Group issues call for probe in levee failures after storm

• By JOE GYAN JR.
• Advocate New Orleans bureau
• Published: Mar 28, 2008 - Page: 11A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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NEW ORLEANS — A grass-roots group that formed after Hurricane Katrina renewed its call Thursday for a congressionally mandated, independent probe of the levee failures that swamped 80 percent of New Orleans.

The group Levees.org lashed out again at the American Society of Civil Engineers, which received a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to review the work of the corps-appointed Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force.

The corps paid IPET $25 million to analyze why New Orleans’ levee system failed during Katrina.

At a news conference inside a renovated eastern New Orleans home that took on 7 feet of water after the storm, Levees.org founder and executive director Sandy Rosenthal charged that ASCE’s peer review amounted to nothing more than a “public relations campaign’’ for the corps.

Rosenthal, who based her allegations on documents her group obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, alleged that ASCE has sought to “minimize and understate’’ the corps’ role in the levee failures.

ASCE has convened an independent panel to investigate accusations by fellow engineers that the professional engineering association covered up engineering mistakes in its probe of the Katrina levee failures and used the probe to protect engineers and government agencies from lawsuits.

The panel is expected to issue a report by the end of April and could recommend that the society stop accepting money from government agencies for disaster investigations.

ASCE, which says it takes the allegations seriously, has declined comment until completion of the panel’s report and an internal ethics review.

Rosenthal said New Orleans deserves nothing less than “a big, all-encompassing investigation’’ — an independent federal probe of the levee failures similar to the investigation conducted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. She said the work of the so-called “8/29 Investigation’’ — Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005 — would mirror that of the 9/11 Commission.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said in a written statement to Levees.org that she will continue to push for a “thorough and independent analysis of the events leading up to August 29, 2005.’’ Landrieu, who tried to add an 8/29 Commission as an amendment to the 2007 water resources bill, said she will introduce a stand-alone 8/29 Commission bill when Congress returns from recess next week.

Critics have accused ASCE in its hurricane investigation of suggesting that the power of the storm was as big a problem as the poorly designed levees. The society did issue a report last year that blamed the levee failures on poor design and the corps’ use of incorrect engineering data.

“This was no fault of ours,’’ Rosenthal said.

Levees.org and ASCE have butted heads before. The society threatened to take legal action against the activist group in November after the group posted a video on the popular YouTube.com Internet site that parodies the relationship between ASCE and the corps in connection with the levee failures review.