08:54 PM CDT on Tuesday, September 13, 2005

By JANET McCONNAUGHEY / Associated Press

Hurricane Katrina's "complete destruction" of St. Bernard Parish apparently was caused by levee failure along a 76-mile-long shipping channel opened in 1965, the man in charge of pumping out the area said Tuesday.

The levees along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, supposed to hold back up to 17 1/2 feet of water, apparently were the biggest stretch lost. When other levees or floodwalls broke and flooded New Orleans, those breaks were measured in hundreds of feet. This failure may stretch for miles.

St. Bernard Parish is a 1,794-square-mile fringe of water, marsh and land dangling into the Gulf of Mexico southeast of New Orleans — only 465 square miles of that land.

Only 45 square miles were inhabited, according to Col. Duane Gapinski, in charge of "unwatering" New Orleans and nearby parishes. Still, its population is 18th-largest among Louisiana's 64 parishes. Many of its 65,500 residents commuted across the Mississippi River to New Orleans, but others run shrimp boats and work in refineries.

Col. Richard Wagenaar, the Corps' chief district engineer, believes that up to 90 percent of the levee along the MRGO is damaged, Gapinski confirmed.

"I have a different estimate but it's very significant, and the level of protection is severely, severely degraded," Gapinski said during the Corps' daily teleconference with reporters.

The shipping channel, sometimes known as "Mr. Go" because of its initials, was dredged through wetlands to cut 40 miles off the Mississippi River passage to New Orleans. It's used by about 650 deep-draft ships a year.

But salt water brought into the marshes and wakes from cargo ships have destroyed 18,000 acres of land and 1,500 of cypress swamp, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which dredged it.

Now the levee failure apparently is the reason the whole parish flooded.

"There's lots to be studied," he said. "But houses were removed from their foundations. That's where the water came from — out of New Orleans East."

Was the parish, as Gapinski said, completely destroyed?

"I think about 95 percent of the parish was under water. I would say it's pretty well destroyed," said Col. Richard Baumy of the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office. "You've got to see it to believe it."

At the moment, Gapinski said, there are more pressing needs than repairing that levee.

"It's not really protecting anything," he said. "That levee is in front of St. Bernard Parish. The parish president announced nobody would be allowed to return to that parish for four months."

Gapinski, who joined the teleconference late because of problems keeping phone connections to New Orleans, lost his connection before he was asked his estimate of the percentage of levees that failed or the length of the breach or breaches.

Nobody else could give that information, said John Rickey, a spokesman for the Corps. He said he would respond to e-mailed requests for the information, but had not answered one from The Associated Press by Tuesday evening.

Gapinski did not know how long it will take to fix.