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NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 25 (UPI) -- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and New Orleans levee officials never agreed on how to protect the city from storm waters, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Dating back to the 1970s, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed using floodgates to block off surges at the far eastern end of Lake Pontchartrain, in response to Hurricane Betsy in 1965, when flooding of New Orleans killed some 75 people and caused more than $1 billion in property damage.
In the 1980s, the corps wanted to install floodgates in front of the city's three main internal canals to protect from hurricane storm surges, but the Orleans Levee District, the city's flood protection agency, preferred to build higher flood walls along the canals, the newspaper reported Sunday.
However, over the subsequent 20 years, behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the levee board forced the corps to accept higher flood walls -- and funding was always a problem.
Despite $95 million to buttress the city's canal levees, neither agency detected the weaknesses inside the flood walls before Hurricane Katrina struck, the Times said.
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