Questions raised about corps levee work

NEW ORLEANS -- The crane was busy Friday along a stretch of levee between the 17th Street Canal and Lake Marina Avenue in the West End area. The machine was breaking up a concrete pad installed to protect the side of the levee, and loading the pieces into dump trucks.

Andy Oats lives nearby and called Eyewitness News to find out why the cement was being torn out, because it had only recently been installed.

"I didn't know what to think," Oats said.  "I said it has only been there maybe three months, max."

To Oats, it seemed the government was throwing away money that had just been spent on levee protection.

"Big time. Big, big time," Oats said.

I contacted the Army Corps of Engineers and brought those concerns to them, asking why was this work done, and then undone?

"What we looked at is after Gustav, we looked at some other areas that might need some additional action as we call it," said Rick Kendrick, Army Corps Of Engineers spokesman.

Corps spokesman Rick Kendrick said the work was done as a temporary measure after Hurricane Gustav in 2008, when the agency became concerned about whether a storm surge could swamp this section of levee, so they added metal sheet pilings to raise the height of the levee, and concrete to keep the side from eroding.

"The entire project was about $400,000 more or less," said Kendrick. "We'll re-use all the sheet pile, but some of the concrete work, which was a minor piece of it, will have to be removed, and some other stuff put back in place."

Oats said, "They must have spent a few nickels at least to put in all this cement, and now it's gone."

Kendrick said the corps' concern was to have a final project in place for this hurricane season.  "So we knew we could do some interim measures, and it might be maybe $50,000 or so we could not re-use."

"Somebody's paying for it, and bottom line, it's got to be me," said Oats. "As a taxpayer, it's got to be me."

Why were only temporary improvements done after Gustav, and not the final project at that time?

"We did not complete the environmental documentation for that particular reach, which you must complete before we do a final project, and was not completed until March of this year," Kendrick said.

The current project, from the 17th Street Canal to just past Lakeshore Avenue will create a levee designed to meet 100-year storm standards.

"We're raising the whole area up about two to three feet, depending on location, adding some gates in, replacing the T-walls with higher T-walls, higher and stronger T-walls," Kendrick said.