximum water depth is about 15 feet. If this hadn’t occurred, the 

water depth would have been maybe five to seven feet. I want to 

draw your attention to this area here and talk very briefly about 

the levee overtopping in this area, which was where Lake PontVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:37 Aug 31, 2006 Jkt 024446 PO 00000 Frm 00011 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\24446.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
6

chartrain actually flooded into part of New Orleans. Next slide, 

please. 

This is a slide of the actual levee, and you can see its northern 

embankment, and right on the top here is a wreck line. That is the 

water line from the surge. But you will see the wall here is actually 

a few feet, a couple of feet lower. Next slide, please. 

And this is what happens when you get overwash. You create a 

scour trench, and this was one of the areas that Orleans East flooded. Next slide, please. 

I want to start with the 17th Street Canal and then go to London 

Avenue Canal. Next slide, please. 

This is the basic design of the walls, the so-called I-walls. There 

is sheetpiling driven in the ground and then a concrete wall on top, 

a soil embankment on either side. Very often, that soil comes from 

the dredging of the canal, so it is the material that was in the 

canal. Next slide, please. 

This is what we term a hydrograph. It gives you the height of 

the water with time, and I will draw your attention to the pink 

line. This is from the model. This is the water level that was experienced in the 17th Street Canal at its mouth. The arrow indicates 

when we believe the breach actually occurred, so it was after the 

peak of the surge. Next slide, please. 

An aerial view right after the flood, and the important thing is 

right here in the middle, you can see a green bank and the wall. 

That is the area that slid. Next slide. 

This is taken on the water on day two. You can see there is the 

wall. We tried to line ourselves down the wall. And there is the 

former bank, and that used to be over here. Here are the wall segments that moved 30-odd feet. Next slide. 

And then between them, there were sky areas and the walls also 

blew out, as well. Next slide, please. 

This is the actual soil that is left behind, the old embankment, 

and the thing that we saw was a lot of wood and organic matter 

in this bank, indicative that it was dredged out of the canal. Next 

slide, please. 

And, of course, as all of this moved, it acted as a bulldozer, and 

this yard used to be about four or five feet lower, and you can see 

how the hummocky terrain and the buildings and everything have 

moved. This is the bulldozing effect as that levee let go. Next slide, 

please. 

Underneath all of this is an old swamp, and you can see the cypress stumps that occur in this area about every 15 feet. So New 

Orleans was built on an old swamp, and it suggests that where the 

17th Street Canal breach occurred, we were sitting on top of an old 

swamp deposit. Next slide, please. 

In addition, we tried to get the monoliths and the sheetpiling removed. We couldn’t, but this was something that disturbed us. It 

looks like the sheetpiling actually didn’t extend into this monolith. 

Unfortunately, this whole area has now been covered with the repair material, but it raises questions. Next slide, please. 

Right now, we are not sure exactly how the water got from the 

canal through onto the opposite side to soften the soils and lead to 

the actual sliding of the wall. There are three potential pathways, 

one in this highly organic old swamp material that was pumped up 

7

to form the bank, the actual peat and swamp layer, and also these 

clays down here have lots of parallel lenses in them. The important 

thing was that sheetpiling, from all the records we can find, only 

went to minus-ten feet below sea level Next slide, please. 

An aerial sketch, if you will, of what happened. This levee section 

moved, and then these walls on either side collapsed. Next slide, 

please. 

This is at London Avenue at Filmore. This is the Western 

breach, very similar sorts of features. I want to draw your attention to this little house and pine trees. Next slide, please. 

This is what it was like before Katrina. The house was down at 

the toe of the levee. You can see the pine tree. Next slide, please. 

And now it is way up, as a result of that heave, indicative again 

of the very similar failure at the 17th Street Canal of this section 

of the levee sliding outwards. Next slide, please. 

On the opposite side from that breach, the walls are broken, tilted, cracked. Next slide, please. 

There is evidence of what we call sand boils, where the water has 

come underneath the levee and blown up on the top, on the back 

side. Next slide, please. 

And, in fact, there are also heaves you can see, not a good slide, 

but these planter boxes have moved and there was this little swimming pool that moved, as well. So some of the same features we 

saw at the 17th Street Canal, not as dramatic. Next slide, please. 

And what we believe happened at Filmore was basically the 

same thing. The sheetpiling came down to 11-and-a-half feet below 

sea level and the water found its way through. What is interesting 

on the opposite side of the canal, where it didn’t fail but it cracked 

the sheetpiling, we believe went down to minus 26 feet, seeming to 

suggest a deeper sheetpile would have helped. Next slide, please. 

The Mirabeau break on London Avenue, the thing that really 

strikes you when you get there is the sand. This is the top of a car, 

so you have four to five feet of sand. It looks like a river, the whole 

area. Next slide, please. 

And when you look at the actual break, the thing that struck us 

were the wall segments actually dipping down into what appeared 

to be a hole, and so perhaps a slightly different failure to the other 

areas. Next slide, please. 

And what we suspect is that this is a blowout hole that the soil, 

that the water made its way underneath and blew out, created a 

void, and these wall segments collapsed into that hole. Next slide, 

please. 

And again, the important thing at Mirabeau is you have this 

very thick layer of beach sand. It is very porous, very premeable, 

and it created, we believe, a conduit for the water to get from the 

canal under pressure and onto the other side, and the fact that you 

have all the sand amongst the houses, suggesting that this was the 

main failure mechanism. Next slide, please. 

The Industrial Canal failed just before the peak, right at the 

time the water started overtopping. Next slide, please. 

The breaches. Next slide, please. 

Next slide. 

Just to show you how it blew out, it removed all these houses, 

probably a 20-foot head of water. Next slide. 

8

1The prepared statement of Mr. Mlakar appears in the Appendix on page 98. 

And on the ground, you see a scour trench where the pilings used 

to be, the wall used to be. Next slide, please. 

And where it hasn’t failed, there is this very typical scour trench 

all the way along, suggesting that it was just overwash that led to 

the failure of these sections of the levees. Next slide, please. 

There is the question of the barge. Next slide. 

What we found was evidence that the barge had gone through 

the wall. Next slide, please. 

But it was after the wall had collapsed, and that was given to 

us that the wall is at 45 degrees and the sheetpiling where the 

barge perhaps did knock the wall is horizontal, suggesting the wall 

was down before the barge came through. Next slide, please. 

What really struck us, though, was when you look down the 

length of the wall, it had these strange curves in it beyond where 

the actual breach is and then the signs of embankment failure in 

front of the walls. Next slide. 

And what you see here is a tilted wall and examples of where 

the soil has dropped down in both cases. And in this area, we saw 

something that we call percolation holes, where it appeared the 

water had actually started to scour down underneath the 

sheetpiling. Next slide, please. 

Again, swampy material. The bore hole data suggests that these 

are all soft or very soft clays. Next slide, please. 

And again, there appears to have been a number of potential 

mechanisms for the water to get under to lead to the failure as well 

as the overtopping, and right now, our investigation is looking at 

both, this being a failure related to the soil as well as the overtopping. Next slide, please. 

And being from Louisiana, I am obviously very concerned about 

what happens to the folk who trusted the system, and this is an 

example of how some of them actually got out. Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Dr. Mlakar. 

TESTIMONY OF PAUL F. MLAKAR, PH.D., P.E.,1 SENIOR RESEARCH SCIENTIST, U.S. ARMY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER, VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI 

Mr. MLAKAR. Madam Chairman and Members of the Committee, 

I am Dr. Paul F. Mlakar, Senior Research Scientist at the U.S. 

Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, 

Mississippi, which is a component of the Corps of Engineers. I have 

spent most of my professional career of four decades in the Corps 

studying the response of structures to extreme loadings. This has 

included the performance of the Murrah Building in the Oklahoma 

City bombing and the Pentagon in the September 11 crash. I am 

a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the recipient of their Forensic Engineering Award in 2003. I am also a Registered Professional Engineer, legally obligated to protect the 

health, safety, and welfare of our citizens. 

As some of you know, the ERDC conducts research and development to enable the Corps to better perform its military and civil 

works mission in support of the Nation. We employ 2,500 people 

in seven laboratories located in four States. The staff is recognized 

9

nationally and internationally for its expertise in civil engineering 

and related disciplines. Our facilities include a number of unique 

devices that allow us to deliver technical solutions on the leading 

edge of science. 

I am pleased to appear today on behalf of the ERDC and the 

Corps to provide information as requested in your letter of October 

27. The Congressional interest in the performance of the storm 

damage reduction infrastructure in Hurricane Katrina is much respected and shared by the Corps. While we do not yet have the 

complete answers to all of the questions, we welcome this opportunity to share our progress with you. 

The Corps takes its responsibility for the safety and well-being 

of the Nation’s citizens very seriously. In the case of the New Orleans area, we are determined to learn what failed, how it failed, 

why it failed, and to recommend ways to reduce the risk of failure 

in the future. 

So what have we done about these failures in Katrina? As the 

emergency operations wound down, the Corps asked me to lead in 

the collection of data for the study of the protection infrastructure 

affected. I deployed to New Orleans on the heels of Hurricane Rita 

and have spent most of the intervening period in the region. At 

various times, I have been joined by some 30 Corps staff and other 

colleagues. Our priority has been on the breaches in the metropolitan area that caused the greatest devastation, that is the 17th 

Street Canal, the London Avenue Canal, and the Inner Harbor 

Navigation Canal. 

To document exactly what happened, we have been diligently recording the damages and measuring the post-Katrina conditions. 

To eventually explain how and why, we have examined physical 

evidence to establish the maximum water elevations at various locations. To establish the timeline of events, we have conducted detailed interviews so far with about 70 people who sat out the storm. 

To establish the soil properties, we have pushed a state-of-the-art 

instrumented cone to a depth of 80 feet at some 60 locations. We 

further collected samples of the soil at depth in 10 locations for laboratory testing. We have also electronically scanned 63 out of 235 

boxes of documents dealing with the design, construction, and 

maintenance of the projects involved. 

As we began, the American Society of Civil Engineers and a University of California team sponsored by the National Science Foundation approached the Corps about similar studies of infrastructure 

performance they were undertaking in hopes of applying lessons 

learned to the levee systems in California. In the spirit of openness 

and full transparency, we invited these teams to join us for inspections of the projects involved. We subsequently learned that the 

State of Louisiana would soon establish its own study team, and 

we invited the researchers from the Louisiana State University 

Hurricane Research Center to join us in advance of this official establishment. The Corps gratefully acknowledges the assistance provided by these teams in the collection of the data. 

So what is the way ahead? Over the next 8 months, an interagency performance evaluation task force commissioned by the 

Chief of Engineers will conclude the collection of the data, deliberately analyze this information, and rationally test various 

10

1The prepared statement of Mr. Seed with attachments appears in the Appendix on page 102. 

hypotheses about the behavior of the infrastructure. This work will 

comprehensively involve the following technical topics on 360 miles 

of diverse infrastructure. The topics are geodetic reference datum, 

storm surge and wave modeling, hydrodynamic forces, floodwall 

and levee performance, pumping station performance, interior 

drainage and flooding modeling, consequence analysis, and finally, 

risk and reliability assessment. 

The participants on this task force will be drawn broadly from 

Federal agencies, academia, State and local governments, professional societies, and international experts. We will communicate 

our progress periodically through news releases, press conferences, 

and web postings. The final results will include conclusions as to 

the causes of the failures and recommendations for the future design and construction of such infrastructure nationwide. These results will be independently reviewed by an external panel of the 

American Society of Civil Engineers. At the request of the Secretary of Defense, the National Academies will also independently 

assess the results and report to the Assistant Secretary of the 

Army for Civil Works. 

Our scheduled completion date is July 1. In the meantime, our 

progress will be shared with and used by our colleagues in the 

Corps responsible for the reconstruction of the protection in New 

Orleans. 

My written statement contains further information about your 

specific questions, and I request that it be entered into the record. 

Chairman COLLINS. Without objection. 

Mr. MLAKAR. In closing, I advise against reaching conclusions to 

the very important questions before appropriate analysis is accomplished. Speculation concerning the understanding of why damage 

occurred in Katrina is not adequate to build back a reliable flood 

protection system. My testimony illustrates the Corps’ continuing 

commitment to the pursuit and use of sound science and engineering principles in the execution of our civil works mission. 

On behalf of the Corps, thank you for allowing me the opportunity to present this testimony today. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Dr. Seed. 

TESTIMONY OF RAYMOND B. SEED, PH.D.,1 PROFESSOR OF 

CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF 

CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, ON BEHALF OF THE NATIONAL 

SCIENCE FOUNDATION-SPONSORED LEVEE INVESTIGATION 

TEAM 

Mr. SEED. Can I get my first Power Point image? In fact, you can 

skip to the second one. 

Madam Chairman and Members of the Committee, good morning. My name is Raymond Seed, and I am pleased to be asked to 

appear before you today to testify on behalf of the levee investigation team sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation. A 

large number of leading national and international experts with a 

tremendous amount of forensic experience in sorting through major 

disasters have worked very hard this past month, and I am pleased 

to be able to present you with the first copy of the preliminary reVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:37 Aug 31, 2006 Jkt 024446 PO 00000 Frm 00016 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\24446.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
11

1The report appears in the Appendix on page 224. 

port of the findings of the combined ASCE and NSF-sponsored field 

investigation teams.1 I am very grateful for their tremendous efforts in getting this material ready for you today. 

Our hearts go out to the many people who have lost everything, 

even in some cases their lives, in this catastrophic event. Our 

teams have had considerable previous experience in many other 

disasters, including numerous major earthquakes around the 

world, the recent Indian Ocean tsunami, floods and levee failures, 

the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and more. But we were not 

prepared for the level and scope of the devastation that we witnessed when we were in New Orleans. It must be the intent of our 

work that something like this will not be allowed to happen again. 

Next. 

With that in our minds and in our hearts, I must make it clear 

that we know a great deal about what happened, and in many 

cases, why, and that it is my intent today to speak as openly as 

possible. Our team, to a man and to a woman, feels that the people 

of the New Orleans region and the Nation and our government at 

all levels need and deserve nothing less. Important decisions are 

being made that will affect people’s lives for years to come. We recognize the importance of providing the best possible informed information, responsibly studied and professionally and thoughtfully 

synthesized, that we can at this early juncture. Better and more 

complete information will continue to evolve over the coming year, 

but that will be too late for many ongoing decisions being made 

right now today. 

Our preliminary report presents a consensus document, and it 

presents the initial observations and findings that we were able to 

agree to release with all the team members and organizations involved. If you will ask, I will do my best to answer questions well 

beyond the scope of our initial preliminary report. 

Why did the levees and floodwalls fail? This is a map of the Central New Orleans region, prepared initially by the U.S. Army Corps 

of Engineers and then modified to reflect additional findings of our 

investigation teams. It shows the locations of many levee breaches 

that occurred with stars and dots and serves as a good base map 

for our discussions today. Not shown on this map are the additional 

flood protection levee systems that extend down the lower reaches 

of the Mississippi River, which begins here and runs about to the 

floor of the room, providing a narrow, additional protected corridor 

down to the Gulf. 

The storm surges produced by Hurricane Katrina resulted in numerous breaches and consequent flooding of approximately 75 percent of the metropolitan areas of New Orleans. Most of the levee 

and floodwall failures were caused by overtopping as the storm 

surge rose over the tops of the levees and their floodwalls and produced the erosion that subsequently led to failures and breaches. 

Overtopping was most severe at the east end of the flood protection 

as the waters of Lake Borgne were driven west, producing a storm 

surge on the order of roughly 20 feet in the area right here and 

massively overtopping the levees across this stretch. Next photo. 

12

This photograph and the one which follows it—next—show two 

sections of those levees, or at least two sections where those levees 

had previously existed. They are massively eroded. There is virtually nothing left of these levees along some parts of this stretch. 

A very severe storm surge also occurred farther to the South, 

along the lower reaches of the Mississippi River, and significant 

overtopping produced additional breaches in this region, as well. 

Next. 

That is the section off the bottom of the map. Next. 

These are some of the homes in that area. This photograph 

shows houses in the Plaquemines Parish corridor where the levee 

on the left, just off the photograph, breached and overtopped, and 

the storm surge carried the houses across and deposited them on 

the right-hand levee, which fronts the Mississippi River just to the 

right and has the main rip-rap and slope protection across the 

front face here. This was a catastrophic breach. Next slide. 

Overtopping was lesser in magnitude along the Inner Harbor 

Navigation Channel and along the Western portion of the MRGO 

Channel, which are the two main conduits through here and along 

here. But the consequences were no less severe. This overtopping 

again produced erosion and caused numerous additional levee failures. Next. 

This photograph shows the well-known breach at the West end 

of the Ninth Ward. I didn’t show this earlier, but we spent some 

time figuring out the answer to the chicken and the egg question 

here, and it is our preliminary opinion that the infamous barge was 

a passive victim which was drawn into a breach that was already 

open at this location. Most of the failures in the Central New Orleans area were the result of overtopping, and one of the common 

failure modes was simply water cascading over the concrete 

floodwalls and then carving sharply etched trenches on the back 

sides of these walls. The next photo. The next photo. 

This is an example of that, one of many. There is a large breach 

just in the background here. This is just West of the Port of New 

Orleans. Many failures of this type. This reduced the lateral supports at the back sides of the walls and left them vulnerable to the 

high water forces on their outboard faces. 

Another repeated mode of failure and distress throughout the 

central region were problems at transition sections, where two different levee or wall systems joined together. The next slide. This 

is one of those sections. You can see here a structural wall which 

carries a gate structure over here for a road to pass through. It 

meets an earthen levee over here with a rail line crossing it, so 

there are three different intersections here. The intersection itself 

was a soft spot. Each of the individual sections was better designed, but they didn’t join well. This was a common problem. 

There is a need to better coordinate these connections and their details. 

Farther to the West, in the East Bank Canal District, three levee 

failures occurred on the banks of the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals, and these failure levels occurred at water levels well 

below the tops of the floodwalls lining these canals. These three 

levee failures were likely caused by failures in the foundation soils 

under the levees, and the fourth distressed section on the London 

13

Avenue Canal shows signs of having neared the occurrence of a 

similar failure prior to the water levels having receded. Next. 

This photograph actually shows a breach on the 17th Street 

Canal being closed, and Dr. van Heerden showed earlier, this is the 

original inboard half of the embankment which just slid to the 

right, roughly 45 feet at the location of the piece of chain-link fence 

right here, a massive lateral translation as a result of foundation 

instability. 

The section across the canal on the East bank of the London Avenue Canal, North failure section, was very seriously distressed. Dr. 

van Heerden showed that one. In our view, it was at the point of 

incipient failure and was only saved by lowering of the water in the 

canal, possibly as a result of the other two breaches. That section 

is very seriously damaged and requires remediation before it can 

again safely hold high waters, and that will be another question 

which we will deal with later in this talk. 

The road forward. Major repair and rehabilitation efforts are underway to prepare the New Orleans flood protection system for future high water events. The next hurricane season will begin in 

June 2006. We have a hurry on our hands. Based on our observations, there are a number of things we would like to point out. 

Although it is somewhat customary to expect levee failures when 

overtopping occurs, they are not a requirement. There are things 

that can be done in terms of design details that would have provided better overtopping protection. Inboard face scour protections, 

splash slabs, rip-rap protection, even paving would have made a 

big difference at some of these sites and might have prevented 

some of the failures we observed. 

As the system is being repaired and rebuilt, it would be advantageous to better coordinate the crest heights of the various sections. Better coordination between individual units would be a good 

idea. 

Areas in which piping and internal erosion occurred are now 

weakened segments. There is a need to go back and assess the remaining segments that did not fail and be sure they still have their 

full integrity. Some of them will be found to have been damaged, 

in all likelihood. 

Levees are series systems, where the failure of one component, 

one single segment, means the failure of the whole system. The 

failure of several levees at less than their full designed water 

height in this hurricane warrants a thorough review of the overall 

system. 

In the short term, as repairs continue, we would like to see the 

sheetpiles, which are currently being operated as floodgates at the 

north end of the canals, continue to operate in that fashion. The 

Corps of Engineers does have good plans for moving forward on the 

five main downtown breach repairs, and we think they should operate those canals in that fashion until those can be implemented. 

The Corps, like other public agencies, routinely hires outside 

boards of consultants for critical dam projects where public safety 

is at interest. We are not aware of any major dams in the United 

States which basically protect larger, more vulnerable populations 

than the New Orleans levee system, and we hope the Corps will 

14

1The prepared statement of Mr. Nicholson appears in the Appendix on page 121. 

be encouraged to empanel such a body to oversee their work in 

New Orleans. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are stretched very thin right 

now, trying to respond and effect emergency and interim repairs in 

the wake of this catastrophe. It must be the job of the Federal Government and oversight committees such as yours to ensure they 

have the adequate resources and technical capabilities on hand to 

get the job done safely and well. The Corps has responsibility for 

many potentially high-hazard dams and levee systems, and we 

must all be able to have high confidence in their ability to perform 

these tasks. 

The ASCE and NSF teams have been drawn in inadvertently 

into some of the ongoing levee repair work, and we feel that right 

now, the Corps of Engineers is stretched very thin in the New Orleans region. 

This concludes my testimony. Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Doctor. Dr. Nicholson. 

TESTIMONY OF PETER NICHOLSON, PH.D., P.E.,1 ASSOCIATE 

PROFESSOR OF CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING 

AND GRADUATE PROGRAM CHAIR, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII, 

ON BEHALF OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGINEERS 

Mr. NICHOLSON. Thank you, Madam Chairman, Members of the 

Committee. Good morning. My name is Peter Nicholson, and I am 

pleased to appear before you today to testify on behalf of the American Society of Civil Engineers as you examine the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the infrastructure of Coastal Louisiana, particularly on the levee system that protects the City of New Orleans. 

I was asked by ASCE to assemble an independent team of experts to travel to New Orleans to collect data and make observations to be used to assess the performance of the flood control 

levees. 

One of the goals of the assessment team was to gather data and 

attempt to determine why certain sections of the levee system 

failed and why others did not. These determinations may help to 

answer the question of whether the failures were caused by localized conditions and/or whether surviving sections of the system 

may only be marginally better prepared to withstand the type of 

loads that were generated by this event. Could I have the next 

slide, please. 

The team that we assembled consisted of professional engineers 

from ASCE with a wide range of geotechnical engineering expertise 

in the study, safety, and inspection of dams and levees. While in 

New Orleans and the surrounding areas, we examined levee failures as well as distressed and intact portions of the levee system 

between September 29 and October 15. 

Our levee assessment team was joined by another ASCE team of 

coastal engineers and another team primarily from the University 

of California, Berkeley, under the auspices of the National Science 

Foundation. Our three teams were joined in the field by the U.S. 

Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development 

15

Center Team, led by Dr. Paul Mlakar, and we would like to thank 

Dr. Mlakar and the ERDC team for their logistical support. 

What we found in the field was very different than what we had 

expected, given what we had seen in the early media reports. Rather than a few breaches through the floodwalls in the city caused 

largely by overtopping, we found literally dozens of breaches 

throughout the many miles of the levee system. As geotechnical engineers, we were particularly interested to find that many of the 

levee problems involved significant soil-related issues. Next slide, 

please. 

We have seen many of these same slides. Dr. van Heerden and 

Dr. Seed have stolen a little of my thunder. Playing clean-up here 

is going to be a little tough. We have seen this slide before, the 

17th Street Canal breach, and we observed, as said, intact soil 

blocks that had experienced large translation and heave. Next 

slide. 

We have seen slides like this. Here is the translated section we 

have seen before. It used to be over here. Next slide. 

And here again, just a slightly different view looking the other 

way than the former slides, where the levee had been here, and 

here is that elevated section or block with the chain-link fence. 

This movement would be consistent with the failure of the soil embankment or the foundation soils beneath. While we cannot yet determine conclusively the exact cause of the breach itself, the type 

of soil failure may well have been a significant contributing factor. 

Next slide. 

We have also seen London Avenue Canal breach, another view 

of the clubhouse, here from a different view, here taken from the 

top of the temporary repair that used to be down in the backyard 

of the house below. Next slide, please. 

Again, in that same area, we saw a tremendous amount of sand 

deposited, and we believe this material to be either from the foundation material beneath the embankment as well as material that 

may have been scoured from the canal. Next slide. 

Again, we were very interested in the non-failed section across 

the canal where we observed this floodwall and underlying embankment in severe distress. You can see it is out of alignment. 

Next slide, please. 

It was observed that we saw tilting on the inside of the wall, 

cracking, as we had seen before. This wall was badly out of alignment. And as a result of the tilt, there were gaps between the wall 

and the supporting soil on the canal side. We also observed that 

there was evidence of soil movement, seepage, and piping as indicated by a number of close examinations. Next slide. 

Sinkholes behind the wall near the crest of the embankment. 

Next slide. 

As well as we have seen the examination of sand boils and 

heave. We have seen slides like this before. Next slide. 

Further to the South, we had the second breach of the London 

Avenue Canal. Here, as they were trying to close the repair, dropping sandbags into the open hole. Next slide. 

And again, we have seen the buried car with huge volumes of 

sand deposited, much more than could have come from the embankment, and we believe these were scoured from the canal itself. 

16

By the time we got there, there was very little evidence left to examine the mechanisms at this site. 

It is very important that the impact of the levee breaches outside 

of the City of New Orleans not be overlooked, and many of the sections of the system were severely tested by overtopping, as we have 

heard earlier. Many portions of the levees were breached or severely distressed, causing significant heavy flooding, in many cases 

complete destruction of the thousands of neighborhood homes. 

The hurricane produced a storm surge that varied considerably 

depending on location, including the combined effects of orientation, geography, topography with respect to the forces of the passing storm. Hydraulic modeling of the surge, courtesy of LSU and 

Dr. van Heerden’s group, and I have a few of his slides, as well. 

Next slide, please. 

We have seen this before, the hydrograph showing essentially 

two different levels of storm surge, as we have heard, in the Industrial Canal and much less in the city, significantly different levels 

of the storm surge as the storm passed. Next slide. 

As the storm passed to the East of New Orleans, the counterclockwise swirl, essentially, of the storm generated a large surge 

from the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Borgne that impacted the Eastern-facing coastal areas of the New Orleans area and the lower 

Mississippi delta. Next slide. 

The surge was, as we have seen this, as well, courtesy of the 

Hurricane Center, concentrated into this funnel area here up 

through the MRGO Channel into the Industrial Canal or the Inner 

Harbor Navigational Canal, and much less so to the north in Lake 

Pontchartrain. 

As shown by these models and the field evidence, this surge, 

which impacted the lakefront and the three canals within the central part of the city, was noticeably less severe. Field data indicated 

that the surge levels from the lake did not reach the elevation of 

lakefront levees and was well below the top of the height of the 

floodwalls bordering the interior canals, where three notable 

breaches occurred. 

Where the storm surge was most severe, causing massive overtopping, the levees experienced a range of damage from complete 

obliteration to intact with no signs of distress. Much of the difference in the degree of damage can be attributed to the types of 

levees and materials that were used in their construction. The most 

heavily damaged and/or destroyed earthen levees that we inspected 

were constructed of sand or shell fill, which was easily eroded. 

Next slide. 

And we have seen this slide, as well, before. This was the area 

along the MRGO that took the brunt of the storm as it came in, 

or the brunt of the surge through Lake Borgne from the East and 

just took out this section of the wall. Next slide. 

This is another aerial view showing where the flooding occurred, 

color coded here with the deepest flooding in dark blue, getting 

lighter to the yellow. So we can see the massive storm surge coming in from the East, or from the right in your picture, coming over 

that destroyed levee and also overtopping walls and breaching both 

on either side of MRGO as well as from the canals within the city. 

17

Senator LIEBERMAN. Can you do us a favor and define MRGO? 

It is the Mississippi River——

Mr. NICHOLSON. Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, MRGO. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Right. 

Mr. NICHOLSON. Next slide, please. 

This is just a lot of the embankments that were obviously overtopped. This is a photograph that we got from personnel at the energy plant, which watched through the storm. There is actually an 

earth embankment under here being overtopped by the flood wave. 

Next slide. 

This is another example of one of the earthen levees that had essentially been gutted by the overtopping flow. Next slide. 

We have seen this same slide when Professor Seed shared a lot 

of the slides. Essentially, nothing left of that embankment levee. 

Next slide. 

This is an example of some of the embankments which were 

overtopped but survived quite well. In this area, we had a significant area of marshland in front, essentially helping knock down or 

keep the storm surge or the waves to a lesser extent. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Where was that one? 

Mr. NICHOLSON. This is in the first line of defense on the Eastern 

edge of New Orleans East. Next slide. 

Moving back into the Industrial Canal, we have seen some of 

these slides, as well. Next slide. 

We have seen this slide twice, I think, already. We can go to the 

next one. 

We have seen the type of damage. This is just inside of that 

breach in the lower Ninth Ward. Next slide. 

And we have also seen a similar slide like this showing the scour 

on the backside of those walls that are overtopped as well as the 

misalignment of those I-walls or floodwalls just to the North of the 

lower Ninth Ward breach. Next slide. 

Again, the scour behind the overtopping. The soil line used to be 

up here. This soil has all been removed, essentially destabilizing 

behind the wall. Next slide. 

This is on the North side of the MRGO, overtopping, severely 

scoured out behind and caused breaches and failure of those walls. 

Next slide. 

We also saw a lot of problems with transitions. We can see two 

different problems here, different materials, and different heights. 

Oftentimes, there was a weak connection between the two, but in 

addition, the lower heights would direct the water to flood over 

sometimes the weaker material first. Next slide. 

If this was earth versus concrete, obviously the earth loses. Next 

slide. 

This is what happens if that is allowed to go further. The earth 

line was up here. This was earth embankment, which has now 

been severely scoured away and breached through, essentially. 

Next slide. 

More concrete to sheetpile, again, with the difference in height, 

directed the flow over this area first, and sheetpile being weaker 

than concrete, sheetpile loses. Next slide. 

We also saw this type of very complex transition where we had 

all the different problems, different material types, concrete to 

18

1The letter and e-mail appear in the Appendix on page 208. 

pavement on soil to ballast under railroad tracks to earth embankment. We had breaches on this side and this side. This raises another question of where we have the types of transitions between 

parts of the levee system that were maintained, designed, and constructed by different authorities or different agency groups. Here 

we had an earthen levee constructed by one group, the railroad 

taking care of their own business, different heights, so we have a 

complete mix of things happening there. I am finished. 

Well, I think we can answer the rest as we end. Madam Chairman, this concludes my testimony, and we will be pleased to take 

questions. Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Your testimony was very helpful. 

Dr. Seed, I want to begin my questioning with you today. At 

least twice, you wrote to the Army Corps of Engineers, on October 

11 and October 18, to raise very serious concerns about the adequacy and the integrity of the repairs that the Army Corps and its 

contractors were making to the levees and the floodwalls, and I 

want to read for the record—we will put the entire letter of October 

11—and the e-mail of October 18—into the record, but I want to 

read some excerpts.1

On October 11, you wrote that the situation at the 17th Street 

Canal ‘‘warranted an urgent response’’ because the repair was ‘‘actively eroding.’’ In this same letter, you wrote that the ‘‘current embankment section was poorly configured with regard to the ongoing 

risk of failure.’’ You wrote that certain repairs were leaking. In the 

case of the 17th Street Canal repairs, you wrote that ‘‘rapid erosion 

and blowout would become likely.’’ At the Southern London Avenue 

break, you said that it was leaking into the city more than at the 

other two breaks and you called it a ‘‘potential hazard.’’ You urged 

‘‘urgent and resolute further action.’’

You also flagged the fact in your subsequent e-mail that contractors working on some of the levee repairs were not doing it properly and that there was inadequate oversight from the Army Corps. 

In that same e-mail, you said to the Army Corps, you warned of 

a ‘‘significant flow’’ of water and that there was no possibility of 

controlling storm surge rises at sections of the Industrial Canal 

levee so that further action may be urgently warranted. 

These raise very serious questions in my mind about the integrity of the repairs that have been undertaken and whether the returning residents of New Orleans are still at risk. What is your assessment today of the sufficiency of the repairs, and do you think 

there is a serious public safety issue still in New Orleans? 

Mr. SEED. Those are two separate questions. 

Chairman COLLINS. Yes, and I shouldn’t have combined them. 

Mr. SEED. That is all right. I am a professor. We do that for a 

living. 

The first question is the most complex. We haven’t been on the 

ground in New Orleans now for several weeks and more, and so we 

are not entirely clear what the details of those current configurations are. 

In response to the first letter, which you discussed, the Corps did 

respond quickly and very well, and those sections were rapidly imVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:37 Aug 31, 2006 Jkt 024446 PO 00000 Frm 00024 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\24446.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
19

proved. Behind that, though, was a week of back-and-forth interaction between our team and the Corps in which the responses, in 

our view, were insufficient and sometimes misdirected, and it became clear to us that they were struggling to get the right kind of 

people put in charge of the projects to get our concerns addressed. 

My understanding from their last response is they do, in fact, have 

the right kind of people now directing these projects, and so we 

have a better feeling about them. 

The second letter addresses the two breaches on the Industrial 

Canal at the West end of the Ninth Ward, which when we left the 

sites had been further remediated, but which, in our view, were not 

adequate for a high-water incident, for instance, another hurricane 

storm surge as the storm season isn’t yet behind us, or even a very 

high tide. A week ago Monday, October 24, they developed a large 

seep at one of those two sections, the northern of the two, and that, 

in our view, was not entirely unexpected. 

The Corps does now have five contracts let and, I believe, signed, 

and they have five outsourced engineering firms doing the final design work on more permanent closure sections. These will all involve sheetpile curtains, which will be far deeper than the original 

sheetpiles that were installed in these sites, and the configurations 

will be far more stable than they were before. So there do seem to 

be suitable patches on their way to being in place at these five locations. So with regard to these five particular sites, I don’t believe 

there is a long-term significant risk to the City of New Orleans. 

The other half of the question, though, is what is the state of the 

overall safety of the City of New Orleans, and the answer there is 

the section that crossed along the North breach has not yet been 

addressed nor remediated. It is clearly a very weakened situation, 

and it was probably at the point of incipient failure in this last 

event. It certainly hasn’t had its situation improved by the suffering it went through. It has, in fact, deteriorated. And there are 

many sections around the system that need to be investigated more 

thoroughly. 

There are also ongoing repairs of literally, as Dr. Nicholson said, 

dozens of breaches, and the section up along what we like to call 

as locals the MRGO section is vastly eroded. That is a very difficult 

construction project, simply in terms of time, if the race is to get 

things put back together for the next storm season in June. So 

there is a tremendous logistical difficulty and the Corps of Engineers is working very hard at all this. They are also stretched very 

thin. It is a challenge for anybody. It is a very difficult challenge. 

Chairman COLLINS. Dr. Nicholson, what is your assessment of 

the current state of repairs and the adequacy as far as people coming back into New Orleans to live and work? 

Mr. NICHOLSON. Well, as Dr. Seed had mentioned, the repairs of 

the damaged sections, of the breached sections in town seem to be 

coming along quite well and seem to be adequate, with perhaps the 

exception of the Industrial Canal area, which we hope they are 

going to be taking care of fairly soon. 

As far as the safety of the entire New Orleans area, as engineers, 

we look at safety or risk on a scale or as a factor of safety. So there 

are different levels of safety. There are always going to be some 

risks, particularly in a large storm. 

20

For the short term, my opinion is that short term, without a 

storm, they are probably adequately safe. Certainly with a large 

storm, as we are not yet out of hurricane season, as Dr. Seed had 

just mentioned, and certainly for the next hurricane season, there 

are significant risks and safety. With evacuation, proper evacuation, certainly the property is at risk and there is a large degree 

of safety to the property, but I believe as far as the safety of returning there with the potential to evacuate, I see that there is 

adequate safety. 

Chairman COLLINS. Dr. van Heerden, Senator Lieberman mentioned in his opening statement that we have heard time and again 

that the levees were constructed to withstand what I understand 

is called a standard project hurricane, and that is usually stated 

to be a Category 3 hurricane. We have also heard, well, the reason 

the levees failed is Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane that simply 

overwhelmed the design of the levees. But it is my understanding 

that your analysis suggests that the hurricane was not that strong. 

Could you elaborate on that and tell us what your assessment 

showed? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Certainly. If you look at New Orleans, there 

was basically two different surges. The surge on the right side of 

the eye was the sort of surge you would expect with a Category 3 

storm, and that was where we saw the 18 to 20 feet of water in 

the funnel. But on the left-hand side, or the West side of the eye, 

the winds were much lower, more of the order of a Category 1 

storm. The surges were not Category 3 surges. If Katrina had gone 

to the West of New Orleans, we would have seen about 15 feet of 

water in Lake Pontchartrain and obviously flooded a much greater 

area. 

So as far as we could see, based on the model, and we have also 

spent many hours going out and measuring the heights of water 

lines, the surge in Lake Pontchartrain wasn’t that of a Category 3 

storm, and nor did it exceed the design criteria of the standard 

project hurricane. 

We have tried to understand what the standard project hurricane 

is, and if one uses the frequency that is in the Corps of Engineers 

definition, that is one is to 200 years, then you are talking about 

a Category 5 storm. If you use the central pressure of 27.6 inches, 

then you are talking about the potential of a Category 4 storm. 

In terms of the definition of the winds, we found two different 

definitions, and it is very difficult to work from those definitions to 

come up with the Saffir-Simpson. However, in the 1965 document, 

they talk about trying to design to the 1915 hurricane. The 1915 

hurricane was a Category 4 hurricane. In 1969 documents, they 

talk about designing to Hurricane Betsy, again, which was a Category 4 storm. 

So there is some confusion, exactly what is the standard project 

hurricane, but in our opinion, the design criteria on the 17th Street 

and London Avenue Canals were not exceeded. 

Chairman COLLINS. So to summarize before I move on to Senator 

Lieberman, is it fair to say that the levees should have survived 

Hurricane Katrina, given that Hurricane Katrina by the time it 

struck New Orleans was at a lesser category than the standard 

project hurricane? 

21

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Madam Chairman, yes, it is fair to say that 

they should have stood the surge. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Lieberman. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. 

Dr. van Heerden, let me pick up from Senator Collins’ line of 

questioning. I understand you to be saying that, because as we all 

remember, Hurricane Katrina went more to the East of New Orleans than it was originally thought. That on the Eastern part of 

New Orleans, there was a significant surge and perhaps the hurricane was at a Category 3 or higher at that point. But the point 

that strikes me as very significant here is that insofar as Lake 

Pontchartrain is concerned, it, in your opinion, was significantly 

less than what we are calling a Category 3 hurricane, is that correct? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Yes, sir, that is correct. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. And if I understand this correctly, most of 

the flooding of downtown New Orleans came from Lake Pontchartrain. Obviously, there was other significant flooding to the 

East in the New Orleans East, lower Ninth Ward, but when it 

came to downtown New Orleans, the 17th Street Canal, the Industrial Canal, and I believe it is the London Street Canal, those fed 

the flooding of downtown New Orleans, is that right? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Downtown was principally the 17th Street 

Canal and the London Avenue Canal——

Senator LIEBERMAN. London Avenue——

Mr. VAN HEERDEN [continuing]. As well as some breaches on the 

Industrial Canal. When you get to Orleans East, the flooding occurred not only from the Industrial Canal, but also from the 

breaches that the others have spoken about along the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Correct. Let me come back and focus on 

Lake Pontchartrain because now you have told us that by your estimate, expert estimate, Hurricane Katrina was well below Category 3 as it hit Lake Pontchartrain. So do I correctly conclude that 

your determination is that the water of Lake Pontchartrain did not 

overtop the levees along the canal? In other words, the water did 

not reach a level to overtop those levees along Lake Pontchartrain? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. In the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal, the waters did not get high enough to overtop those 

levees from——

Senator LIEBERMAN. Right. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I went up in a boat on the 17th Street Canal, 

and what we saw were water lines that indicated that the maximum water level was about three feet below the top of the wall. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. So the fact that the water came surging 

through those levees and those canals from Lake Pontchartrain 

was the result of a failure of the levees, not that the water went 

over them? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. That is correct, sir. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Dr. Seed and Dr. Nicholson, do you and 

your investigation agree with those conclusions? Here, I am focusing on Lake Pontchartrain, that the water—the flooding didn’t 

occur from the water overtopping the levees, but that the levees 

simply failed. Is that your conclusion, Dr. Seed. 

22

Mr. SEED. Our preliminary conclusion on all three of those sections is that the failure was produced somewhere in the foundation 

or the lower levels of the embankments themselves, but certainly 

the earthen embankments became unstable and the floodwalls 

were no longer supported. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. And Dr. Nicholson. 

Mr. NICHOLSON. I concur with the other two. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. And this led to my conclusion from your testimony that I stated at the outset, that it was human error in the 

design and construction of the levees that led to a significant part 

of the flooding of New Orleans, that, in fact, if the levees had done 

what they were supposed to do, notwithstanding the strength of 

the storm on the East part of town, on Lake Pontchartrain, it 

wasn’t that strong. If the levees had done what they were designed 

to do, a lot of the flooding of New Orleans would not have occurred, 

and a lot of the suffering that occurred as a result of the flooding 

would not have occurred. Am I correct in drawing that conclusion, 

Dr. Seed and Dr. Nicholson? 

Mr. SEED. The latter part of your conclusion is unequivocally correct. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Which is—just to clarify——

Mr. SEED. Which is that the levees would have been expected to 

perform adequately at these levels if they had been designed and 

constructed properly. The opening sentence was a little bit troublesome inasmuch as you said it would be the result of human error. 

It may not have been the result of human error. There is a high 

likelihood that it was, but we are receiving some very disturbing 

reports from people who were involved in some of these projects, 

and it suggests that perhaps not just human error was involved, 

but there may have been some malfeasance. Some of the sections 

may not have been constructed as they were designed. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes. 

Mr. SEED. That needs further investigating. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. That is very important. So it was not only 

an error, or might be called technical judgment about what was 

necessary there, but that, in fact, the construction work done on 

those levees was not up to the design specifications, is that what 

I am hearing you say? 

Mr. SEED. We are pursuing stories of that, in fact, and we are 

seeing evidence from what we saw in the field versus some of the 

design drawings we have been able to obtain so far that would suggest that some of those stories might bear some fruits. We are continuing to study it. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. And help us understand, leaving that aside 

for a moment, the malfeasance possibility, what the errors in design were here. Was it a failure—I have heard you refer at different times to the soil configuration. Was it a failure to allow for 

the unique qualities of the soil there? 

Mr. SEED. Somebody asked me about a month ago the difference 

between a dam and a levee. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes. 

Mr. SEED. In principle, a dam is tall and narrow and a levee is 

short and very long. The real difference is that with a dam, we pick 

our sites and we pick them very carefully. We build levees usually 

23

at the edge of swamps, sometimes in swamps. We routinely get 

very poor foundation conditions, so the poverty of the foundation 

conditions is not unexpected. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Not unusual. That is where levees are built. 

Right. 

Mr. SEED. Not unusual and we are used to that. What makes the 

New Orleans levees unusual is the high stakes involved in terms 

of the inboard population being protected. These are very high-risk 

levees with regard to consequences. In a system with several hundred miles of levees, it is very difficult to do suitable investigation 

and basically to nail all the details. The problem with the levee 

system is if you leave one detail unnailed, you leave a vulnerability 

which may in the end bring the whole system down. 

The local conditions at the sites of the three main breaches on 

the canals, the one on 17th and the two on London, were very challenging local conditions. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Right. 

Mr. SEED. There was some accommodation of that in the design, 

and we are studying very hard right now to determine if, in our 

opinion, the accommodation was suitable. Performance would be 

suggesting that it might not have been. 

And the other half of the question is whether they were actually 

built the way they were designed, and there are some issues there. 

We are hoping very much to be able to, for instance, pull some of 

the sheetpiles and see what length they actually are. We have several sets of design documents which suggest different lengths, and 

we have several reports that perhaps none of those lengths is the 

correct answer. But these things are still out there and pulling a 

couple of sheetpiles is a clear step. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. And you are still at work on it, but I hear 

you say that notwithstanding the unique circumstances of the soil 

in the vicinity of the construction of those levees to protect New Orleans, particularly facing Lake Pontchartrain, within your field, 

within your expertise, that was not an impossible task, that it 

could have been done, from what you know now, a lot better than 

it, in fact, was done, so that the levees would have withstood the 

water surge. 

Mr. SEED. There was a second message, though, in what I said, 

and that is that borings were spaced at intervals, many miles of 

levee were being designed, and at some cost and some price, it 

would be possible to do a better and safer job. An important issue 

to get to later in the studies is whether, in fact, the level of protection that was paid for was delivered. But I think we have to also 

acknowledge the fact that the budgets were tight, people were 

squeezed, and we may not have been paying for enough protection. 

So it may be a double-ended question. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Well, that is an important question for us 

as elected officials, particularly those who fund the Army Corps of 

Engineers. But it is just an infuriating conclusion here, if what 

stands in the remaining investigations, that, in fact, a lot of the 

damage to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina flooding was preventable. And it would have been prevented if the design and construction of the levees, particularly along Lake Pontchartrain and, 

24

to some extent, to the Eastern part of the city, had been done according to professional standards and specifications. 

Mr. SEED. They were done according to professional standards 

and specifications. I want to be very careful there. They weren’t 

necessarily done in the way, in hindsight, we would have liked to 

have them be done, and that is because professional standards, and 

so on, cover some range. But there certainly was the possibility to 

have engineered the system to perform better. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Dr. Mlakar, I apologize because I have only 

got about a half-minute left, but I hope there is time for you to respond insofar as you are able at this point in your investigations. 

I do want to say that I was troubled—I understand the difficulty 

and I caught your words of rational conclusions here. One of the 

problems we are facing is the movement of the calendar. If your report is not coming until July 1 of next year, and the hurricane season begins again on June 1, by which time the Corps has said it 

would restore the levees to at least the pre-Katrina levels, how is 

your report going to be helpful, or as helpful as it should be? 

Mr. MLAKAR. We will be sharing our interim progress with my 

colleagues in the Corps of Engineers who are responsible for the reconstruction. So while the final report, due to the serious deliberations and complexity of the problem, will take until July, the interim progress will be shared much before that as the decisions 

have to be made. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. OK. Thank you. Thanks, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Voinovich. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH 

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you, Madam Chairman, for holding 

this hearing and raising important questions about the levees in 

New Orleans, and I just want to thank this panel. You have been 

terrific. It is nice to have such expertise before us today and coming from an objective point of view without any kind of axe to 

grind, as so often is the case when we have hearings before this 

Committee and many other committees. 

I think it is important to learn from our mistakes and not to repeat them in the future. Today’s testimony confirms what I have 

known since I was chairman of the Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure. That was my first 2 years in the Senate. 

I lucked out, and I was chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee. I had the Army Corps of Engineers under 

our jurisdiction, and at that time, I concluded that we were not 

funding the Army Corps of Engineers to the extent that they 

should be funded. We can sit here and we can criticize, but I think 

we should look at ourselves in the mirror and the administrations, 

not only this Administration, but previous administrations should 

do the same thing. 

In the 1960s, we were spending, in 1999 dollars, about $4 billion 

on projects, $4 billion. Today, the last average from 1999 has been 

about $1.5 billion. Our operation and maintenance, in 1999, we 

were behind about $250 million. Today, it is $1.250 billion. The 

real question is, had we done our job, had the administrations 

asked for the money that the Army Corps of Engineers should have 

received and had this Congress responded to that, and I kept sayVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:37 Aug 31, 2006 Jkt 024446 PO 00000 Frm 00030 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\24446.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
25

ing, we need it, we need it, please, from the head of the Army 

Corps of Engineers, ask for the money. It just wasn’t there. 

And, by the way, we then added on to them these ecological restoration projects. In other words, in addition to just the Army 

Corps of Engineers work, we are saying now we have these 

environmental restoration projects. We are going to throw that on 

top of you. 

Yes, sir, Dr. Seed. 

Mr. SEED. The Corps of Engineers knows how to build levees and 

how to make them safe. Euphemistically, we say somebody wrote 

the book. The Corps of Engineers literally wrote the book repeatedly on the creation and the safe creation of levees. Their compaction standards, their design standards are widely copied and emulated throughout the country and throughout the world. 

The Corps of Engineers is also struggling right now to repair failures in the New Orleans area, and it is painfully clear to our investigation team that they are struggling for lack of technical manpower, and we find that to be very daunting. We haven’t done a 

formal study of the national staffing of the Corps yet, but we hope 

to engage in that. We have been taking personal surveys among 

our friends and colleagues, former students. The assistant coach of 

my soccer team is also a geotechnical engineer, and he is working 

on a big Corps levee project in Yuba City, California. 

And in all of our contacts, we are finding a shortage of 

geotechnical engineering capability and the elongage of cost efficiency, which is people with degrees in economics and management 

and a lack of engineering. The stunning parallel to us is NASA before the Challenger disaster and NASA afterwards, where they reinstituted their engineering and scientific capabilities at the cost of 

cost efficiency. 

I think we need to take a very strong look at ourselves as a Nation. We have strangled the Corps of Engineers in terms of budgets 

and support. They have responded by doing what was necessary to 

get their jobs done as best they could. But I think the human error 

issue in New Orleans is not going to be something which we can 

be pointing fingers at the Corps for. I think the finger pointing will 

be at ourselves when we are all done. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, the National Academy of Sciences has 

come out with some recommendations, ten recommendations on 

what we need to do to deal with the lack of scientists and engineers 

in this country, and I am hopeful that the Senate and the House 

and the Administration will adopt their recommendations and 

spend the money and make the sacrifice that we need in order to 

deal with this ongoing problem. 

This Committee has spent its time on looking at the issue of 

human capital, and if you go back to almost any problem we have, 

it is not having the right people with the right knowledge and 

skills at the right place and at the right time. Go back and look 

at it. We have neglected human capital on the Federal level forever, and it is time for us to change that, and I am glad that you 

brought up the lack of folks that they need to get the job done. 

Here we are today, and we have to make decisions about New 

Orleans. Are we going to go to a level three and rebuild this thing 

and get it so that we can get to level three, and if we were to do 

26

that and we decided to go to level five, would we do it differently? 

Do you understand the question? In other words, we have concrete, 

and we have under-soil that shouldn’t be there. We are going to get 

in there and make it better, assuming you have the resources to 

do it. But the question is, if you go to a level three and the decision 

then is to go to a level five, would you do it differently in terms 

of going to the level three? In other words, can you take it to level 

three, do it right, and then say, if we go to level five, can you build 

on top of that, or if you are going to go to level five, would you do 

it differently right from the get-go? 

Dr. Mlakar or any of you, chip in on it. 

Mr. MLAKAR. Thank you, Senator. Probably if we decided to go 

to level five from the get-go, there might be some different options 

open to us than if we first went to level three and then went to 

level five. I am here primarily to talk about the fact-finding we are 

doing to figure out exactly what happened, but as a general answer 

to your question, yes, there are probably some different options on 

which way you want to authorize us to go. 

Senator VOINOVICH. And then the question is, if you go to level 

three and then the decision is to go to level five, what is the time 

span, and then what do you do in the interim period? What if we 

have another hurricane? If we don’t rebuild to level three the way 

it is supposed to be done, then the folks will still be very vulnerable 

in New Orleans. Can I have some comments from some of the other 

witnesses? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I would respectfully encourage to go to a level 

five to start. From the hurricane statistics side, in the last 50 

years, a major hurricane has come close to New Orleans on about 

eight different occasions, and just a slight change in the track of 

any of those hurricanes would have created a similar sort of flooding. Southeast Louisiana is a hurricane-prone area, and speaking 

as a Louisianan, I would encourage that we go to Category 5 from 

the beginning. Thank you. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Dr. Seed. 

Mr. SEED. Speaking as a Californian and as an American, therefore not from Louisiana, I think if you do a Category 3 first design 

and then go to a Category 5, many of your design elements will be 

compatible and extendable. Some of them will not. There will be 

some sunk costs which will essentially be a temporary, interim 

measure. 

Designing for a full Category 5 is no walk in the park. It probably involves restoration of offshore barrier islands and a lot of 

issues that are going to be well beyond concrete and rebar and 

sheetpiles and earth levees. It is a very complex issue and a very 

difficult one, and in the end, you are also still going to have a system which will be untested until it is tested. One of the great problems with levee systems is there is no way to do a dry run to see 

how you are doing. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Could I make one more comment? 

Senator VOINOVICH. Sure. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. We heard in the testimony that those levees 

that were faced by wetlands weren’t eroded, and we saw that in the 

slide. So I would encourage that at the same time we restore the 

levees, we restore our coastal wetlands. These wetlands are our 

27

outer line of defense. These wetlands are what take the stuffing out 

of the hurricanes, the barrier islands and the wetlands. Perhaps 

this is a unique opportunity to both reconstruct the levees and get 

the coastal restoration program going. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Dr. Nicholson, would you like to comment on 

this? 

Mr. NICHOLSON. Well, as Dr. van Heerden just mentioned, we did 

observe that where the wetlands gave you a first line of defense, 

not necessarily line of defense, but it certainly helped reduce the 

wave heights and the impact on those levees. We saw that very 

clearly. So that restoring the wetlands would certainly give you a 

front line to help reduce the impact. 

Senator VOINOVICH. The conclusion I get from all of you, then, 

is that if you were in our shoes and having to make a decision, 

even if we decided that we were going to build to a level five, then 

it is incumbent on us to build to level three and do it the right way. 

Mr. SEED. Probably the safest and secure answer to that is there 

is no way to do a level five quickly, and the people of New Orleans 

will need protection before that can be completed. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Akaka. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AKAKA 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. 

I want to add my welcome to all of our witnesses, and I would 

like to add a special aloha to Dr. Nicholson, who, as Senator Collins mentioned earlier, is a professor at the University of Hawaii 

at Manoa. Dr. Nicholson, I want you to know that I am honored 

that you are leading the American Society of Civil Engineers team 

and lending your expertise to this worthy cause. I am pleased to 

have you join this hearing today. 

Dr. van Heerden, you have written movingly about the situation 

in the State of the Emergency Operations Center, that Monday 

evening, as you realized the levees were falling, you assumed that 

‘‘the Corps of Engineers, who basically owned the levees, would be 

warning everyone’’ and you thought that ‘‘the Corps must be monitoring the levees’’ and that they would sound the alarm. Have you 

learned why the Corps did not warn everyone and why they 

weren’t monitoring the levees? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. No, we haven’t. The first call that we got that 

indicated something was amiss was when I was at the State Emergency Operations Center, and that was around eight o’clock on 

Monday evening, and quite honestly, at that time, everybody was 

congratulating themselves that we had dodged the bullet. We first 

heard of a nursing home somewhere, they had two feet of water in 

it and the water was rising half-a-foot an hour. They weren’t sure 

where it was and they weren’t sure if it was salt or fresh water, 

which would have been a key. Then, as far as I know, they lost 

telephone contact. But whether a warning was given, certainly at 

eight o’clock in the State Emergency Operations Center, we were 

unaware of it. 

Senator AKAKA. Dr. Mlakar, I know you are not here to represent 

the Corps, but I would like to give you a chance to comment, if you 

are willing to do that, on this. 

28

Mr. MLAKAR. Thank you, Senator. Yes, I am here as a technical 

expert leading the collection of the data to figure out exactly what 

happened, and I am really not prepared to answer this question on 

our emergency response but will be very pleased to get back with 

you for the record on that point. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much. 

Dr. van Heerden, I understand that in the summer of 2004, you 

and others from the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center 

participated in a simulation of a Category 3 storm hitting New Orleans. That exercise predicted that flooding would leave 300,000 

people trapped in New Orleans. On Sunday, August 28, just over 

a year later, your LSU team warned FEMA and other disaster officials that there would be a significant event in New Orleans. What 

was FEMA’s reaction when they were warned both in the summer 

exercise and immediately prior to the levees breaking that there 

was a disaster in the making? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. That is a hard one to address. In the 2004 

exercise, I think for the most part, this was the first time anybody 

had ever really thought about the consequences of a flooding event 

of New Orleans, maybe the first time that some of the agencies 

really understood what the consequence could be if the city was 

flooded. 

The only comment I had was I knew from our public opinion surveys that 68.2 percent of the people would leave and that would 

leave about 300,000 behind, and if you flooded the city, you would 

have over 800,000 homeless. And so we tried to press with FEMA 

the need to perhaps preposition tents and to perhaps find the properties in Louisiana, whether it was State parks or farmland, where 

you could erect these tents for these evacuees as the first line, and 

I was told very bluntly that Americans do not live in tents, and I 

was obviously very disappointed because I knew that we would 

have this problem that we had where citizens were bused all over 

the place, families were split up, and in many cases, there wasn’t 

the first-line medical surveillance that could happen if you had an 

organized tent city or series of cities. 

In terms of FEMA in response to New Orleans, we made all our 

predictions, our storm surge model outputs available to FEMA officials via the Internet, and at the State EOC, we briefed them, 

briefed everybody there, including FEMA, and then the Times-Picayune Newspaper on the Sunday morning before the storm took one 

of our storm surge outputs and created a color graphic and indicated then that the flooding was going to happen. 

Senator AKAKA. I was particularly interested in what response or 

reaction FEMA had about your findings and what had happened 

there. 

Dr. Seed, a member of your team was quoted in the press stating 

that your team was denied access to certain Army Corps of Engineers employees. Can you comment on these reports and describe 

exactly what your team requested from the Army Corps of Engineers and also what responses you received from them? 

Mr. SEED. We have had highly variable levels of cooperation from 

the Corps of Engineers. It has fluctuated with regard to the units 

of the Corps we have been in contact with, the locality of those people, and also the time of the week. 

29

We had a marvelous experience in the field for 21⁄2 weeks, where 

the various teams arrived, we were squeezed as to numbers of people we were allowed to bring in because there were questions about 

ingress and safety and also whether, in fact, investigation teams 

might be in the way as emergency operations were proceeding. 

When we arrived on the ground, we learned rapidly that the situation was bigger than we could handle, and we pooled our resources. 

The Corps team, the investigation team led by Dr. Mlakar, literally 

worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the teams, and we did 

as much study as we could quickly because bulldozers were scooping up and burying vital data. So cooperation and collaboration of 

teams on the ground in the critical 21⁄2 weeks of the field studies 

was superb. 

We were routinely promised we would be able to meet with local 

representatives from the Louisiana District, who have an intimate 

knowledge of the history and the evolution of many of these sites, 

which is fundamentally critical if you are working under those 

kinds of time constraints and you only have limited manpower. We 

never actually met any of those people at any of the sites. They 

were always busy doing other emergency work, and that was very 

disappointing to us. That was the source of Dr. Bea’s concerns. 

We received a wonderful inbriefing document with maps and 

some cross-sections of some of the levees, which was tremendously 

useful. We were, however, not able to obtain any of the subsequent 

follow-on documents that we had requested, in fact, a list of documents which we had developed jointly amongst the various teams, 

including input from the ERDC team, until this past Saturday, 

when all of a sudden many documents were posted electronically 

on a website. 

So the Corps of Engineers seems to be moving in fits and starts. 

Sometimes, they are very cooperative. Sometimes, they are not. I 

was listening with painstaking diligence to Dr. Mlakar’s comments 

in the opening session. The Corps of Engineers has repeatedly 

promised to provide documentation and access to all the teams. 

This involves background design documents and design memoranda, construction memoranda, maintenance and inspection reports. It also extends to ongoing studies they are doing right now, 

the borings and sampling and the test data. A lot of that stuff is 

very important. They have consistently promised that stuff will be 

forthcoming. 

In his comments today, that last piece was missing. He announced an intent to develop this information, but he did not announce an intent to share it with the other investigation teams. I 

am hoping that was an omission, not a deletion. 

Senator AKAKA. Do you think the Corps was deliberately keeping 

you from meeting people? 

Mr. SEED. The Corps of Engineers has just suffered a major 

blow. The people that work for the Corps of Engineers do so because they have a desire to do good things and make people safe, 

and when your work doesn’t go well in that regard, it is a very difficult situation. 

I think the Corps is struggling to get its hands around all of this 

at many levels, locally and at the national level. To their credit, as 

time passes, we do see them consistently making the right steps in 

30

the end. We did see the interim levees repaired in fits and snatches 

for a while, and then when we pointed out the flaws, the flaws 

were rapidly and appropriately addressed. 

It did take us many weeks of struggle to get our investigation 

teams in and on the ground. The Corps was expressing concerns 

about the safety of the teams and logistical issues and the possibility they might interfere with the operations. Members of our 

team have directed these types of operations. They certainly know 

their way around a levee and around construction equipment. 

There is no way they would be an obstruction in the field, and their 

personal safety was not much of an issue. We have been to countries like the Northwest corner of India up against the Pakistan 

border and many of us who have had 12 inoculations are immune 

even to mosquitoes from the Louisiana area, to a large extent. So 

we thought that was perhaps also a delaying tactic. We would have 

liked to have gotten in quicker. But in the end, the teams were let 

in. That doesn’t always happen. 

So it is a very mixed bag. We are seeing mixed responses, but 

we are seeing the Corps consistently in the end responding adequately to get the job done. That lifeline hasn’t been cut yet. We 

are concerned, though, that as the heat goes away, they continue 

to respond adequately to get the job done. There are a great many 

documents, and so on, we are going to need in the months ahead, 

and the data they are currently developing is, of course, fundamentally important. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you, Dr. Seed. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

Before I call on Senator Warner, let me address the issue of documents. It is very troubling to this Committee that the forensic 

teams that are looking into the failures of the levees have not received complete and total cooperation from the Army Corps. I do 

want to point out that Dr. Mlakar is not the individual making document decisions, but I also want to assure you, Dr. Seed, and others involved in these reviews, that this Committee is committed to 

making sure that you have all the documents that you need from 

the Corps to complete your analysis. That is absolutely critical to 

your work. It is also critical to our work. And we, too, have had 

difficulty in receiving the documents that we need from the Army 

Corps and from the Department of Defense, in general. So this is 

an issue that this Committee will follow up on, and it is appropriate that I now call on the distinguished chairman of the Armed 

Services Committee who perhaps can assist us in this matter, also. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR WARNER 

Senator WARNER. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

First, the Senate has approached, I think in a very reasonable 

way, the extraordinary broad analysis that we must provide about 

this natural catastrophe to our Nation and the human suffering it 

involved. There are four of us on this Committee who serve on the 

Environment and Public Works Committee, and the distinguished 

Ranking Member being one of the four, Senator Voinovich, Senator 

Carper, and myself. I want to say from the outset what I am sure 

31

everybody knows, that the Corps has the primary responsibility for 

issues relating to these levees and so forth. We all recognize that. 

I have personally talked to General Strock. I have a high regard 

for his professional capabilities. He has forthrightly said, we 

haven’t had the time yet to develop the answers that are needed, 

and they are busy doing so. As a matter of fact, I think almost each 

of you are in some form of consultation with the Corps on this. So 

time is needed. But I will join with others on this Committee to assure the Chairman and Members of this Committee that such documents in the possession of the Corps are made available to this 

Committee and in a timely way. 

But I think I have listened very carefully, and this is an excellent panel, by the way. I commend the Chairman and the Ranking 

Member for bringing it here, very competent individuals. I draw on 

a modest background of civil engineering in my college and university years. You are quite right about going, Senator Voinovich, from 

a level three to a level five. Ideally, the footings and so forth required for a level five are probably markedly different than what 

you need for a level three in many instances. Nevertheless, we are 

not here for that question. 

But I did want to just lay a benchmark about the Corps, and 

they are working very hard on this, and the Environment and Public Works Committee has purposely allowed them more time before 

they are brought before us as witnesses, but we will assure you 

that this Committee is well served by their documents. 

I would like to go to another matter, Madam Chairman, and that 

is one that Dr. Ivor van Heerden raised, and others, about if we 

go to a level five and so forth, we have to rely on much more than 

what man can devise. It is what nature can devise by way of these 

natural barriers, which through the years there has been some erosion, and the loss of the natural sediment from the river has not 

provided the help that nature needs to reestablish itself. 

So this brings me to the channel called, as I understand it, 

MRGO, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a manmade navigation 

channel that provides a direct shipping lane from the Gulf of Mexico to the marine terminals in New Orleans. I wonder if that 

should not be reexamined in the light of the overall approach to the 

revitalization of this whole area. 

It is my understanding that over the years, experts have worried 

that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet would allow a severe storm 

surge to give a direct hit at New Orleans. Is there any data to support that did happen in this instance? That concern appears to 

have been one that we have got to address. This project also has 

disrupted the natural flow of sediment, which is critical in providing the buffer zones that you referred to. 

So, therefore, I just wonder, do you feel as we address this problem, and given that there has been some reduction in the navigation use of this outlet and it has become somewhat less significant 

now—I have just been told that, I cannot corroborate it, but I 

will—should the MRGO be a part of the solution to providing for 

the future preservation of this area in the face of natural disasters? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Senator, yes, we believe that a really hard 

look needs to be put on MRGO, whether it is actually needed, and 

certainly from our computer modeling, we know that where MRGO 

32

joins the Gulf and Coastal Waterway, the area known as the funnel 

is where we really get the amplification of the surge. If MRGO was 

to be abandoned, there is the potential of using parts of it as a conduit to funnel sediments elsewhere. Obviously, you can’t have sediment in a channel that you have still got navigation. 

Senator WARNER. Thank you. 

Mr. MLAKAR. First, Senator, I would like to thank you for your 

acknowledgement that there is a great deal of effort involved in 

providing this information, and General Strock and all of us are, 

indeed, committed to be absolutely open and transparent in this 

study. 

As far as MRGO and the natural barriers and this larger picture, 

I am really here as a technical expert on what happened in Hurricane Katrina. We will have some information about that in our 

final conclusions, to what extent the loss of the wetlands, to what 

extent MRGO might have played a role in that. Others in the 

Corps are looking at these larger questions, and perhaps I would 

like to defer to them to answer. 

Senator WARNER. Thank you very much. Dr. Seed. 

Mr. SEED. We haven’t studied yet, the degree of vulnerability introduced by the MRGO, but it doesn’t appear to have been a large 

issue in this particular case. The larger question is to how to move 

forward to something like a higher degree of protection, possibly a 

Category 4 or 5 system as is being discussed. It is a broader issue 

than reconfiguring something as simple as the MRGO when the 

barrier islands—it probably involves reconfiguring how that was 

even created in the New Orleans area and how they are coordinated. 

It involves the need to have somebody be in charge of the overall 

system and resolve the differences between the different groups 

who have to interact at connections and cross-connections. It involves handling issues like the Corps of Engineers, who build levees and then nominally turn them over to locals after some period 

of time and those interfaces. There are a lot of organizational 

issues which need to be resolved to move the city safely forward. 

Senator WARNER. Thank you. 

Mr. NICHOLSON. Similarly, the hydraulics of MRGO and the funnel factor are a bit out of my purview. As a geotechnical engineer, 

we are looking at other issues as far as the levees were concerned. 

But certainly, this is an area where there has been a lot of discussion and should be looked into further. I have seen some of the 

modeling done by the LSU Hurricane Center that has suggested 

that may certainly help at least part of the protection, or could be 

a buffer zone, if you will. But that is an area which is really beyond 

the scope of what we are looking at. 

Senator WARNER. I thank the Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Senator Carper. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER 

Senator CARPER. Again, our thanks to each of you for joining us 

today. 

I appreciate the use of the technology and all the maps and the 

photos that you showed, and you used a pointer of some kind, a 

laser pointer that was actually difficult to follow. I do pretty well 

33

in my color blindness tests and so forth, but it was just hard to 

pick it up on the charts, so I just share that with all of you so that 

next time it might be even more helpful to all of us. 

Dr. van Heerden, if I could start off with the first question for 

you, please. Last month, at a hearing on another committee that 

I serve on, the Environment and Public Works Committee, a Lieutenant General whose name is Strock, Carl Strock—I don’t know 

if you know him, but he is the Chief of Engineers. He stated that 

the path of Hurricane Katrina was such that the wetland loss was 

not an issue in this particular storm. I would just ask for you to 

react to that comment. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. If we had the wetlands we had in the 1870s 

now——

Senator CARPER. In the when? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I say 100 years ago, the surge would have 

been dramatically less, and there are two very important reasons 

for that. First off, if you imagine a hurricane moving forwards with 

very strong winds, the winds that are blowing on land are on the 

right-hand side and that is blowing the water towards the land. 

But on the left-hand side, the winds are blowing offshore and that 

is blowing the water away from the land. 

So if you have very significant and healthy wetlands and barrier 

islands on the left-hand side, you start to suck the wind energy out 

of that storm. On the right-hand side, if you have substantial wetlands and barrier islands, you add significant friction to that surge. 

And if you have ever had the opportunity to go into the Louisiana 

cypress swamps, which used to be very——

Senator CARPER. I have never had that opportunity. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Do come down. But if the cypress swamps 

that used to exist where MRGO, along the course of MRGO that 

got destroyed by the salt, what you see is a 60 to 70-foot high wall 

of gray tree stumps, and when that water tries to flow through 

that, there is a lot of very significant friction, and you lose that 

flow. 

An example of how valuable the wetlands are, Hurricane Andrew 

made landfall in Louisiana in 1992, I believe it was, and made—

its path came up the central part of Louisiana where we have extremely healthy wetlands and two new emerging deltas, two areas 

of net land growth, and the surge in Morgan City, which was some 

20-odd miles inland, was only seven feet. So to me, that is—and in 

terms of the wind between the coast and Morgan City, the wind 

lost 50 percent of its energy. That is an example of how valuable 

those wetlands are in reducing hurricane impacts, both wind and 

surge. 

Senator CARPER. How do we go about rebuilding the wetlands? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. If you look at it, all of coastal Louisiana was 

built by the Mississippi River and the sediment in the river is, in 

essence, a renewable resource. The river floods every year. All we 

have got to do is find efficient methods to get that sediment out of 

the river and back into the wetlands. In our toolbox, we can have 

major diversions, perhaps diverting 50 percent of the river. We 

know that used to happen every 1,000 years and that is what built 

large parts of Louisiana. There may be opportunities to do that 

34

now in the lower part of the river system, maybe into the Breton 

Delta. 

The next tools in our toolbox are siphons and minor or smaller 

diversions, and we have a couple of those, and that is where you 

simulate the distributory channels that used to operate when the 

river flooded, and you can get the sediment a little further, and 

greater volumes. 

Another important way would be to use what we call mini-siphons. These are very small siphons spaced every few miles down 

the river that would in many ways simulate a natural flooding 

event because you would put—you wouldn’t flood anybody locally, 

which is a concern, but you would put significant amounts of fresh 

water and especially the nutrient-rich waters into the wetlands. 

And then also in the toolbox is the restoration of our barrier islands, and in Federal waters, there are some fantastic sand resources that are there that could be mined and that sand then used 

to build barrier islands. I believe it is very doable and would really 

aid Louisiana in terms of hurricane impacts. 

Senator CARPER. All right. Thanks very much. 

I have a question that I would invite any of the panelists to answer. I will give you a break, Mr. van Heerden, for a moment, but 

I would ask any of the others who would like to take a shot at this 

to do so. 

Many of the Corps’ calculations regarding how to build levees to 

protect New Orleans from a Category 3 hurricane were done, I 

think someone said, in the 1960s, and since then, New Orleans has 

subsided, but there has been a great deal of additional development, as we all know, and hundreds of square miles of wetlands 

have been lost. An independent analysis was done, I think for the 

Times-Picayune Newspaper back in 2002. I think it was called 

‘‘Washing Away.’’ It showed that therisk might now be twice as 

large as the Corps had estimated. 

How has this affected the Corps’ assumption and design recommendations? Is there any attempt to review and update the assumptions regarding the design? Mr. Mlakar. 

Mr. MLAKAR. Yes, sir. I would say that we don’t have an answer 

or conclusion about that right now, but that is certainly going to 

be a subject of our study. 

Senator CARPER. I am sorry, say that one more time. 

Mr. MLAKAR. We don’t have the answer to that right now, but 

I think we will have something to report on that at the end of our 

study. 

Senator CARPER. And that will be roughly when? 

Mr. MLAKAR. The study will be done July 1. 

Senator CARPER. All right, thank you. Yes, sir, Mr. Seed, an easy 

name for me to pronounce. 

Mr. SEED. And I apologize for my name being so simple. People 

tend to remember it, although sometimes I get called ‘‘Bird’’ several 

years later. [Laughter.] 

I have a partial answer for that, and our sense is the partial answers are important at this early stage. Hydrology has advanced 

considerably over the past half-century, and there are numerous 

projects, Corps projects, Bureau projects, and projects owned by 

neither involving levees and also large and high-risk dams whose 

35

hydrology needs to be updated and the ramifications of which need 

to be studied. 

The difference between levees and dams is that dams tend to get 

reassessed every 5 and 10 years in a fairly formal system. There 

is a National Dam Safety Program which foments that. We don’t 

have a National Levee Safety Program. It is a missing piece, and 

we would like to see one established. 

Many levees are beginning to protect large populations. Levees 

used to exist in the swamps, which were unpopulated. We have a 

huge problem in California with our Sacramento Delta, where people are now moving into the delta because the real estate around 

the delta is both built in and hugely expensive, and we are projecting having over 200,000 people move into that area in difficult 

and tenuous situations over the next 10 years alone. The prudence 

of that is also a political issue in California. 

We also have in California a city, Sacramento, with levee flood 

protection, nominally engineered by the Corps. The design level of 

flood protection intended for New Orleans was to be a so-called 

200-year level of protection, which means about once every 200 

years, you would expect to lose it in a major hurricane. As the Picayune said, the better estimate today might be roughly half that. We 

have levee systems in Sacramento which are nominally engineered 

to a 75-year level of protection, and the local understanding is it 

may be half of that. There are efforts to raise Folsom Dam now to 

help staunch some of the flooding and raise those levels. But we 

have levee systems throughout the United States at various levels 

of protection, and it is possible that those all need to be reassessed 

in terms of their levels of prudence. 

Senator CARPER. Mr. Nicholson, do you want to add anything? 

Mr. NICHOLSON. Yes, just two things. First of all, I am not in a 

position to comment on what the Corps is doing or has understood 

about reevaluating the effect of the wetlands, but I did want to concur that the ASCE also believes that support of a National Levee 

Inspection Safety Program similar to the National Dam Safety Program that exists now would certainly be important, particularly in 

protecting those large urban areas. It is vitally important as they 

have been neglected to a much greater extent than our national 

dams. 

Senator CARPER. One last quick one for you, Dr. Seed. You stated 

in your testimony that some inexpensive modifications to the levees 

and floodwalls could have prevented some of their failures. What 

would be the reasons for choosing not to undertake those modifications? 

Mr. SEED. It is almost a policy issue. The Corps of Engineers was 

authorized, which is a very specific term, to provide a certain level 

of protection for the people of New Orleans, and they specially 

sized the elevations of the tops of the levee and floodwall systems 

targeted at that. They typically overbuilt them in many areas by 

a foot and sometimes two to allow for long-term settlement, and 

the region is also subsiding. But by and large, that was the target, 

and they met it. 

It was not their policy to think about what would happen if you 

got one or two more feet of water. Therefore, there was no design 

provision for one or two more feet of water, but it may well be that 

36

with some inexpensive additions that might have added, at best, a 

few percent to the overall project cost, one or two or sometimes 

three feet of water for a few hours might have been accommodated 

safely. Our sense is that there is a bit of a policy issue there which 

needs to be evaluated. 

Senator CARPER. All right. Thanks to all of you. Thanks very 

much. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Coleman. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COLEMAN 

Senator COLEMAN. Thank you, Madam Chairman, and thank you 

for holding this important hearing. Gentleman, though I didn’t 

have the time to listen to your testimony, I have read your statements. Just a couple of questions. I am still trying to understand 

what happened here. 

We have heard a lot of talk about building to a level five and the 

timing that would take and the cost that would take, but my kind 

of basic question as I kind of listened to the testimony, I think all 

of you have commented that the levee failure—I think, Mr. van 

Heerden, I think you talked about geotechnical engineering failure 

and talked about high porosity and permeability of soils. I think, 

in fact, every individual talked about the soil being an issue, that 

it wasn’t the surge, as you read the paper, that the surge overcame, but there were issues with the soil, geotechnical issues, I 

think is the phrase that was used. 

So my first question is, did the levees break because they were 

not geared to deal with a Category 5 hurricane, or, in fact, what 

we really dealt with was something less than a Category 5 here? 

I am trying to understand why. Is there anybody here who is saying that the reason for the failure was because the levees were not 

adequate to protect against a Category 5 hurricane? 

Mr. SEED. There are two pieces of that. As Dr. Nicholson said, 

there were several dozen levee failures, breaches, and distressed 

sections. A majority of them were the result of overtopping, and 

that simply means that the hurricane was bigger than the levees 

were built to take and that will be a policy issue. You could pay 

more and get bigger, taller systems that would have taken more 

storm surge. 

But three of the particularly devastating failures, the ones on the 

17th Street and London Avenue Canals, failed at far less than designed water surge levels because they were on the left flank, far 

away from where the hurricane was, and the water surge wasn’t 

so big there. So those were, in fact, foundation failures. 

Senator COLEMAN. So those, just to understand, if they were 

built to level 3 but didn’t have the foundation failures, we would 

not have seen the extent of damage that occurred? 

Mr. SEED. A considerable fraction of the flooding and some of the 

loss of life would have been prevented. 

Senator COLEMAN. I don’t want to get into any finger-pointing 

here, but how would that have been prevented? What should have 

gone on that didn’t go on to have prevented those structural failures? 

37

Mr. NICHOLSON. I will take that one. First of all, I think I would 

be careful with the use of ‘‘structural failure.’’ As geotechnical engineers——

Senator COLEMAN. I am not a geotechnical, so give me the right 

phrase. It is important that we define this. And again, my concern 

is that there is so much talk about Category 5, but as I read your 

reports—and there are cost issues, let me just say, there are cost 

issues. I fully agree with my colleague from Ohio about the need 

to have more scientists, more engineers, but I don’t agree that the 

issue is simply more funding, and I don’t believe—I would say, respectfully, Mr. Seed, that this kind of conflict, if we put more into 

cost efficiency, that somehow that takes away from efficiency. In 

the private sector, it doesn’t work that way. You can get cost efficiency and have people do the right job. So I am not a believer that 

if we would have thrown more money in, necessarily. If that is the 

case, I would support that. 

So I am trying to understand the nature of the problem, why the 

problem was there, and what I am least clear on, that it wasn’t 

necessarily a problem because we weren’t at Category 5, the ability 

to deal with Category 5. We had less than that, and yet we still 

saw the breaches. So help me understand why that occurred and 

how that could have been prevented. 

Mr. NICHOLSON. OK. Well, in fact, this is a multi-faceted issue 

because we had a number of different types of flood control structures. We had different heights of storm surge in different areas. 

And so this discussion of Category 3, Category 5, as Dr. van 

Heerden said, really is a term that is used for the size of the storm, 

and there are a couple different definitions which make it even 

more complicated. Really, the individual flood protection is designed for a certain level of storm surge. 

As Senator Lieberman had asked, if they had performed as they 

were intended, certainly, we would have seen a lot less flooding. 

Exactly what went wrong and what failed is precisely what we are 

trying to do, and we certainly need additional studies. We, in the 

field, observed many different types of failure mechanisms. There 

is not one thing that went wrong. In different areas, in different 

types of levees, we saw different types of failures. 

So in some cases where we saw the overtopping, it is fairly easy. 

It is the more difficult ones, such as those floodwalls in town on 

the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals where we, in fact, have 

some pretty good ideas of what had gone on. We understand or we 

can observe some of the mechanisms that had led to the failures. 

But exactly what went on, and again, we aren’t looking at fingerpointing at this point. 

Senator COLEMAN. Let me ask you, who has the responsibility for 

checking the soil——

Mr. SEED. Can I tackle that next because I think I have the answer you are looking for, and I think the question you asked is the 

one that we were all hoping to hear today. It is certainly why I flew 

out from California on the red-eye. 

Senator COLEMAN. I have taken that flight. [Laughter.] 

Mr. SEED. That is the only way we get to Washington from 

Berkeley. 

38

Throwing more money into the bucket is not going to fix the 

problem. For more money, you can buy higher levees, and for more 

money, you can buy an increased level of safety, but what you need 

is an increased level of assurance of safety, and to get an increased 

level of assurance of safety, you need to make some fundamental 

changes as to how levee systems in the New Orleans area are designed and built and maintained. 

No one is in charge. You have multiple agencies, multiple organizations, some of whom aren’t on speaking terms with each other, 

sharing responsibilities for public safety. The Corps of Engineers 

had asked to put flood gates into the three canals, which nominally 

might have mitigated and prevented the three main breaches that 

did so much destruction downtown. But they weren’t able to do 

that because, unique to New Orleans, the Reclamation Districts 

who were responsible for maintaining the levees are separate from 

the Water and Sewerage District, which does the pumping. Ordinarily, the Reclamation District does the dewatering pumping, 

which is separate from the water system. These guys don’t get 

along. The Sewerage District was so concerned they wouldn’t be 

able to pump through gates which had to be opened and closed that 

in the end, the Corps, against its desires, was forced instead to line 

the canals, which they did with some umbrage, and the locals bore 

a higher than typical fraction of the shared cost as a result of that. 

The constant interaction between different groups who fight over 

turf, pride, and other issues to the detriment of public safety needs 

to be stopped. There needs to be some overall coordination. Levees 

in the New Orleans area are at different heights. You can stand—

we have a photograph in our report at one section where you can 

clearly see five different elevations, all within 100 yards of each 

other. If you have five different elevations within 100 yards, the 

person who built the lowest section wins because they become the 

public hazard. There is a need to coordinate these things. 

At a more global level, if someone is to be in charge, in all likelihood, it needs to be somebody very much like the Corps of Engineers, quite likely the Corps of Engineers. The Corps of Engineers 

needs to have the manpower and the technical expertise in terms 

of boots on the ground to get that job done. 

Standing in the field, we saw sections which just didn’t look entirely prudent. These weren’t individual sections of a levee or of a 

wall, these were sections where a levee and a wall joined together 

and the joint didn’t look right. Now, we had the benefit that nature 

had highlighted that for us by scouring around the edge so we 

could all see that there was a scour path, but we all thought, looking at them, maybe we would have foreseen the scour path had we 

been standing there before the hurricane. Hindsight is 20/20, but 

we think perhaps we would have noted that. It doesn’t seem to us 

that people stood there and looked at that. There seems to have 

been a shortage of boots on the ground. 

We are seeing design documents which are signed off and initialed and checked by just one individual and not by several, as 

would be customary, and we are seeing the Corps stretched very 

thin, trying to do the work to build and to complete the building 

of a very complex system, and it doesn’t feel like the manpower and 

especially the technical expertise is entirely at the level we would 

39

like to see it at to get a job of this nature and this sensitivity accomplished. 

Senator COLEMAN. Mr. van Heerden. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I met with Colonel Wagenaar last week, the 

District Engineer in New Orleans, and recognizing, as Professor 

Seed does, that perhaps they don’t have all the technical expertise 

they need at this point in time, we offered from the University of 

Louisiana to help. We have got, obviously, a lot of engineering departments, geotechnical engineers, and so maybe as a beginning or 

a short gap or whatever, we suggest that the Corps of Engineers 

reach out to academia and try and capture some of the talents and 

expertise in the universities. 

Senator COLEMAN. If I may, and this is just a comment, Madam 

Chairman, I served as Mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota. We are at the 

beginning of the navigable headwaters. The Mississippi starts 

there and is navigable right down to New Orleans. When I was 

Mayor, we had floodings that came very close to flooding situations. 

We have a major power plant on the Mississippi, and we were 

within a short level of major problems. I worked extensively with 

the Corps. We actually built a gate and a floodwall around one of 

the neighboring islands, which was the Corps really going outside 

of the way they usually operate so that citizens could use this island when there wasn’t a problem with the flood, but you could 

close the gate and provide protection. They showed great flexibility. 

But I really do appreciate two things that I have heard here, and 

one of which reminds me of what we heard in the post-September 

11 hearings. Who is in charge? If you see a problem, how do you 

get it done? We are all listening to this and saying, we have heard 

this before, the kind of silo effect in government. 

So I would just say thank you, one, for expressing the need to 

coordinate, and then the second piece, which we have heard before, 

too, is the need for government to reach out. Whether it is FEMA 

calling Wal-Mart and figuring out how to position supplies or the 

Corps working with academia and others, and we did that in our 

development, to take advantage of the talent that is out there. So 

it isn’t necessarily just throwing more money. I am not against that 

where it is needed. But it is about how you use it efficiently and 

how decisions are made, and so I do appreciate your response. 

Mr. SEED. Could I add a third piece to that, though, and that is 

something we saw with NASA and the Challenger and we see in 

other agencies. It is important that we don’t just simply reach out 

to academia. The Corps, in streamlining its operations, is outsourcing an increasing fraction of its work in engineering and especially in geotechnical engineering. I should welcome that because, 

of course, I could do work for the Corps and I could get paid for 

it as opposed to doing these investigations where we are all volunteers and my wife is nuts. [Laughter.] 

But against my own better judgment, I am going to tell you that, 

I think, the Corps of Engineers needs to have a very strong internal capability because what happened to NASA was they lost the 

ability to keep track of the outsourced engineering. You bring elegant people in from the outside. If you can’t deal with them on a 

level playing field, you have a hard time checking what they are 

40

doing and problems can arise. It is important that the Corps have 

an internal capability which matches the problem, as well. 

Senator COLEMAN. You have made that point quite clear today. 

Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator Coleman. You brought 

up an incredibly important issue. Our full Committee investigation 

has already revealed that there was a great deal of confusion 

among the Army Corps, the Levee Board, the State Department of 

Transportation, and the Water and Sewer District on who was responsible for what, and that is an issue that we are going to be 

pursuing in a subsequent hearing because there is also evidence 

uncovered by our investigators that that confusion about who is responsible for what delayed the response when the levees failed, and 

it is incredibly important that we pursue that issue and focus not 

just on the specifications that are needed for the new, improved 

levee system, but also the organizational issues that will clearly 

designate an agency to be in charge. So I appreciate your raising 

that issue. 

I do want to follow up on that issue with Dr. Nicholson because 

we have had a number of experts, including Dr. Seed today, who 

have suggested that the failure to have one department or agency 

with clear control and responsibility for the designing, the building, 

and the maintenance of the levees contributed to the damage from 

Hurricane Katrina. From your perspective, what would be some of 

the problems from a civil engineering standpoint associated with 

the lack of a comprehensive effort and with a lack of a clear role 

designating responsibilities? 

Mr. NICHOLSON. I see that really as a two-part question, or twopart answer. Certainly, we observed in the field where you had different organizations in charge of the design, maintenance, and even 

the construction of certain parts of levees, where they came together, that was one of the transition problems we saw and——

Chairman COLLINS. If I could just interrupt you for a second, is 

that the issue with the transition points that both you and Dr. 

Seed referred to, where you have very different materials being 

used, where the seams don’t seem to go together in a logical way 

once they are uncovered? 

Mr. NICHOLSON. Well, certainly we find that each individual organization will do as they see fit, and when the two sections of the 

flood control system operated or owned, designed, and maintained 

by each of those different organizations come together, they may be 

in two different manners. They may have two different heights. 

They may be two different materials. 

And so the transition from one to the next needs to be more continuous. We need to maintain or improve the connection between 

those two. If they are at different heights, if they are different materials, those are two of the big transition problems. As I showed 

in my last slide there, we have also got different organizations such 

as the railroads coming in with a very different purpose and aspect 

of what they believe is their greatest importance. They may not 

have in their mind the same, not just agenda, but the same comprehension of what their part of the responsibility is. And so that 

is a very difficult question or problem that we see. 

41

How to answer that, as has been brought up, perhaps the solution would be to put one organization in charge and to oversee and 

essentially be responsible for that, and overseeing and essentially 

having authority over the other organizations. 

Chairman COLLINS. Dr. Seed, do you agree with that? 

Mr. SEED. Yes. The important analogy here is that building a 

levee system is like building a boat or building a Space Shuttle. 

You have a lot of pieces that have to fit together perfectly because 

if you have a flaw, you are going to lose the whole thing. It is not 

necessarily reasonable to think you can build 80-some-odd miles of 

levees in a ring if you have got a half-dozen or more different parties involved and if you do it in 143 individual projects. It is perhaps better to have an overall vision and one group responsible, 

like the captain of a ship, whose job it is to be sure that the ship 

is seaworthy before it sails. 

Chairman COLLINS. Dr. Mlakar, what is your opinion on that? 

Mr. MLAKAR. I think the results of our studies, I believe, ma’am, 

you began by saying we need to really investigate this thoroughly, 

and I think the final results will have some recommendations along 

those lines. 

Chairman COLLINS. You are withholding judgment for now. 

Dr. van Heerden, what do you think? Should we have one agency 

with clear, overall responsibility? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Madam Chairman, my comment is going to 

politically raise some hackles in Louisiana, but I believe there 

should be one Levee Board. It is a scale of efficiency. It is a scale 

of expertise. And it becomes a case of when you have all these different agencies, one hand doesn’t know what the next hand is 

doing. So in my opinion, yes, we need one Levee Board, and they 

should be controlling all the levee systems, not a large number of 

levee boards, each funded in a different way, each appointed in a 

different way, in many cases, levee board members not being engineers or having experience in drainage or understanding some of 

the models. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

Dr. Nicholson, just one final question. Dr. Seed raised the issue 

of possible malfeasance or corruption in the construction or the materials used for some of the levees as opposed to the specifications 

not being adequate, but of perhaps the case where the specifications were adequate but the contractor did not comply. Did you see 

any examples of the inferior materials being used in the levees as 

part of your review? 

Mr. NICHOLSON. We don’t have exact information to answer the 

first part of that question as far as what was specified or not used 

as specified. We did see what we considered to be inferior materials 

in some cases, perhaps, but that may well have been allowed in the 

specifications. 

Chairman COLLINS. Could you give us an example of the inferior 

materials? 

Mr. NICHOLSON. I think the best example of that was using sand 

and the so-called shell fill as embankment material, the highly 

erodible materials that may have been sufficient if you had not had 

any erosion, but as soon as you start that erosional process, they 

42

quickly disappear, and we saw wide evidence of large sections of 

the levees simply gone. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Lieberman. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Thanks again. 

The panel has been really superb. I thank you for your public service and what you are doing in coming before us. 

I want to take you to a different part of your investigations, 

which is to say the Committee has obviously focused on why the 

levees failed, but also, for various reasons, when the levees failed. 

Knowing when the levees failed will help give us some understanding of the specific period during the storm when the breaks 

happened and the different water levels and forces at work at that 

time. 

Second, knowing when the levees were overcome or failed will 

help us understand when different parts of the city and the surrounding parishes began to flood and help us assess how and when 

the State, local, and Federal officials learned of these breaks and 

responded to them. 

So if I could start with you, Dr. van Heerden, if you would please 

walk us through your best estimates this morning of when the various levees failed causing the flooding of New Orleans. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. We set up something called our stop-clock 

program where we created a hotline for people to phone us when 

they returned to their homes to tell us the times on hand-face 

clocks, and working—this is now just preliminary data——

Senator LIEBERMAN. Right. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN [continuing]. But we started in the lower 

Ninth Ward. It appears that they started to flood from the East, 

in other words, from the area of the funnel, as early as 5 a.m., and 

by 6 a.m., it had reached Tennessee Street, which is very close to 

where the two big breaches occurred. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Right. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. At 5 in the morning, there was—where the 

railroad crosses the Industrial Canal at Interstate 10, from the 

water level record in that area, we understand that the sandbags 

that they had used to seal the levees at the railroads blew out. 

That was, we believe, around 5 a.m. 

In terms of the two large breaches on the Industrial Canal, apparently they occurred between 7:15 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., and that 

is just from testimony. We don’t have the clocks here. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Right. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. In terms of the London Avenue Canal, again, 

this is all very preliminary data, the Mirabeau breach, the one on 

the South, the one closest into the city, we believe occurred between 9 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. The one at Filmore Street, between 10 

and 10:30 a.m. We have got a number of clocks at 10:15 a.m. And 

then at the 17th Street Canal, between 10 and 10:30 a.m. But this 

is very preliminary data. We are still getting lots of phone calls. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. It is very significant because based on the 

data you have, the preliminary conclusions, the major levee failures 

had occurred by mid-morning on August 29 and the flooding, therefore, had begun. Part of what we are pursuing here is when—of 

course, it was a chaotic situation, very difficult in many ways to 

determine what was happening, but for various reasons, word did 

43

not apparently reach people at the top of the Federal Government 

until, by some estimates, Tuesday, and that may have affected, obviously, what the response would be. 

Do any of the others of you on the—yes, Dr. Mlakar, do you have 

some conclusions about the time of the levees——

Mr. MLAKAR. We don’t have conclusions yet, but we are looking 

into that issue, exactly when it did fail. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes. 

Mr. MLAKAR. That is very important to understanding how and 

why it failed. Like Dr. van Heerden, we have been looking at 

clocks. We have got on the order of 50. You know, the clock might 

stop when it loses power, the clock might stop when it is flooded. 

There are some issues there that we have got to sort through. 

We have talked to 70 eyewitnesses out of an identified group of 

100—that is still growing—to get their recollections. As you can 

well imagine, we might have one person recall 8 a.m. and the person across the street is sure that it was still dry at 10 a.m., so we 

have got some issues in resolving the witness testimony. 

And then finally, in addition to that, we have identified some security cameras that were operating that should have a very good 

field of view on what was happening, and we are in the process of 

acquiring their tapes. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Security cameras that were there for that 

reason, or just for reasons——

Mr. MLAKAR. For some other reason, perhaps a 7-Eleven, a bank, 

or whatever is just surveiling and you happened in the field of view 

to have an area that is eventually breached and flooded. So we are 

in the process of synthesizing all that information, and as part of 

this, we will be getting together with my colleague from LSU and 

combining their information with our information to give all of us 

the best estimate of when. And while we are primarily interested 

in that information for helping us understand the how and the 

why——

Senator LIEBERMAN. Because you will relate it to what the storm 

was doing at that point. 

Mr. MLAKAR. Exactly. It will also be information useful for your 

slightly different purpose. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Absolutely. Dr. Seed and Dr. Nicholson, do 

you reach independent judgments about the times at which the levees broke? 

Mr. SEED. We have been funneling our information in terms of 

witnesses’ statements, and so on, to the other two groups because 

we lack the manpower and resources to really do a full processing 

of that. But the timelines described by Dr. van Heerden would 

make sense with the geotechnical observations we see in the field, 

and so they are consistent. 

Mr. NICHOLSON. I would have to agree with that, as well. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you all. Thanks, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Coleman. 

Senator COLEMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Just a couple of 

other areas of inquiry. 

Mr. Seed, you have talked a lot about NASA and the comparisons to NASA. One of the things that you have in the NASA program is you have redundancies, and levees don’t appear to have 

44

redundancies, though I am wondering, and perhaps you can educate me on this, what are the redundancy options, doable options? 

Is it wetlands? Is it barriers? Is that what one would call a redundancy? This investment, I keep coming back to the cost issue, the 

former mayor in me. I guess I am going through the protection 

about Category 3 versus Category 5. Does the existence of 

redundancies, does that move something from a Category 3 to a 

Category 5 or does it just strengthen the ability to withstand a 

Category 3? Help me understand this redundancy issue. 

Mr. SEED. Not necessarily. Redundancy is hugely expensive in 

the context of levees. The only really thorough redundant system 

in the world is that of Holland, which in the mid-1950s the entire 

Nation was flooded by a North Sea storm, and so they have tremendous incentive, literally the entire country was flooded. They 

operate in polders, which are essentially like the containment compartments in a ship, so that if their exterior coastal defense is 

breached, you flood only a section and then you hit a second levee. 

And so they have defense in depth. But if that is the single leading 

issue for your nation, you can put a large fraction of your national 

resources into that. 

I don’t think we can get a large fraction of our national resources 

into the New Orleans levees in the next week or two. I don’t think 

that is going to happen. So redundancy is very expensive. More 

likely, we are going to have to build levees which are vastly more 

secure. In California, we have a few places where we have sacrificial islands. We have things that are designed to fail like a fuse 

in an electrical system, which will reduce water levels and take 

water levels down. So there are a lot of options we can look at 

there, but by and large, in the New Orleans area, given the geometries, redundancy would be very difficult to achieve. 

Senator COLEMAN. Do you other gentlemen want to comment on 

that issue? 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Only that restoring the wetlands would, in 

essence, act in a small way as a second barrier. 

Senator COLEMAN. Let me just touch on two other points. One, 

is there—and this may not be for your panel, but I am interested, 

are any lessons to be learned here about the relationship between 

FEMA and the Corps? Is there anything anybody wants to comment on regarding FEMA and the Corps in terms of interaction, 

communication, efficiency of what one does helping the other, or 

perhaps hindering the other? 

Mr. SEED. Two separate operations, in our view, speaking for our 

team, the Corps’ job is to prevent these things from happening in 

the first place and then to fix them afterwards, and FEMA does the 

middle piece, which is the emergency. 

Senator COLEMAN. Is there a notification piece, though? What I 

am hearing, clearly, the Corps has a question about timing or has 

a part in saying, hey, we have a problem. And again, this may not 

be your area of expertise, but at a certain point, knowing there is 

a problem and then being able to respond, I think there would be 

some issues there. 

Mr. SEED. Well, I guess the heart of the issue we discussed earlier, if the lines of responsibility and who is in charge aren’t clear, 

it is very hard to decide who needs to be issuing warnings and pubVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:37 Aug 31, 2006 Jkt 024446 PO 00000 Frm 00050 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\24446.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PAT
45

lic notices, and the Corps’ policy is to build these systems and then 

turn them over to locals. They don’t remain the proprietors forever. 

So there are some difficult issues there. 

The turning over is also problematic. California has a great 

many Corps-built levees which are now turned over to locals who 

then have deep pockets liability for these kinds of things. You, of 

course, can’t sue the Corps of Engineers as a Federal agency. They 

have tremendous immunity for water-related and safety-related 

projects. So when they get turned over to the locals, the locals 

aren’t necessarily all that pleased to be getting them because they 

acquire the liability, whereas while the Corps operates them, they 

are a little bit protected. 

Senator COLEMAN. And they acquire the maintenance responsibility, also. 

Mr. SEED. They do, but it is the liability which is crushing. So 

there are some issues as to how levees happen in the United 

States. I am hoping that all this will trigger an investigation at a 

more global level of where levees are, what the conditions of levees 

are, and more fundamentally, how levees happen, how they are designed and built, how they are constructed and maintained, and 

how people allow decisions with regard to who lives where and who 

lives above sea level and the levels of protection and so on. It is 

a huge, festering national issue which has been off the radar 

screen. 

As my wife likes to tell me, levees are currently sexy for maybe 

a month or two, but by and large, when these disasters aren’t hitting, levees are just big piles of dirt. They are not all that attractive. They don’t get much attention. 

Mr. MLAKAR. Sir, I believe your question was about the relationship between FEMA and the Corps. We certainly appreciate your 

interest in that, but I think you are right. There are probably others in the Corps that are much more qualified to speak to that than 

I. 

Senator COLEMAN. Let me just say, Madam Chairman, you 

raised the issue about inferior materials, malfeasance, corruption, 

and I just want to say, I think we really have to look into that. I 

was in Armenia not too long ago, and things are falling apart there 

because everything was built with, like, 15 percent less rebar because it went into the pockets of someone. That is corruption on a 

clear level. 

And we hear a lot of murmuring, and maybe folks don’t want to 

talk about it, we hear murmuring about New Orleans, Louisiana 

has had a history of corruption in public officials. It has happened. 

I don’t want to offend anybody, so I think we have to get beyond 

the murmuring and take a very close look, a very earnest look. Is 

that an issue? Contractors, were they not putting in the materials 

they were supposed to? And again, we don’t have the answers. We 

clearly saw inferior materials. But I think we have to have the 

courage to take a look at that and not to point a finger or to offend, 

but to say we have an obligation to make sure that what was done 

was done right. 

Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Akaka. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. 

46

Let me ask this fast question before I ask my last one, and this 

is to Dr. Seed. You stated that throwing money at the Corps will 

not solve the problem, but you also said that the Corps is lacking 

staff, or the quote is ‘‘boots on the ground.’’ To clarify, is there a 

way to fix the staffing issue without additional funding, in your 

opinion? 

Mr. SEED. No. My comment was intended in the other direction. 

I don’t think simply putting additional funding in guarantees you 

are getting good boots on the ground. You can spend that money 

in other ways. I am hoping that there is some oversight capability, 

and I am hoping that if funding is injected, there will be some reorganization and some rebuilding of some of the engineering expertise, which was formerly very impressive in those areas of endeavor. 

Senator AKAKA. My final wrap-up question, Madam Chairman, is 

for Dr. Nicholson and Dr. Seed. You both made specific recommendations for what can be done to improve the New Orleans 

levee system in the future, and I want to open this question also 

to the two other witnesses. Which recommendations can be implemented in the short term and are relatively inexpensive, and which 

recommendations require more time and resources to implement? 

Also, if you care to respond, which measures the Corps of Engineers should have implemented prior to Katrina. Dr. Seed. 

Mr. SEED. Those are three different questions. I guess I am inferring a third one there. The things that can be done quickly aren’t 

necessarily the ones that need to be done as quickly. There is an 

urgency to some of them, and the third one is the easiest question. 

The Corps of Engineers were given operating instructions. They 

were given orders. They were authorized for certain things, and 

they strove to fulfill those specifications. It would be good if their 

instructions were more flexible. It wasn’t their job to do the kinds 

of things that we see that could have been done better. That wasn’t 

part of their task. It wasn’t their assignment. So it is a little bit 

unfair to do finger-pointing because something was omitted. More 

troubling are the three canal failures, which appear to be foundation issues. That will be a tougher issue. 

What can be done quickly, you can get yourself more protection 

by installing splash pads on the inboard faces of a lot of the 

floodwalls. That would be a very inexpensive and rapidly implementable fix. 

Some things are much harder than that, but they are more urgent. Getting the MRGO levee segment back up and operating is 

hugely vital. That was the back door. It is across 15 miles of 

swamp from the developed areas, but the water came across that 

swamp, and it didn’t even slow down. It was not interested in doing 

so. And so the Ninth Ward and the St. Bernard Parish were essentially toast from the first time that flood hit. Getting those levees 

rebuilt is hugely urgent and very difficult to do in a timely manner. 

At a more global level, if the system is going to work, putting 

somebody in charge is important. It is not very expensive to put 

somebody in charge necessarily, but it is going to take some time 

to achieve that because you are going to have to enact legislation 

and take some level of control, probably at a Federal level. 

47

And finally, if the Corps of Engineers is going to be that someone, and they would appear to be the only suitable candidate, the 

Corps of Engineers is also going to have to do some restructuring 

and some rebuilding of some of its capabilities, and that will not 

be a short-term issue. It is much easier to whittle down an organization than it is to rebuild it. You can do a lot of damage in 3 or 

4 years that might take a decade or longer to repair. 

Senator AKAKA. Dr. Nicholson. 

Mr. NICHOLSON. I would agree with much of what Dr. Seed said 

as far as overtopping protection and getting the MRGO length of 

levee restored, as that is the front line of protection for much of 

that area. Certainly the whole St. Bernard Parish area took that 

as their—or lost that front line of protection. 

But to go a little step further, for quick and inexpensive, those 

are very difficult things. Those two options are maybe the two that 

would be quick and inexpensive. But at the next level, and this 

may not be quick and not all that inexpensive, would be, as I think 

we both agreed earlier, would be the enactment of a National Levee 

Safety Program which would oversee New Orleans at about the 

same cost, and I believe that is about $10 million a year for those 

two programs, to have a levee protection program in New Orleans, 

as well as in California. It would help to get more attention paid 

to those vital infrastructure elements. 

Mr. SEED. And not just New Orleans and California. We have 

levees in a lot of places. Most States have levees. We have massive 

levee systems up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys. We 

have levees in the Charleston area. So I would hope it is something 

which would have some national interest at this point. 

Mr. NICHOLSON. I should say, even Hawaii has a small section 

of levees. 

Senator AKAKA. Dr. Mlakar. 

Mr. MLAKAR. Yes, thank you. Rather than speculate as we are 

just getting into this of what we need to do in the short- and the 

long-term, I would like to answer your question by reiterating the 

Corps’ commitment here in a thoroughly open and transparent 

manner to getting to the answers and finding out the how and the 

why it happened, and then I think the answers to your questions 

will be clear. 

Senator AKAKA. Dr. van Heerden. 

Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I have two comments. One is the academics 

of how the soil failure actually occurred don’t detract from the fact 

that we had soil failure and you can very visually see those levee 

systems slid many tens of feet. So what I would ask is that we 

identify other areas in our levee systems that perhaps didn’t fail 

or could have failed where we have similar soil conditions and perhaps come in and drive a secondary line of sheetpile down to 50, 

60, 70 feet, whatever the case may be, to create that barrier to stop 

the seepage. 

The second thing is, and very important to Louisiana, some of 

our parishes, some of the levee boards do not have a very strong 

or robust economic base in which to get funds. Just as the Federal 

Government took over the building of the levees after the 1927 

flood on the Mississippi, and they paid for them and built them, 

perhaps this is a time in terms of some of our jeweled cities like 

48

New Orleans for the Federal Government to offer the same level 

of support and come in and build the levees without us having to 

rely on the limited incomes of some of these parishes and levee 

boards in Louisiana. 

Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

I want to thank all of our witnesses today for truly excellent testimony. Your testimony and statements have been extremely helpful to us as the Committee continues its investigation into the 

preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina. It is absolutely 

critical that we get a better understanding of why the levee system 

failed and you have helped us to do so today. 

I want to assure you that your full statements and any additional material that you may wish to submit will be included in the 

hearing record. In addition, Members of the Committee may have 

some additional written questions which we will be submitting to 

you. I very much appreciate the efforts that all of you made to be 

here today. 

The hearing record will remain open for 15 days. I want to also 

thank our staff for their hard work on this investigation. 

Senator Lieberman. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Very briefly, I 

join in the thanks. It strikes me, as I have listened to you this 

morning and read your papers, that you are men of science and you 

speak in technical terms and very reasoned tones, but the testimony that you have given really cries out to us to act decisively. 

And if I might add, generously in terms of support for the Army 

Corps, to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again because you do deepen, in your testimony and your investigation, you 

deepen the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and the failure associated 

with it because you now tell us that not only was it a failure of 

governmental preparation and response to the flood, but the flood 

itself could have been significantly prevented had the design and 

construction of the levees been what they should have been. 

I would ask you this as you go forward in continuing your work. 

It may be that what you find not only helps us understand what 

happened, but as you have suggested a few times today, you may 

also come across some indications of, for want of a better term, 

what I would call a ticking time bomb, some other vulnerability, as 

I think you said at the end, Dr. van Heerden, that didn’t fail this 

time but might again. And, we want to work together to make sure 

that it doesn’t next time. 

But I know most of you are working with, talk about not much 

resources, a lot of you are giving your own time, and this is an 

enormously important contribution you are making that only people of your experience and expertise can make, so thank you very 

much. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. This hearing is now adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 12:19 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.] 

(49)

A P P E N D I X 


24446.001
50


24446.002
51


24446.003
52


24446.004
53


24446.005
54


24446.006
55


24446.007
56


24446.008
57


24446.009
58


24446.010
59


24446.011
60


24446.012
61


24446.013
62


24446.014
63


24446.015
64


24446.016
65


24446.017
66


24446.018
67


24446.019
68


24446.020
69


24446.021
70


24446.022
71


24446.023
72


24446.024
73


24446.025
74


24446.026
75


24446.027
76


24446.028
77


24446.029
78


24446.030
79


24446.031
80


24446.032
81


24446.033
82


24446.034
83


24446.035
84


24446.036
85


24446.037
86


24446.038
87


24446.039
88


24446.040
89


24446.041
90


24446.042
91


24446.043
92


24446.044
93


24446.045
94


24446.046
95


24446.047
96


24446.048
97


24446.049
98


24446.050
99


24446.051
100


24446.052
101


24446.053
102


24446.054
103


24446.055
104


24446.056
105


24446.057
106


24446.058
107


24446.059
108


24446.060
109


24446.061
110


24446.062
111


24446.063
112


24446.064
113


24446.065
114


24446.066
115


24446.067
116


24446.068
117


24446.069
118


24446.070
119


24446.071
120


24446.072
121


24446.073
122


24446.074
123


24446.075
124


24446.076
125


24446.077
126


24446.078
127


24446.079
128


24446.080
129


24446.081
130


24446.082
131


24446.083
132


24446.084
133


24446.085
134


24446.086
135


24446.087
136


24446.088
137


24446.089
138


24446.090
139


24446.091
140


24446.092
141


24446.093
142


24446.094
143


24446.095
144


24446.096
145


24446.097
146


24446.098
147


24446.099
148


24446.100
149


24446.101
150


24446.102
151


24446.103
152


24446.104
153


24446.105
154


24446.106
155


24446.107
156


24446.108
157


24446.109
158


24446.110
159


24446.111
160


24446.112
161


24446.113
162


24446.114
163


24446.115
164


24446.116
165


24446.117
166


24446.118
167


24446.119
168


24446.120
169


24446.121
170


24446.122
171


24446.123
172


24446.124
173


24446.125
174


24446.126
175


24446.127
176


24446.128
177


24446.129
178


24446.130
179


24446.131
180


24446.132
181


24446.133
182


24446.134
183


24446.135
184


24446.136
185


24446.137
186


24446.138
187


24446.139
188


24446.140
189


24446.141
190


24446.142
191


24446.143
192


24446.144
193


24446.145
194


24446.146
195


24446.147
196


24446.148
197


24446.149
198


24446.150
199


24446.151
200


24446.152
201


24446.153
202


24446.154
203


24446.155
204


24446.156
205


24446.157
206


24446.158
207


24446.159
208


24446.160
209


24446.161
210


24446.162
211


24446.163
212


24446.164
213


24446.165
214


24446.166
215


24446.167
216


24446.176
217


24446.177
218


24446.178
219


24446.179
220


24446.180
221


24446.181
222


24446.174
223


24446.175
224


24446.183
225


24446.184
226


24446.185
227


24446.186
228


24446.187
229


24446.188
230


24446.189
231


24446.190
232


24446.191
233


24446.192
234


24446.193
235


24446.194
236


24446.195
237


24446.196
238


24446.197
239


24446.198
240


24446.199
241


24446.200
242


24446.201
243


24446.202
244


24446.203
245


24446.204
246


24446.205
247


24446.206
248


24446.207
249


24446.208
250


24446.209
251


24446.210
252


24446.211
253


24446.212
254


24446.213
255


24446.214
256


24446.215
257


24446.216
258


24446.217
259


24446.218
260


24446.219
261


24446.220
262


24446.221
263


24446.222
264


24446.223
265


24446.224
266


24446.225
267


24446.226
268


24446.227
269


24446.228
270


24446.229
271


24446.230
272


24446.231
273


24446.232
274


24446.233
275


24446.234
276


24446.235
277


24446.236
278


24446.237
279


24446.238
280


24446.239
281


24446.240
282


24446.241
283


24446.242
284


24446.243
285


24446.244
286


24446.245
287


24446.246
288


24446.247
289


24446.248
290


24446.249
291


24446.250
292


24446.251
293


24446.252
294


24446.253
295


24446.254
296


24446.255
297


24446.256
298


24446.257
299


24446.258
300


24446.259
301


24446.260
302


24446.261
303


24446.262
304


24446.263
305


24446.264
306


24446.265
307


24446.266
308


24446.267
309


24446.268
310


24446.269
311


24446.270
312


24446.271
313


24446.272
314


24446.273
315


24446.274
316


24446.275
317


24446.276
318


24446.277
319


24446.278
320


24446.279
321


24446.280
322


24446.281
323


24446.282
324


24446.283
325


24446.284
326


24446.285
327


24446.286
328


24446.287
329


24446.288
330


24446.289
331


24446.290
332


24446.291
333


24446.292
334


24446.293
335


24446.294
336


24446.295
337


24446.296
338


24446.297
339


24446.298
340


24446.299
341


24446.300
342


24446.301
343


24446.302
344


24446.303
345


24446.304
346


24446.305
347


24446.306
348


24446.307
349


24446.308
350


24446.309
351


24446.310
352


24446.311
353


24446.312
354


24446.313
355


24446.314
356


24446.315
357

Æ


24446.316