Congress's investigative arm found no evidence of fraud or improper influence in the placing of faulty pumps along New Orleans' drainage canals before the start of last year's hurricane season, Sen. Mary Landrieu said Thursday.

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The investigation began after a memo surfaced warning the Army Corps of Engineers that the pumps were faulty.

Landrieu said the Government Accountability Office found that the Army Corps of Engineers should have been more forthcoming about problems with the pumps. But it found no evidence of wrongdoing, noting that the corps was in a rush to get pumps in place before the June 1 start of the 2006 hurricane season. The 2005 season had produced Hurricane Katrina, which inundated 80 percent of New Orleans after the city's flood protection system failed.

"We always said there was no smoking gun," Col. Jeffrey Bedey, who is overseeing reconstruction of the city's levee system for the corps, said in reaction to the report.

In preparing bid specifications for pumps, the corps had copied specifications -- typos and all -- from the catalog of a politically connected Florida company, Moving Water Industries Corp., which installed 34 drainage pumps at canals before the start of the 2006 hurricane season.

The corps has said it is "accepted and prudent" practice to adopt a company's design in government bids. Bedey said Thursday that a corps is doing its own review of the MWI contract, which will be released soon.

A May 2006 memo by a Corps inspector working on the pump project, provided to The Associated Press earlier this year, warned that the pumps were faulty and would not work if needed to remove water during a hurricane. GAO opened its investigation after the memo surfaced. Landrieu said she was briefed Thursday morning on the forthcoming GAO report.

A GAO official who led the investigation, Anu Mittal, did not immediately return a call for comment and a copy of the report has not yet been made public.

The corps has insisted that the pumps would have worked, but last year's unexpectedly mild hurricane season never put them to the test. A draft of the GAO report said it was uncertain how well or how long the pumps would have worked if a hurricane had struck last year, Landrieu's office said.

The pumps have since been overhauled and Bedey said they are ready for the upcoming season. He also said the GAO report confirms that the corps took remedial action once the memo alerted them to problems with the pumps.

Landrieu, in a telephone news conference, said the GAO told her that the corps should have been more transparent about problems with the pumps and the rushed schedule for testing.

"The greatest weakness was the corps assuring people this was in place when it wasn't," Landrieu said.

MWI is a Deerfield Beach, Fla., company owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps.

In New Orleans, after MWI's heavy duty pumps were installed, the corps and MWI struggled to get them to work properly; problems have included excessive vibration, overheated engines, broken hoses and blown gaskets, according to the spring 2006 memo by Maria Garzino, the mechanical engineer who oversaw pump testing.

The Corps has said it decided to install the pumps, and then fix the machinery while it was in place, on the theory that some pumping capacity was better than none. And it defended the manufacturer, which was under time pressure.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)