Corps looking for eyewitnesses of N.O. levee breach|[2/18/06]

Published 12:00 am Monday, February 20, 2006

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-established task force is beefing up efforts to beat a June 1 deadline to complete a comprehensive study of failures of the levee system in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

At the behest of the Corps-established Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, the Engineer Research and Development Center’s Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory began work in mid-January on a 14,000-square-foot replica of the breach at the 17th Street Canal levee wall and the surrounding 1.2 square miles to depict the Old Hammond Highway bridge to 1,200 feet beyond the breach site, which bordered the Lakeview neighborhood. About a mile of the southern shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain will also be part of the model.

At one-third the size of a football field, the model is being built into a slab inside the J.V. Hall building at ERDC and will have a four-foot wide gap carved into it to represent the canal itself, which breached on the Orleans Parish side of the canal when Katrina devastated the central Gulf Coast Aug. 29.

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Project managers expect the $325,000 model to be finished, complete with a painted surface to separate land from water, by the second week in March.

Once complete, two large multidirectional wave generators will simulate the movement of the lake water that played a big part in the failure of the I-wall constructed along the canal.

&#8220The project will be used to accompany numerical data taken out in the field to see the velocity of the waves and determine causes of the breach,” said Bill Seabergh, project manager for the model project.

Separately, IPET, composed of about 150 engineering and science experts from the Army Corps, private industry and universities nationwide, is asking residents from New Orleans who rode out the storm to provide photographs, videos and other eyewitness information on how, when and where the floodwaters rose in the city.

Specifically, videos or photos with dates and times to document the footage are being sought, along with any other eyewitness accounts of wave activity around the breach.

Accounts of storm surges believed to reach 25 feet or more that barreled up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet in St. Bernard Parish is also being sought.

Interviews to gather information have been ongoing since October, said Corps spokesman Wayne Stroupe, with the goal being to &#8220leave no stone unturned” and unravel unanswered questions in the levee system failure.

All IPET reports concerning the design and construction records of the New Orleans levee system are being reviewed by experts from the American Society of Civil Engineers. The first such report was issued in January and is available on the IPET Web site, https://ipet.wes.army.mil.

The second and third reports, dealing with structural analysis, are slated for public release March 10 and May 1 respectively.

IPET’s final report is due June 1.