[Senate Hearing 109-526]
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2006
S. Hrg. 109-526
HURRICANE KATRINA:
WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL?
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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
COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman
TED STEVENS, Alaska JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut
GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio CARL LEVIN, Michigan
NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii
TOM COBURN, Oklahoma THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
LINCOLN D. CHAFEE, Rhode Island MARK DAYTON, Minnesota
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey
PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico MARK PRYOR, Arkansas
JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia
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
C O N T E N T S
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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
HURRICANE KATRINA:
WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL?
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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 the American Society of Civil Engineers
teams will be releasing a joint interim report detailing their
initial findings at this hearing.\1\
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\1\ The report appears in the Appendix on page 224.
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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 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 so-called 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, 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 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.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. van Heerden with attachments
appears in the Appendix on page 49.
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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 Pontchartrain 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 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.
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.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Mlakar appears in the Appendix on
page 98.
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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 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 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.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Seed with attachments appears in
the Appendix on page 102.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 report 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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The report appears in the Appendix on page 224.
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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.
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 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 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.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Nicholson appears in the Appendix
on page 121.
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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 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. 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.
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 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\
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\1\ The letter and e-mail appear in the Appendix on page 208.
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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 improved. 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.
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?
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.
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 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, 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 saying, 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 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 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.
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.
We had a marvelous experience in the field for 2\1/2\
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 2\1/2\ 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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?
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 finger-pointing 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.
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 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 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
two-part 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.
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 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 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 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 public 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.
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.
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 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.]
A P P E N D I X
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