Will New Levees Protect New Orleans From the Next Hurricane?

On a steamy morning June 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina, I sat in a packed ballroom at a hotel in downtown New Orleans to hear the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers take the podium and accept blame for the single biggest civil engineering failure in American history.

It was a stunning admission.

For months, members of the Corps had blamed the massive breakdown of the city's levee system on mother nature.

But now a 6,000-page report that cost the Defense Department more than $20 million had said its own Corps had built levees and floodwalls that were "a system in name only," incomplete, inconsistent and with design performance flaws.

"We do take accountability," Lt. Gen. Carl Strock said. "It's been sobering for us," he added to "have to stand up and say: We had a catastrophic failure of one of our projects."

A second and a third independent investigation had similar findings. One even went so far as to say the Corps took short cuts in building the levees to save money.

In the five years since those levees failed -- flooding 80 percent of New Orleans and killing more than a thousand people -- the federal government has spent $15 billion trying to fix what went wrong.

The Army Corps of Engineers is, at Congress's direction, constructing what it says is a flood protection system rated for 100 years -- in other words, able to withstand a storm likely to occur once every 100 years on average. The Corps says the system has some resiliency up to the level of a once-every-500-years storm.

Twelve miles from New Orleans at Lake Borgne, the Corps is building a massive wall 26 feet high and two miles long. That's where the huge post-Katrina storm surge pushed water down a ship channel dredged years earlier by the Corps, resulting in some of the worst flooding in St. Bernard Parish and areas of East New Orleans.