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Ralph Vartabedian/Stephen Braun: New Orleans' Levees Suffered From Numerous Defects

In the frantic days after Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers scrambled to plug a breach on the 17th Street levee, dropping massive sandbags from a fleet of helicopters.

But the engineers were baffled: The sandbags kept disappearing into the watery breach. The pit eventually swallowed 2,000 sandbags, each weighing between 3,000 and 20,000 pounds. It was an early sign that the hurricane had opened an extraordinarily deep hole in the foundation of the storm wall, pointing to a fundamental breakdown in the engineering of the city's levee system.

Investigators recently told The Times that the 17th Street levee failed because its engineers made a series of crucial mistakes, one of which was to base the levee design on the average strength of the soil rather than on the strength of its weakest layer. The errors may reflect a loss of expertise during the 1990s, when the corps sharply downsized its soil laboratories.

The faulty soil analysis is one of many defects or flaws in concept, design, construction and maintenance that left many of the levees in New Orleans especially vulnerable to Katrina. Environmental miscalculations, including the loss of natural protection from marshes, added to the problems.

The errors might have been offset had the corps required larger safety margins, and that raises questions about the corps' internal culture.

Although the levees' shortcomings became apparent shortly after the hurricane hit, experts are only now pinpointing the underlying causes of the collapses. What they find will determine who bears the political and legal responsibility for the flood and provide a technical basis for any future levee system to protect New Orleans from a monster storm.

The levee failures were among the most costly engineering errors in the United States, measured by lives lost, people displaced and property destroyed, said half a dozen historians and disaster experts.

Katrina flooded New Orleans with about 250 billion gallons of water and killed more than 1,000 people.

"I don't think there is anything comparable in recent American history," said retired engineering professor Edward Wenk Jr., a science advisor to three presidents and investigator of the Exxon Valdez accident.

[Editor's Note: This is a short excerpt from a much longer article. Please see the LA Times for more.]