You're On Your Own

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As he talks, Van Heerden takes a sample of shell-studded sand, maybe 6,000 years old, that Katrina dumped all over houses next to the London Avenue Canal--one of three drainage canals built to carry water out of the low-lying city. As part of Team Louisiana, the state group investigating why the city flooded, Van Heerden has been walking the entire levee system, and has come to the conclusion that the Corps' design was largely to blame. According to Van Heerden, the team's report, set for release May 31, will show that 87% of the water that flooded New Orleans came through breaches in the floodwalls, not over the tops of levees. That's key because a storm surge topping the levees would have lasted but a few hours, leaving at most 3 ft. of water in New Orleans, he calculates. The breaches, by comparison, let water pour in for days, inundating houses up to their rooftops.

•TRYING TO MAKE THE LEVEES READY

DAVID DANIEL, HEAD OF THE AMERICAN Society of Civil Engineers team reviewing the Corps' work, has also criticized the nation's chief engineers for playing it "too close to the margins" of safety in the past. He gives them kudos for getting the city's levees "back to where we were" before Katrina--but that's also what worries him as the city prepares for a new storm season. Every levee, says Daniel, is still too low by a couple of feet because the Corps didn't calculate for the ground subsiding. "If they find other areas that were a hairline away from failure before, they need to fix those right away," he says.

The hopes and fears of the city are, for now, concentrated on a tall, rangy Corps veteran, Lieut. Colonel Lewis Setliff, head of Task Force Guardian, the group charged with repairing the levee system. Setliff's team has been given an $800 million pocketbook to repair more than 200 miles of levee damage and construct three unique floodgate systems to stop storm surges from riding into the city via the three drainage canals breached after Katrina. The Corps admitted last week that two of the three floodgates it was building for the job would not be finished on June 1, as promised. The anticipated delay--a month in the case of one gate structure--has made people in New Orleans nervous, if not downright angry.

Setliff is soothing and honest, admitting that the Corps is "struggling" with designs never before built. Engineers, he notes, had to start construction before finishing the designs in hopes of beating the first storm. Though they'll miss the deadline, he says, "there is really little risk [from hurricanes] in June." Just in case, the Corps has a backup plan: pilings already stacked at the scene can be driven into the canal bed to stop storm surges--a job that would take three days to complete in the "worst case," Setliff promises. That plan, put into effect along Lake Pontchartrain before Hurricane Rita, worked well--though it was little solace for the unprotected Ninth Ward, which flooded for a second time.