Canal May Have Worsened City's Flooding

Shirley Laska, director of the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology at the University of New Orleans, says local flood-control meetings have been dominated for years by complaints about the Outlet, but nothing has changed.

Before Katrina, the Corps was already studying whether to close the canal. The initial conclusion was no, but the Bush administration ordered the agency to redo its analysis.

The main advocates for the channel were the Port of New Orleans and its supporters in the Corps of Engineers and in Louisiana's congressional delegation. "You had the people of St. Bernard Parish against the Port of New Orleans," Boasso said at a community meeting Monday. "And the Port of New Orleans had the clout."

Port Director Gary LaGrange said "the jury is still out" on whether MRGO contributed to Katrina's devastation. But he said the port would have been willing to give up the Outlet if the Corps had completed a $750 million project to expand a lock on the Industrial Canal, another little-used shipping channel.

Most ships heading to New Orleans use the Mississippi River, but LaGrange said many local businesses rely on the alternative routes, including America's largest chicken exporter -- which now has 5 million pounds of rotting meat on its hands.

In any case, LaGrange said, the city would never have drowned if Congress had authorized levees protecting it from a Category 5 hurricane, instead of a Category 3.

"We've been stuffing a 250-pound body into 180-pound pants," he said. "That's your problem right there."

But in 1998, the St. Bernard Parish Council unanimously called for the channel's closing. In 2002, an LSU study noted that "locally, the MRGO is perceived as a superhighway for storm surge because of the channel's susceptibility to inundation by tropical storms and hurricanes." In 2004, a federally funded simulation drill called Hurricane Pam concluded that surges from a Category 3 hurricane would overwhelm the MRGO "funnel," flood surrounding areas and kill tens of thousands of people.

Mashriqui has dedicated his career to preventing a repetition of the Bangladesh catastrophe, and after the grim experience of the Hurricane Pam study, he became an evangelist for building a floodgate across the throat of the funnel.

When he spoke to emergency responders at the Metairie, La., library on "Hurricane Vulnerability Modeling for Southeast Louisiana," the next speaker was an Army Corps engineer. But he said Corps officials told him they could not study anything that was not in their congressional authorization. One colleague at the Hurricane Center predicted that nothing would happen until hundreds of people died.

"I told everyone: If New Orleans is a boat, here are the holes," Mashriqui said. "This is my passion; I don't want people to die in hurricanes. But nobody did anything."

Several current and former Corps of Engineers employees say the Corps' New Orleans district was reluctant to give up MRGO.

In recent years, Corps officials have spoken about closing it. But last year, they estimated their "project capability" for dredging the outlet at a whopping $38 million, signaling their desire to keep it open. "The general feeling was: 'There's no way we're closing that,' " says one biologist who left the district this year. "They wanted all the business they could get."

John Paul Woodley Jr., the assistant Army secretary who oversees the Corps, said the Bush administration had to instruct the agency to restart its study of whether to close the channel, because it hadn't taken into account the channel's destruction of wetlands, even though it was conducting a separate study of a $14 billion project to restore Louisiana's coastal wetlands. Woodley said there was also concern that further erosion could merge the channel with Lake Borgne -- which happened after Katrina.

Yesterday, Woodley pointedly declined to rule out the possibility that MRGO contributed to the tragedy of Katrina. "I've heard those concerns, and I wouldn't discount them," he said.

Woodley cautioned that the investigation of the catastrophe has just begun, but many scientists, environmentalists and St. Bernard Parish officials said they do not need a forensic investigation by the Corps of Engineers to know that their warnings have come true. Larry Ingargiola, the head of emergency management in St. Bernard, said he knows exactly why only 52 of its 28,000 structures made it through Katrina unscathed.

"That's where the damn water came -- right up MRGO," he said. "We've been screaming about it for years. I don't know how many politicians I've taken on tours. But there it is."