Failure Of Levees Long Predicted For New Orleans

WASHINGTON — President Bush, acknowledging the "frustration" of New Orleans residents stranded in the flooded city, told ABC's "Good Morning America" Thursday, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

In fact, just such a potential nightmare has been foreseen by storm experts, investigative reporters, academics, and even by U.S. government agencies for years.

"We certainly understood the potential impact of a category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans, Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, told reporters Thursday in a telephone briefing.

Strock said that long before Katrina hit with its category 4 fury, the Corps had listed the potential of a powerful direct hit on New Orleans among a handful of top catastrophic disasters, which also include a major earthquake in San Francisco.

Al Naomi, senior project manager for the Corps of Engineers in Louisiana, added that the 300 miles of levees protecting New Orleans were never meant to withstand forces above a category three storm. "The design was not adequate" for that, he said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was also not taken by surprise when the levees broke. FEMA ran exercises a year ago simulating the results of a category 5 hurricane in New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina "caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated," FEMA director Michael Brown said Wednesday on CNN's "Larry King Live."

Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said the president was referring to the fact that once the hurricane had passed, people thought New Orleans was OK and at that point did not anticipate the breaches in levees.

In recent years, forecasts had grown increasingly dire about the impact of a major storm in what has long been affectionately called the Big Easy.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series called "Washing Away" that described catastrophic effects from a storm in the city, which has been gradually sinking for years, even as the barrier islands that once helped form a buffer have been steadily wearing away.

National Geographic magazine last year ran a chilling feature based on a fictitious storm that caused Lake Pontchartrain to spill over into New Orleans. "As [the water] reached 25 feet over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it," the article foretold.

And just one month before Katrina hit, Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, told U.S. News & World Report: "If a hurricane comes next month, New Orleans could no longer exist."

Louisiana officials and lawmakers, aware of the dangers, had been pushing for years for major federal help to secure the city with only limited success.

The Corps of Engineers began a study in 2000 on the feasibility of reinforcing New Orleans' storm protection system to withstand even a rare category 5 storm, but the examination is still in the early stages.

Bush administration critics blame the costs of the Iraq war for shortchanging the Corps of Engineers budget and slowing down three smaller flood-abatement projects around New Orleans. Corps officials denied that charge Thursday.

Lt. General Strock told reporters that "in my opinion, the flooding would still have occurred" and said the funding level has held steady for his operations despite the Iraq war.

Naomi, the Corps of Engineers official in Louisiana, said that major upgrades take so long that protecting the city from Katrina would have required beginning 20 to 25 years ago.

Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Louisiana Republican, said he and others have been pushing for coastal restoration, a program said to cost $14 billion over several years.

"What's been missing is a sense of urgency," he said. Now that the storm has come, he added, "hopefully, it will help us convince people who weren't convinced before."