Rep. Jacob Braud, working with Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration, recently introduced House Bill 633, that would have altered or even abolished part of the levee-board reforms passed after Hurricane Katrina. 

Specifically, Braud (R-Belle Chasse) took cues from the governor, who wanted to eliminate the independent blue-ribbon nominating committee that selects candidates whose expertise is best suited for the Flood Authority East board. Instead of accepting the committee’s recommendation, the governor wanted to directly appoint four board members himself. 

In response, the leadership of Levees.org mobilized its membership to fight the bill.  The campaign worked. 

Braud pulled the bill and amended it, leaving the current nominating system intact. 

Braud’s amended bill, now HB688, is slated to head to the Senate in a few days. The legislation increases the number of terms that commissioners can serve from two to three. Levees.org supports this move. It will help relieve pressure on the nominating committee because the complex matrix of requirements makes it difficult to find qualified individuals who serve pro bono.

But the original bill’s proposed changes seem to have been motivated by skewed perceptions about the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board that we’d like to correct. After Katrina, some people believed, without evidence, that the Orleans Levee Board was responsible for the flooding that covered 80% of New Orleans. 

That belief made the 2005 reforms feel urgent, when spearheaded seven weeks after Katrina by the Business Council of Greater New Orleans. 

Motivated by that belief – without any proof to support it – legislators wrote, introduced and passed bills during the chaotic months after Katrina. They consolidated the multiple levee boards in Greater New Orleans into two boards. The reforms also mandated that board members be  required to have experience in civil engineering, hydrology and other sciences, which became law long before any investigations were completed. 

Once the investigations were finished, the evidence was clear: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was 100% responsible for the levee breaches, due to design and construction mistakes. 

Indeed, the Army Corps’ very own levee study (2008) looked at New Orleans levees and their I-walls, which deflected and moved away from the edges  of the canals, creating a gap that helped the walls breach.  “(T)he levee and I-wall designs for the outfall canals and IHNC (Industrial Canal) did not consider deflection of the I-wall,” the study stated (in Volume 1, USACE IPET, I-199). “This resulted in failure of the levee-floodwall system at the four locations.”

The 2005 levee breaks represented a failure of the system to perform as designed, Army Corps investigators wrote.

Years later, in 2015, the notion that the pre-Katrina levee board acted irresponsibly was debunked for good in a peer-reviewed scientific article published in the official journal of the World Water Council. And in 2022, the Associated Press style guide advised reporters worldwide that when discussing the flooding of New Orleans, federal levee failure must be included. 

Despite all this readily available data, some still insist on blaming the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board. 

The sound bites have changed, though. Now critics are saying that the levee breaches and catastrophic flooding could have been avoided if the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board had criticized the Corps’ designs for the drainage canals. 

This assumption is preposterous. The Orleans Levee Board had no legal authority to question the Corps’ work. 

Since Katrina, the East and West Levee Authorities quickly have learned that lesson – namely that – despite their members’ professional expertise – they have no legal authority over the Corps in either design, construction or maintenance. In 2014, Stephen Estopinal, an eight-year veteran and former president of the post-Katrina Levee Authority East, summed this up by saying that he served on the authority “without any authority.”  More recently, Estopinal stated that “whether the governor selects the members, or a panel picks candidates, or we choose the first nine people coming out of church on Sunday, those members cannot affect the design or operational procedures of the flood reduction system.”

Retired U.S. Rep. Garret Graves agreed. Graves, who chaired the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority from 2008 – 2014, testified in February 2013 that because the Corps retains exclusive control over building hurricane flood protection, the local levee board’s role is “largely reduced to that of a bystander.”

One must also keep in mind that, from the perspective of board members on the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee Board, they were working with the great and powerful Army Corps with its 200 years of experience and sterling reputation. 

This is the Army Corps that had built tens of thousands of miles of levees along the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio Rivers, levees that were capable of withstanding surge heights of up to 20 feet for 30 days or more every single year. It was not reasonable for the Orleans Levee Board to doubt the Army Corps’ capability to build floodwalls atop a few miles of local drainage canals that needed to withstand about nine feet of storm surge for a few hours and only occasionally, not annually. 

Had the people who served on the Orleans Levee Board challenged the Army Corps’ proposed designs for the canals that failed during Katrina, they very likely would have been ignored. But this is all Monday-morning quarterbacking about events from 35 years ago. We will never know.

This we do know. The current Levee Authority East and West oversee the maintenance of the hurricane-protection system according to strict instructions provided by the Army Corps. If the levee authorities do not follow those instructions, the levees can be decertified, adversely affecting flood insurance rates.

For now, the post-Katrina levee board changes remain. Though the Orleans Levee Board was not at fault, we believe it makes sense to have levee boards with the current level of expertise. And as we stated last year, and are re-stating again this year, we would prefer that a blue-ribbon committee select our levee authority members, rather than the governor. 

The next step is convincing the Army Corps that the experts who sit on our levee boards deserve a role beyond that of bystander. One need only look at the levee breach event of August 29, 2005 to understand that.

Sandy Rosenthal is founder and president of Levees.org. H.J. Bosworth, Jr., P.E., is lead researcher for Levees.org.