3rd probe of Pumps on Canals requested

Is the Army Corps of Engineers putting New Orleans' residents safety at risk? Perhaps their incompetence resulted in the failure of the levees holding up during Hurricane Katrina. The entire Army Corps of Engineers need to be investigated.



Secretary Robert Gates has been asked to investigate a whistle-blower complaint that questions the reliability of 40 pumps the Army Corps of Engineers initially installed at three New Orleans canals after Hurricane Katrina.

It will be the third official review of the temporary pumping stations built under corps supervision at the 17th Street, London Avenue and Orleans Avenue canals after the storm's surge inundated the region 25 months ago, much of it rushing into the canals from Lake Pontchartrain and breaching substandard walls along 17th Street and London Avenue.

Corps commanders in New Orleans continue to say the once-troubled pumps have been overhauled and will work properly in a hurricane. The agency is providing information and running the pumps for a General Accounting Office team conducting a second investigation at the request of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans.

All probes were triggered by a corps engineer with the Los Angeles district, Maria Garzino, who says corps officials haven't properly addressed the critical issues she first raised in the spring of 2006 in her role as leader of the corps' pumping systems installation team.

"My office has received serious allegations which cast doubt on the integrity of costly pumping equipment installed in three main structures by USACE and its ability to protect New Orleans from further flooding," according to a Sept. 21 letter to Gates from Scott Bloch, head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

In his letter Bloch determined that Garzino's claims warrant further investigation under the federal whistle-blower statute.

"I have concluded that there is a substantial likelihood that the information Ms. Garzino provided discloses a violation," he wrote. "Consequently, I am referring this information to you for an investigation of and appropriate action regarding Ms. Garzino's allegations and a report of your findings within 60 days of your receipt of this letter."

Neither Bloch's office nor the Defense Department could be reached for comment. But Col. Jeff Bedey, commander of the corps' Hurricane Protection Office in New Orleans, said Friday that he is familiar with Bloch's call for an investigation and the supporting documentation.

"I am confident that all the pumps currently in place on the three outfall canals will operate as they were designed to operate in the event a hurricane requires that we close gates," Bedey said.

Group releases documents

Jeff Ruch, executive director of the national whistle-blower advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, predicted Gates will assign investigators independent of the corps to conduct a more detailed technical probe than he says has been done to date.

In the end, Ruch said, Bloch could reject as unreasonable any or all of the findings of the Gates-directed inquiry, require more information, or accept all the findings outright.

Ruch released Bloch's letter to Gates and Garzino's official five-page "disclosure" in support of her allegations to The Times-Picayune.

Ruch's agency isn't representing Garzino, but because she consented to being publicly identified for the purposes of the investigation, Ruch said his group opted to release the documents to ensure the process is made public.

Garzino, who could not be reached for comment, was dispatched to New Orleans last year to oversee quality control in the manufacture and installation of hydraulic pumps in temporary stations that the corps and its contractors were building at the mouths of all three canals.

The stations were built alongside massive floodgates, also constructed post-Katrina, to provide internal drainage for surrounding neighborhoods in the event the gates were ever closed against storm surges in future hurricanes. The pumps are designed to lift rising canal water up and around the closed gates.

The hydraulic pumps that Garzino questions are installed at all three canals. The corps also subsequently added new nonhydraulic, direct-drive pumps to increase capacity at the much larger 17th Street Canal, and the reliability of those pumps isn't in question.

But Garzino says shortcuts taken by the corps and the contractor, Moving Waters Industries of Deerfield, Fla., to meet a June 1, 2006, deadline set by Congress produced inherently flawed pumping systems that she says still have not been properly tested.

Corps vouches for pumps

Bedey said neither Garzino's allegations nor his response to them has changed.

"I absolutely believe that the (pump) team took the information from Ms. Garzino, who was correct to write her report, and all the other things we learned over time, and made the changes required in order to operate these pumps as intended," he said.

Bedey and other corps officials said publicly last summer that they were encountering problems with some of the pumps so severe that various components would be rebuilt after the 2006 season.

They also have said they didn't test the pumps as extensively in Moving Waters Industries' laboratory as ordinarily would be done because of the critical need to provide some additional flood protection for the 2006 storm season, the first since Katrina.

But Bedey said he still thinks the decision to install the troublesome pumps in New Orleans and continue to work on them during hurricane season was a more prudent decision than simply having no drainage pumps at all had a storm threatened the city.

"Just last week, when the GAO was out here, we turned on the pumps, and they ran as long as we had enough water to run them," Bedey said.

A major challenge to testing the hydraulic pumps on site -- rather than in the lab before delivery -- is that they must have a minimum amount of water in which to operate at full capacity, and that's been hard to come by during the mostly dry days since Katrina.

"We have done everything we can do. And some of those pumps have run five or six hours continuously," Bedey said. "But it is a fact that we've never had enough water at 17th Street to operate all the 43 pumps there at one time, nor do we believe we ever will unless there's a hurricane."

In its initial probe this spring, the GAO found no evidence of fraud or improper influence behind the corps' decision to award the multimillion-dollar contracts to Moving Waters Industries. But the GAO did criticize the corps for giving false assurances to the public during the 2006 hurricane season.

Once it became apparent that they wouldn't be able to correct serious vibration problems during the season, corps officials should have provided a more honest, less optimistic assessment of the ability of their troubled pumps to perform during a hurricane, the GAO said.

Just a few weeks later, a separate "technical review" was ordered by Brig. Gen Robert Crear, commander of the Mississippi Valley Division in Vicksburg, Miss., which oversees the corps in New Orleans. He summoned corps engineers from other districts to do the work, and in a June 4, 2007, memo, Crear and the engineers insisted the pumps have been tested and will work properly.

But the report also confirmed that another round of needed repairs that would provide even more reliability were only just getting under way.

As a result, Landrieu ordered a second GAO investigation.

Bedey said he hasn't yet been apprised of those findings and doesn't know whether that probe is complete.