A group of scientists on Thursday accused the Army Corps of Engineers of endangering this city's future by failing to take steps to immediately close a shipping channel blamed for widespread flooding during Hurricane Katrina.

The rebuke was aimed at a preliminary report the Corps sent Congress on Dec. 15, urging it to close the 76-mile Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet but stopping short of saying when.

The scientists are being employed as experts by a team of lawyers suing the Corps and held their news conference in the office of some of the lead attorneys in the case.

Locals have dubbed the 76-mile channel a "hurricane highway" because it has been blamed for funneling storm surge into the city.

The Corps report denied that the channel contributed to the flooding of the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The Corps says storm surge modeling shows that the channel did not act as a funnel.

Those statements have baffled, and exasperated, many locals and scientists.

"The Corps has been working on this channel for 54 years, and they have egg on their face and it's hard to admit," said Mark Madary, a St. Bernard Parish councilman who appeared with the scientists at Thursday's news conference denouncing the Corps report.

The channel is "a ticking time bomb in the heart of Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes," the scientists said in a letter to House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi and incoming-Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

The scientists called for building storm barriers to keep storms' waves from entering this network of canals that they call "the funnel." They also said the Corps report omitted detailing ways to rebuild marsh and swamp forests ruined by the channel, which is known, from its initials, as the "Mr. Go."

G. Paul Kemp, a Louisiana State University engineer and one of several forensic engineers examining what caused the flooding during Katrina, said the Corps' modeling mistakenly excludes a 6-mile stretch where the canal merges with the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway to explain how the channel did not cause the flooding.

The combined waterway travels through eastern New Orleans and joins the Mississippi River near the Lower 9th Ward, the neighborhood that saw the worst flooding in the wake of Katrina.

Besides Kemp, two other LSU professors -- Ivor van Heerden, a levee expert and author of a book on the levee failures during Katrina, and John Day, a coastal scientist -- signed the letter. Sherwood Gagliano, an independent scientist who pioneered several studies on coastal Louisiana, and Robert Bea, a levee expert with the University of California at Berkeley who has become one of the Corps' most vocal critics since Katrina, also signed the letter.

The scientists said they hope the new congressional leadership will make closing the channel a priority and also make headway in overhauling the Corps' management style. The MRGO was dug in the 1960s as a shortcut to New Orleans and a way to kick-start the development of reclaimed swampland east of the city that wound up drowned by Katrina.

Since its construction, the channel has destroyed hundreds of square miles of wetlands and killed stands of cypress forests.

The Corps said any decision on what to do with the channel should be incorporated into a state master plan due out next December. That plan is coming up with ways to protect south Louisiana from monster storms, coastal land loss and sea level rise.

(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)