PHOTO: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

RESTORATION: Workers complete a new levee on a drainage canal, where a major breach occurred during Katrina

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has its work cut out for it. The corps holds the primary responsibility for the const0ruction, maintenance, and operational supervision of the New Orleans levee system. After Hurricane Katrina, Congress told the corps to restore the system to at least pre-Katrina levels, and to get that job done fast. In the middle of last year the corps reported back that the ­mission was largely accomplished [see photo, “Restoration”].

But now comes the hard part. Congress has told the corps that its next task is to build up the New Orleans hurricane protection system to shield the city from all but a 100-year storm—a hurricane of a ferocity that would be expected, statistically, to occur only once in a century. Congress has authorized the corps to spend US $5.7 billion to restore the system and achieve 100-year protection, giving it until 2010 to finish.

Three years is not a lot of time to do that kind of job, to put it mildly, but the even bigger problem is that nobody knows yet just what a 100-year storm would look like. Groups ­responsible for telling the corps how big the waves and storm surges from a 100‑year storm would be, and what kind of mayhem they might cause, are set to report back only about now, in March. Meanwhile, the corps is caught in what Jerry L. Foster, a corps engineer who is chairing a major task force on hurricane risk, considers a kind of circularity.

“They’ve got money to build to the 100-year level,” but “they can’t do that [carry on effectively with the work] unless they know what the 100‑year level is,” observes Foster, who is based in the corps’ national offices in Washington, D.C. The people at the front lines ­“desperately need ­information,” but the people responsible for providing that information—including Foster’s own risk group, which is about eight months late with its report—aren’t in a position to cough it up yet.

The job that Congress has given the corps is comparable to the task it was given after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and which, 40 years later, it still had not ­completed when Katrina struck. In a ­massive nine-volume, peer-reviewed interagency report that the corps issued in draft form last June, the engineering organization rendered a scathing verdict on its own post-Betsy work. “The hurricane protection system in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana was a system in name only,” said the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET).

Among many damning findings, IPET reported that the system was incomplete, provided inconsistent levels of protection, didn’t provide enough backup protection, and lacked integrated control. Pumping stations—built originally to drain standing water and rainfall—were not hardened against big storms and generally had no reserve power. Levees, floodwalls, and water gates often were not as strong as they were meant to be, and in many cases levees had subsided so that their actual elevations were much lower than intended. In the big drainage canals and a navigation canal where the most catastrophic breaches occurred, both foundations and protective wall structures failed, revealing severe design deficiencies.