Rep. Jacob Braud, working with Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration, just lately launched Home Invoice 633, that will have altered and even abolished a part of the levee-board reforms handed after Hurricane Katrina. 

Particularly, Braud (R-Belle Chasse) took cues from the governor, who wished to eradicate the impartial blue-ribbon nominating committee that selects candidates whose experience is greatest fitted to the Flood Authority East board. As an alternative of accepting the committee’s advice, the governor wished to straight appoint 4 board members himself. 

In response, the management of Levees.org mobilized its membership to battle the invoice.  The marketing campaign labored. 

Braud pulled the invoice and amended it, leaving the present nominating system intact. 

Braud’s amended invoice, now HB688, is slated to move to the Senate in a couple of days. The laws will increase the variety of phrases that commissioners can serve from two to 3. Levees.org helps this transfer. It would assist relieve strain on the nominating committee as a result of the advanced matrix of necessities makes it troublesome to search out certified people who serve professional bono.

However the authentic invoice’s proposed adjustments appear to have been motivated by skewed perceptions in regards to the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board that we’d wish to right. After Katrina, some individuals believed, with out proof, that the Orleans Levee Board was chargeable for the flooding that lined 80% of New Orleans. 

That perception made the 2005 reforms really feel pressing, when spearheaded seven weeks after Katrina by the Enterprise Council of Better New Orleans. 

Motivated by that perception – with none proof to assist it – legislators wrote, launched and handed payments throughout the chaotic months after Katrina. They consolidated the a number of levee boards in Better New Orleans into two boards. The reforms additionally mandated that board members be  required to have expertise in civil engineering, hydrology and different sciences, which grew to become legislation lengthy earlier than any investigations had been accomplished. 

As soon as the investigations had been completed, the proof was clear: the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers was 100% chargeable for the levee breaches, on account of design and development errors. 

Certainly, the Military Corps’ very personal levee examine (2008) checked out New Orleans levees and their I-walls, which deflected and moved away from the perimeters  of the canals, creating a niche that helped the partitions breach.  “(T)he levee and I-wall designs for the outfall canals and IHNC (Industrial Canal) didn’t think about deflection of the I-wall,” the examine acknowledged (in Quantity 1, USACE IPET, I-199). “This resulted in failure of the levee-floodwall system on the 4 places.”

The 2005 levee breaks represented a failure of the system to carry out as designed, Military Corps investigators wrote.

Years later, in 2015, the notion that the pre-Katrina levee board acted irresponsibly was debunked for good in a peer-reviewed scientific article printed within the official journal of the World Water Council. And in 2022, the Related Press model information suggested reporters worldwide that when discussing the flooding of New Orleans, federal levee failure have to be included. 

Regardless of all this available knowledge, some nonetheless insist on blaming the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board. 

The sound bites have modified, although. Now critics are saying that the levee breaches and catastrophic flooding may have been prevented if the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board had criticized the Corps’ designs for the drainage canals. 

This assumption is preposterous. The Orleans Levee Board had no authorized authority to query the Corps’ work. 

Since Katrina, the East and West Levee Authorities rapidly have discovered that lesson – specifically that – regardless of their members’ skilled experience – they haven’t any authorized authority over the Corps in both design, development or upkeep. In 2014, Stephen Estopinal, an eight-year veteran and former president of the post-Katrina Levee Authority East, summed this up by saying that he served on the authority “with none authority.”  Extra just lately, Estopinal acknowledged that “whether or not the governor selects the members, or a panel picks candidates, or we select the first 9 individuals popping out of church on Sunday, these members can’t have an effect on the design or operational procedures of the flood discount system.”

Retired U.S. Rep. Garret Graves agreed. Graves, who chaired the state’s Coastal Safety and Restoration Authority from 2008 – 2014, testified in February 2013 that as a result of the Corps retains unique management over constructing hurricane flood safety, the native levee board’s function is “largely diminished to that of a bystander.”

One should additionally understand that, from the attitude of board members on the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board, they had been working with the good and highly effective Military Corps with its 200 years of expertise and sterling status. 

That is the Military Corps that had constructed tens of hundreds of miles of levees alongside the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio Rivers, levees that had been able to withstanding surge heights of as much as 20 ft for 30 days or extra each single yr. It was not cheap for the Orleans Levee Board to doubt the Military Corps’ functionality to construct floodwalls atop a couple of miles of native drainage canals that wanted to face up to about 9 ft of storm surge for a couple of hours and solely sometimes, not yearly. 

Had the individuals who served on the Orleans Levee Board challenged the Military Corps’ proposed designs for the canals that failed throughout Katrina, they very seemingly would have been ignored. However that is all Monday-morning quarterbacking about occasions from 35 years in the past. We are going to by no means know.

This we do know. The present Levee Authority East and West oversee the upkeep of the hurricane-protection system in keeping with strict directions supplied by the Military Corps. If the levee authorities don’t comply with these directions, the levees could be decertified, adversely affecting flood insurance coverage charges.

For now, the post-Katrina levee board adjustments stay. Although the Orleans Levee Board was not at fault, we consider it is smart to have levee boards with the present stage of experience. And as we acknowledged final yr, and are re-stating once more this yr, we would favor {that a} blue-ribbon committee choose our levee authority members, slightly than the governor. 

The following step is convincing the Military Corps that the specialists who sit on our levee boards deserve a job past that of bystander. One want solely take a look at the levee breach occasion of August 29, 2005 to grasp that.

Sandy Rosenthal is founder and president of Levees.org. H.J. Bosworth, Jr., P.E., is lead researcher for Levees.org.

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