Professor Raymond Seed Publishes Final Report on Failure of New Orleans Levee System

Over the past nine months, a national team of 38 engineers and investigators led by Professor Raymond Seed, and sponsored by the National Science Foundation and UC Berkeley's Center for Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), conducted an independent investigation of the failure of New Orleans' levees and flood protection system during Hurricane Katrina; the largest and most costly failure of an engineered system in history. This study represented an unprecedented effort, as the large and distinguished team of leading national experts all worked as volunteers, on a pro bono basis, in order to devote the available funding to support of students, and to cover travel, field investigation and laboratory testing expenses.

The team made a thorough study of the New Orleans regional levee system, including urgent post-hurricane forensic ground investigations, field borings and laboratory testing, and extensive computer modeling and analyses.

In its final report published on July 31, the team concluded that the several dozen levee failures in this catastrophic event occurred for a number of reasons, including the choice of materials used in the levee construction, the challenging geology and unstable soils upon which they were built, efforts to achieve economic savings at the expense of reduced margins of safety, and engineering lapses associated with failure to anticipate critical failure modes and mechanisms specific to some of the failure sites. Their research indicated that a majority of the levees failed primarily as a result of human error, and not because Hurricane Katrina was an exceptionally large hurricane.

Professor Robert Bea, co-author of the report, added that the levees were deficient as a result of organizational problems within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the design and construction of the levee system, and organizational problems endemic to the cumbersome overall system within which Congress, the Corps, and local government and oversight agencies must coordinate their efforts to design and construct these types of complex regional systems. The report notes that the Corps' oversight of the levee system was massively hampered due to layoffs of many of its geotechnical engineers who might have otherwise more effectively overseen its design, construction and maintenance.

The UC Berkeley-led team recommends changes from the White House and Congress right on down to the local levee district level, and these include creation of a risk management council reporting directly to the President, a risk assessment office in Congress, and parallel offices at the state level. Their recommendation is not to replace the Corps of Engineers, but rather to re-establish necessary strength and support levels, and to refocus a larger fraction of its efforts on engineering rather than its current focus primarily on project management.

The report states that the principal overall lesson to be learned is that short-term savings achieved by streamlining the process of preparation for storms and other natural disasters resulted in massively larger losses when the hurricane eventually arrived; losses far out of scale with the smaller short-term savings initially achieved. This has ramifications extending well beyond the New Orleans region, and is a national issue of some urgency.

Other faculty and students from the UC Berkeley Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who participated in this study included Prof's. Jon Bray, Juan Pestana and Michael Riemer, and a very hard working group of graduate students including Rune Storesund, Adda Athanasopoulos, Diego Cobos-Roa, Xavier Vera-Grunauer, Carmen Cheung, Kofi Inkabi and Julien Cohen-Waeber.