Corps team blames poor levees

The failure to build New Orleans-area hurricane levees and levee walls as part of an integrated, well-fortified system doomed the region during Katrina and remains the key finding of a revised report released Monday by an investigation team sponsored by the Army Corps of Engineers.

"The system did not perform as a system," concluded members of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, or IPET, which has spent the past 19 months detailing the causes and effects of Katrina's flooding on the levee system and the metropolitan area.

Katrina's storm surge found a wide variety of weaknesses resulting from the system being built as a series of individual projects: problems such as low levee sections, weak links between levee projects, and failed designs. Those individual failures resulted in water invading the entire protection system, the report concluded.

The report again concludes that "particularly inadequate" designs of levee walls along the 17th Street and London Avenue drainage canals resulted in their failure, despite storm-surge water not overtopping them.

Had the New Orleans area levees been more formidable, such as with armoring or stronger levee walls, damage from Katrina would have been cut dramatically, the report said. It concludes, for example, that half the direct property losses, and much of the indirect damage to the city's economy from the flood, might have been averted if levees and walls had just been overtopped but not breached