A little more than a week after Hurricane Katrina passed to the east of New Orleans and her counterclockwise winds whipped Lake Pontchartrain with enough force to breach the citys levee system in several places, the Army Corps of Engineers finally had good news. The Corps and its contractors plugged the worst leak and started a large pump station that was pushing water through the 17th St. Canal back into the lake. The Corps also reported progress on other major breaches at the London Canal and the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal.
Officials now surmise that as the storm surge overtopped the flood walls at 17th St. and London Canals, it scoured their earthen foundations, causing panels to blow out. At the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal, aerial photographs show a barge nearly as long as one of two breaches in the canals east wall, indicating the vessel may have struck the wall, causing it to fail. "But we cant really be sure until we can inspect the sites and do a forensic analysis of the cause of failure. It could well be that there were multiple causes for the failures at different places," says a weary Alfred C. Naomi, a hurricane protection system project manager who has been working on a drainage planthe Corps calls it unwateringsince the storm pierced city flood walls. Naomi is among a cadre of approximately 60 people from the Corps New Orleans District who have been putting in 12 to 16-hour days in a "war room" in the Corps Mississippi Valley District headquarters in Vicksburg.