Chapter 3 Text Analysis Tools Part 1, Text Mining

Now that we have some text data to work with, we will begin to learn some methods for analyzing text. This section will cover text mining. In future weeks we will discuss sentiment and language models.

3.1 Working with Text Data in R

Let’s dig in a little more to into how to handle text data in R. We’ll first introduce a concept called tidytext. Silge and Robinson define tidytext as text data in which each row is a token. Tokens are meaningful groups of text, such as words, sentences, or n-grams (groups of n words or letters). This concept is borrowed from Wickam’s concept of tidy data, which says that each observation should be a row, each variable a column, and each type of observational unit a table.

In other words, tidy data could look something like this:

Row Person Birthday Occupation
1 Joe 12/3/1963 Carpenter
2 Malik 6/8/1978 Architect
3 Suzanna 4/3/2001 Student

Or this:

Row County Temperature PM2.5
1 Santa Clara 78.1 12.1
2 San Mateo 82.3 32.1
3 San Francisco 65.4 44.7

While tidy text would look something like this:

Row Paper Article Text
1 New York Times Study Compares Gas Stove Pollu… Using
2 New York Times Study Compares Gas Stove Pollu… a
3 New York Times Study Compares Gas Stove Pollu… single

Or this:

Row Paper Article Text
1 New York Times Study Compares Gas Stove Pollution to Secondhand Cigarette Smoke Using a single gas-stove burner can raise indoor concentrations of benzene, which is linked to cancer risk, above levels that have prompted investigations when detected outdoors.
2 New York Times Study Compares Gas Stove Pollution to Secondhand Cigarette Smoke For the peer-reviewed study, researchers at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability measured benzene emissions from stoves at 87 homes in California and Colorado and found that natural gas and propane stoves emitted benzene at rates that frequently reached indoor concentrations above health benchmarks set by the World Health Organization and other public agencies.
3 New York Times Study Compares Gas Stove Pollution to Secondhand Cigarette Smoke In about a third of the homes, a single gas burner on high or an oven set at 350 degrees for 45 minutes raised benzene levels above the upper range of indoor concentrations seen in secondhand tobacco smoke, researchers found.

What about the Guardian news data that we pulled earlier - is this in tidy text format? Read it in to your R environment, and if not, try to convert it into a tidy text table.

library(readr)
ca_wf <- read_csv("Data/ca_wf.csv")

One of the first questions that comes up when trying to convert a document into tidytext format is what is our unit of analysis? This is an important question for any research project, and should be given careful thought.

Perhaps we want to study whether there are differences in how blogs and news articles write about climate events. Using the Guardian dataset from earlier, we can create two dataframes of the following forms:

library(tidytext)
library(dplyr)

# first, set up liveblog dataframe
tidy_blogs <- ca_wf %>%
  filter(type == "liveblog")

# unnest tokens
tidy_blogs %<>%
  unnest_tokens(word, body_text) %>%
  anti_join(stop_words)

# look at examples
tidy_blogs %>%
  select(type, word) %>%
  head()
## # A tibble: 6 × 2
##   type     word    
##   <chr>    <chr>   
## 1 liveblog 6pm     
## 2 liveblog york    
## 3 liveblog city    
## 4 liveblog skies   
## 5 liveblog shrouded
## 6 liveblog thick
library(tidytext)
library(dplyr)

# first, set up liveblog dataframe
tidy_blogs <- ca_wf %>%
  filter(type == "liveblog")

# unnest tokens
tidy_blogs %<>%
  unnest_tokens(word, body_text) %>%
  anti_join(stop_words)

# look at examples
tidy_blogs %>%
  select(type, word) %>%
  head()
## # A tibble: 6 × 2
##   type     word    
##   <chr>    <chr>   
## 1 liveblog 6pm     
## 2 liveblog york    
## 3 liveblog city    
## 4 liveblog skies   
## 5 liveblog shrouded
## 6 liveblog thick
tidy_articles <- ca_wf %>%
  filter(type == "article")


tidy_articles %<>%
  unnest_tokens(word, body_text) %>%
  anti_join(stop_words)


tidy_articles %>%
  select(type, word) %>%
  head()
## # A tibble: 6 × 2
##   type    word    
##   <chr>   <chr>   
## 1 article poor    
## 2 article air     
## 3 article quality 
## 4 article returned
## 5 article north   
## 6 article east

We’ve used unnest_tokens() before. But notice the anti_join(stop_words)? What do you think is happening here?

First, let’s take a look at stop_words. You can run View(stop_words), once tidytext is already in your library, to do the same on your machine. We see that these stop words come free three different lexicons: SMART, snowball, and onix. Stop words are essentially words that are not useful for our analyses, such as “the.” Are there any words in these lists that you are surprised to see?

Table 3.1: Stop Words from the TidyText Package
word lexicon
a SMART
a’s SMART
able SMART
about SMART
above SMART
according SMART
accordingly SMART
across SMART
actually SMART
after SMART
afterwards SMART
again SMART
against SMART
ain’t SMART
all SMART
allow SMART
allows SMART
almost SMART
alone SMART
along SMART
already SMART
also SMART
although SMART
always SMART
am SMART
among SMART
amongst SMART
an SMART
and SMART
another SMART
any SMART
anybody SMART
anyhow SMART
anyone SMART
anything SMART
anyway SMART
anyways SMART
anywhere SMART
apart SMART
appear SMART
appreciate SMART
appropriate SMART
are SMART
aren’t SMART
around SMART
as SMART
aside SMART
ask SMART
asking SMART
associated SMART
at SMART
available SMART
away SMART
awfully SMART
b SMART
be SMART
became SMART
because SMART
become SMART
becomes SMART
becoming SMART
been SMART
before SMART
beforehand SMART
behind SMART
being SMART
believe SMART
below SMART
beside SMART
besides SMART
best SMART
better SMART
between SMART
beyond SMART
both SMART
brief SMART
but SMART
by SMART
c SMART
c’mon SMART
c’s SMART
came SMART
can SMART
can’t SMART
cannot SMART
cant SMART
cause SMART
causes SMART
certain SMART
certainly SMART
changes SMART
clearly SMART
co SMART
com SMART
come SMART
comes SMART
concerning SMART
consequently SMART
consider SMART
considering SMART
contain SMART
containing SMART
contains SMART
corresponding SMART
could SMART
couldn’t SMART
course SMART
currently SMART
d SMART
definitely SMART
described SMART
despite SMART
did SMART
didn’t SMART
different SMART
do SMART
does SMART
doesn’t SMART
doing SMART
don’t SMART
done SMART
down SMART
downwards SMART
during SMART
e SMART
each SMART
edu SMART
eg SMART
eight SMART
either SMART
else SMART
elsewhere SMART
enough SMART
entirely SMART
especially SMART
et SMART
etc SMART
even SMART
ever SMART
every SMART
everybody SMART
everyone SMART
everything SMART
everywhere SMART
ex SMART
exactly SMART
example SMART
except SMART
f SMART
far SMART
few SMART
fifth SMART
first SMART
five SMART
followed SMART
following SMART
follows SMART
for SMART
former SMART
formerly SMART
forth SMART
four SMART
from SMART
further SMART
furthermore SMART
g SMART
get SMART
gets SMART
getting SMART
given SMART
gives SMART
go SMART
goes SMART
going SMART
gone SMART
got SMART
gotten SMART
greetings SMART
h SMART
had SMART
hadn’t SMART
happens SMART
hardly SMART
has SMART
hasn’t SMART
have SMART
haven’t SMART
having SMART
he SMART
he’s SMART
hello SMART
help SMART
hence SMART
her SMART
here SMART
here’s SMART
hereafter SMART
hereby SMART
herein SMART
hereupon SMART
hers SMART
herself SMART
hi SMART
him SMART
himself SMART
his SMART
hither SMART
hopefully SMART
how SMART
howbeit SMART
however SMART
i SMART
i’d SMART
i’ll SMART
i’m SMART
i’ve SMART
ie SMART
if SMART
ignored SMART
immediate SMART
in SMART
inasmuch SMART
inc SMART
indeed SMART
indicate SMART
indicated SMART
indicates SMART
inner SMART
insofar SMART
instead SMART
into SMART
inward SMART
is SMART
isn’t SMART
it SMART
it’d SMART
it’ll SMART
it’s SMART
its SMART
itself SMART
j SMART
just SMART
k SMART
keep SMART
keeps SMART
kept SMART
know SMART
knows SMART
known SMART
l SMART
last SMART
lately SMART
later SMART
latter SMART
latterly SMART
least SMART
less SMART
lest SMART
let SMART
let’s SMART
like SMART
liked SMART
likely SMART
little SMART
look SMART
looking SMART
looks SMART
ltd SMART
m SMART
mainly SMART
many SMART
may SMART
maybe SMART
me SMART
mean SMART
meanwhile SMART
merely SMART
might SMART
more SMART
moreover SMART
most SMART
mostly SMART
much SMART
must SMART
my SMART
myself SMART
n SMART
name SMART
namely SMART
nd SMART
near SMART
nearly SMART
necessary SMART
need SMART
needs SMART
neither SMART
never SMART
nevertheless SMART
new SMART
next SMART
nine SMART
no SMART
nobody SMART
non SMART
none SMART
noone SMART
nor SMART
normally SMART
not SMART
nothing SMART
novel SMART
now SMART
nowhere SMART
o SMART
obviously SMART
of SMART
off SMART
often SMART
oh SMART
ok SMART
okay SMART
old SMART
on SMART
once SMART
one SMART
ones SMART
only SMART
onto SMART
or SMART
other SMART
others SMART
otherwise SMART
ought SMART
our SMART
ours SMART
ourselves SMART
out SMART
outside SMART
over SMART
overall SMART
own SMART
p SMART
particular SMART
particularly SMART
per SMART
perhaps SMART
placed SMART
please SMART
plus SMART
possible SMART
presumably SMART
probably SMART
provides SMART
q SMART
que SMART
quite SMART
qv SMART
r SMART
rather SMART
rd SMART
re SMART
really SMART
reasonably SMART
regarding SMART
regardless SMART
regards SMART
relatively SMART
respectively SMART
right SMART
s SMART
said SMART
same SMART
saw SMART
say SMART
saying SMART
says SMART
second SMART
secondly SMART
see SMART
seeing SMART
seem SMART
seemed SMART
seeming SMART
seems SMART
seen SMART
self SMART
selves SMART
sensible SMART
sent SMART
serious SMART
seriously SMART
seven SMART
several SMART
shall SMART
she SMART
should SMART
shouldn’t SMART
since SMART
six SMART
so SMART
some SMART
somebody SMART
somehow SMART
someone SMART
something SMART
sometime SMART
sometimes SMART
somewhat SMART
somewhere SMART
soon SMART
sorry SMART
specified SMART
specify SMART
specifying SMART
still SMART
sub SMART
such SMART
sup SMART
sure SMART
t SMART
t’s SMART
take SMART
taken SMART
tell SMART
tends SMART
th SMART
than SMART
thank SMART
thanks SMART
thanx SMART
that SMART
that’s SMART
thats SMART
the SMART
their SMART
theirs SMART
them SMART
themselves SMART
then SMART
thence SMART
there SMART
there’s SMART
thereafter SMART
thereby SMART
therefore SMART
therein SMART
theres SMART
thereupon SMART
these SMART
they SMART
they’d SMART
they’ll SMART
they’re SMART
they’ve SMART
think SMART
third SMART
this SMART
thorough SMART
thoroughly SMART
those SMART
though SMART
three SMART
through SMART
throughout SMART
thru SMART
thus SMART
to SMART
together SMART
too SMART
took SMART
toward SMART
towards SMART
tried SMART
tries SMART
truly SMART
try SMART
trying SMART
twice SMART
two SMART
u SMART
un SMART
under SMART
unfortunately SMART
unless SMART
unlikely SMART
until SMART
unto SMART
up SMART
upon SMART
us SMART
use SMART
used SMART
useful SMART
uses SMART
using SMART
usually SMART
uucp SMART
v SMART
value SMART
various SMART
very SMART
via SMART
viz SMART
vs SMART
w SMART
want SMART
wants SMART
was SMART
wasn’t SMART
way SMART
we SMART
we’d SMART
we’ll SMART
we’re SMART
we’ve SMART
welcome SMART
well SMART
went SMART
were SMART
weren’t SMART
what SMART
what’s SMART
whatever SMART
when SMART
whence SMART
whenever SMART
where SMART
where’s SMART
whereafter SMART
whereas SMART
whereby SMART
wherein SMART
whereupon SMART
wherever SMART
whether SMART
which SMART
while SMART
whither SMART
who SMART
who’s SMART
whoever SMART
whole SMART
whom SMART
whose SMART
why SMART
will SMART
willing SMART
wish SMART
with SMART
within SMART
without SMART
won’t SMART
wonder SMART
would SMART
would SMART
wouldn’t SMART
x SMART
y SMART
yes SMART
yet SMART
you SMART
you’d SMART
you’ll SMART
you’re SMART
you’ve SMART
your SMART
yours SMART
yourself SMART
yourselves SMART
z SMART
zero SMART
i snowball
me snowball
my snowball
myself snowball
we snowball
our snowball
ours snowball
ourselves snowball
you snowball
your snowball
yours snowball
yourself snowball
yourselves snowball
he snowball
him snowball
his snowball
himself snowball
she snowball
her snowball
hers snowball
herself snowball
it snowball
its snowball
itself snowball
they snowball
them snowball
their snowball
theirs snowball
themselves snowball
what snowball
which snowball
who snowball
whom snowball
this snowball
that snowball
these snowball
those snowball
am snowball
is snowball
are snowball
was snowball
were snowball
be snowball
been snowball
being snowball
have snowball
has snowball
had snowball
having snowball
do snowball
does snowball
did snowball
doing snowball
would snowball
should snowball
could snowball
ought snowball
i’m snowball
you’re snowball
he’s snowball
she’s snowball
it’s snowball
we’re snowball
they’re snowball
i’ve snowball
you’ve snowball
we’ve snowball
they’ve snowball
i’d snowball
you’d snowball
he’d snowball
she’d snowball
we’d snowball
they’d snowball
i’ll snowball
you’ll snowball
he’ll snowball
she’ll snowball
we’ll snowball
they’ll snowball
isn’t snowball
aren’t snowball
wasn’t snowball
weren’t snowball
hasn’t snowball
haven’t snowball
hadn’t snowball
doesn’t snowball
don’t snowball
didn’t snowball
won’t snowball
wouldn’t snowball
shan’t snowball
shouldn’t snowball
can’t snowball
cannot snowball
couldn’t snowball
mustn’t snowball
let’s snowball
that’s snowball
who’s snowball
what’s snowball
here’s snowball
there’s snowball
when’s snowball
where’s snowball
why’s snowball
how’s snowball
a snowball
an snowball
the snowball
and snowball
but snowball
if snowball
or snowball
because snowball
as snowball
until snowball
while snowball
of snowball
at snowball
by snowball
for snowball
with snowball
about snowball
against snowball
between snowball
into snowball
through snowball
during snowball
before snowball
after snowball
above snowball
below snowball
to snowball
from snowball
up snowball
down snowball
in snowball
out snowball
on snowball
off snowball
over snowball
under snowball
again snowball
further snowball
then snowball
once snowball
here snowball
there snowball
when snowball
where snowball
why snowball
how snowball
all snowball
any snowball
both snowball
each snowball
few snowball
more snowball
most snowball
other snowball
some snowball
such snowball
no snowball
nor snowball
not snowball
only snowball
own snowball
same snowball
so snowball
than snowball
too snowball
very snowball
a onix
about onix
above onix
across onix
after onix
again onix
against onix
all onix
almost onix
alone onix
along onix
already onix
also onix
although onix
always onix
among onix
an onix
and onix
another onix
any onix
anybody onix
anyone onix
anything onix
anywhere onix
are onix
area onix
areas onix
around onix
as onix
ask onix
asked onix
asking onix
asks onix
at onix
away onix
back onix
backed onix
backing onix
backs onix
be onix
became onix
because onix
become onix
becomes onix
been onix
before onix
began onix
behind onix
being onix
beings onix
best onix
better onix
between onix
big onix
both onix
but onix
by onix
came onix
can onix
cannot onix
case onix
cases onix
certain onix
certainly onix
clear onix
clearly onix
come onix
could onix
did onix
differ onix
different onix
differently onix
do onix
does onix
done onix
down onix
down onix
downed onix
downing onix
downs onix
during onix
each onix
early onix
either onix
end onix
ended onix
ending onix
ends onix
enough onix
even onix
evenly onix
ever onix
every onix
everybody onix
everyone onix
everything onix
everywhere onix
face onix
faces onix
fact onix
facts onix
far onix
felt onix
few onix
find onix
finds onix
first onix
for onix
four onix
from onix
full onix
fully onix
further onix
furthered onix
furthering onix
furthers onix
gave onix
general onix
generally onix
get onix
gets onix
give onix
given onix
gives onix
go onix
going onix
good onix
goods onix
got onix
great onix
greater onix
greatest onix
group onix
grouped onix
grouping onix
groups onix
had onix
has onix
have onix
having onix
he onix
her onix
here onix
herself onix
high onix
high onix
high onix
higher onix
highest onix
him onix
himself onix
his onix
how onix
however onix
i onix
if onix
important onix
in onix
interest onix
interested onix
interesting onix
interests onix
into onix
is onix
it onix
its onix
itself onix
just onix
keep onix
keeps onix
kind onix
knew onix
know onix
known onix
knows onix
large onix
largely onix
last onix
later onix
latest onix
least onix
less onix
let onix
lets onix
like onix
likely onix
long onix
longer onix
longest onix
made onix
make onix
making onix
man onix
many onix
may onix
me onix
member onix
members onix
men onix
might onix
more onix
most onix
mostly onix
mr onix
mrs onix
much onix
must onix
my onix
myself onix
necessary onix
need onix
needed onix
needing onix
needs onix
never onix
new onix
new onix
newer onix
newest onix
next onix
no onix
nobody onix
non onix
noone onix
not onix
nothing onix
now onix
nowhere onix
number onix
numbers onix
of onix
off onix
often onix
old onix
older onix
oldest onix
on onix
once onix
one onix
only onix
open onix
opened onix
opening onix
opens onix
or onix
order onix
ordered onix
ordering onix
orders onix
other onix
others onix
our onix
out onix
over onix
part onix
parted onix
parting onix
parts onix
per onix
perhaps onix
place onix
places onix
point onix
pointed onix
pointing onix
points onix
possible onix
present onix
presented onix
presenting onix
presents onix
problem onix
problems onix
put onix
puts onix
quite onix
rather onix
really onix
right onix
right onix
room onix
rooms onix
said onix
same onix
saw onix
say onix
says onix
second onix
seconds onix
see onix
seem onix
seemed onix
seeming onix
seems onix
sees onix
several onix
shall onix
she onix
should onix
show onix
showed onix
showing onix
shows onix
side onix
sides onix
since onix
small onix
smaller onix
smallest onix
some onix
somebody onix
someone onix
something onix
somewhere onix
state onix
states onix
still onix
still onix
such onix
sure onix
take onix
taken onix
than onix
that onix
the onix
their onix
them onix
then onix
there onix
therefore onix
these onix
they onix
thing onix
things onix
think onix
thinks onix
this onix
those onix
though onix
thought onix
thoughts onix
three onix
through onix
thus onix
to onix
today onix
together onix
too onix
took onix
toward onix
turn onix
turned onix
turning onix
turns onix
two onix
under onix
until onix
up onix
upon onix
us onix
use onix
used onix
uses onix
very onix
want onix
wanted onix
wanting onix
wants onix
was onix
way onix
ways onix
we onix
well onix
wells onix
went onix
were onix
what onix
when onix
where onix
whether onix
which onix
while onix
who onix
whole onix
whose onix
why onix
will onix
with onix
within onix
without onix
work onix
worked onix
working onix
works onix
would onix
year onix
years onix
yet onix
you onix
young onix
younger onix
youngest onix
your onix
yours onix

Next, let’s make sure we understand what the anti_join is doing. When merging two different dataframes, it is common to use “join” functions. There are two major types of joins in R: mutating joins and filtering joins. We’ll use mutating joins for most instances where we want to combine two sets of information, but in this case, the filtering anti_join() allows us to remove all the stop words from our dataframe. The table below is a helpful guide (this is taken from a dplyr cheat sheet, you can see cheat sheets for various R packages here.

Now that we have removed stop words and organized our data, we can do things like examine the word frequencies in articles and blogs.

# look at blog word frequencies
tidy_blogs %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE)
## # A tibble: 2,379 × 2
##    word          n
##    <chr>     <int>
##  1 air         111
##  2 quality      69
##  3 smoke        68
##  4 wildfires    64
##  5 trump        59
##  6 pence        58
##  7 york         58
##  8 canada       55
##  9 president    55
## 10 city         46
## # ℹ 2,369 more rows
# look at article frequencies
tidy_articles %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE)
## # A tibble: 1,808 × 2
##    word          n
##    <chr>     <int>
##  1 air          96
##  2 smoke        58
##  3 quality      50
##  4 york         40
##  5 canada       37
##  6 wildfires    34
##  7 climate      33
##  8 fires        32
##  9 city         31
## 10 wednesday    30
## # ℹ 1,798 more rows

Both samples contain words like “air,” “quality,” and “fire,” which are not surprising, since our searches included these terms. In this small sample, the blogs contain more words like “trump,” “pence,” and “president,” suggesting that these news stories may be more political than the articles.

library(tidyr)
frequency <- bind_rows(tidy_blogs,
                       tidy_articles) %>% 
  count(type, word) %>%
  group_by(type) %>%
  mutate(proportion = n / sum(n)) %>% 
  select(-n) %>% 
  pivot_wider(names_from = type, values_from = proportion) 

frequency %>%
  head()
## # A tibble: 6 × 3
##   word     article  liveblog
##   <chr>      <dbl>     <dbl>
## 1 1,000   0.000245  0.000144
## 2 1,300   0.000245 NA       
## 3 1,624   0.000245  0.000144
## 4 10      0.000735  0.000864
## 5 100     0.000490  0.000144
## 6 100,000 0.000490 NA
library(scales)
library(ggplot2)

# expect a warning about rows with missing values being removed
ggplot(frequency, aes(x = article, y = liveblog, 
                      color = abs(article - liveblog))) +
  geom_abline(color = "gray40", lty = 2) +
  geom_jitter(alpha = 0.1, size = 2.5, width = 0.3, height = 0.3) +
  geom_text(aes(label = word), check_overlap = TRUE, vjust = 1.5) +
  scale_x_log10(labels = percent_format()) +
  scale_y_log10(labels = percent_format()) +
  scale_color_gradient(limits = c(0, 0.001), 
                       low = "darkslategray4", high = "gray75") +
  theme(legend.position="none") +
  labs(x = "Articles", y = "Blogs")

3.2 Hurricane Katrina and the National Flood Insurance Program

Before jumping into the models and coding, we’ll take a look at the costliest climate disaster to hit the U.S.: Hurricane Katrina. We focus on this event because of the scale of its destruction, but also because of what it reveals about race, class, and politics in the U.S., and what this may mean for a climate-changed future.

The readings for this week cover Katrina in a bit more detail. If you have the time, I highly recommend listening to the entire Floodlines podcast series, or watching the movie Katrina Babies. For now, we will mostly focus on various governmental responses to the disaster.

Hurricane Katrina provided a political opening for reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which insures flood losses in the United States. The program was created in 1968, a few years after Hurricane Betsy brought widespread destruction to Louisiana. For various reasons, the NFIP had endured financial losses that it likely would never be able to repay. Therefore, when Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005, another window of opportunity for change in policy opened. The discourse and lobbying would ultimately lead to changes enacted in the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012.

We are going to look at congressional hearing records, conducted in the wake of Katrina, to get a sense of how the disaster was portrayed among lawmakers and through official government channels. The congressional hearing records that we are using only go until 2010, so we will not be able to analyze everything in the run-up to Biggert-Waters. Still, we can look at how Katrina was discussed in congress in the seven years following the storm.

3.3 Gathering Data from ProQuest

Last week, we learned how to gather text data ourselves from APIs and using web scrapers. This week, I want to introduce another useful resource for gathering text data: the Pro Quest Text and Data Mining Studio. Pro Quest is one of the largest databases out there on news articles, scholarly articles, government reports, and dissertations. The TDM Studio allows users to create their own databases of news articles or congressional hearings, and to either visualize the information directly or work with the data in Jupyter Notebooks.

To get started with ProQuest TDM Studio, start an account here. Try producing a visualization. Make sure that you check all three boxes for “geographic analysis,” “sentiment analysis,” and “topic modeling” (we will learn these in more detail in the next three weeks). Then spend some time thinking about the precise search terms you want to use and the types of media you want to include or exclude. Then submit your request! These can take hours to complete, so we you probably want to check back in on them later.

For now, we’ll try the other application in ProQuest TDM Studio: the workbench. Try clicking “create new database” and choosing between publication titles, ProQuest databases, and congressional hearings. Here, we’ll look at data from the most recent congressional hearings (2003-2010).

From the workbench dashboard, you can click “Open Jupyter Notebook” to begin. Within the Jupyter Notebook, you can click the “data” folder to see the name of your custom dataset. Then go to Getting Started R -> 2022.5.13 -> ProQuest TDM Studio R Samples. In “R Display Document Counts” and “R Convert to Dataframe,” change SAMPLENAME to your database name to get the number of records and save your file to a .csv.

Now, you can begin a new Jupyter Notebook by following the instructions in Getting Started/2022.05.25/ProQuest TDM Studio Manuals/TDM_Studio_Manual.ipynb. You could also click “New” and “R” (or whatever program you want to use) in the filepath that you want to save your notebook (e.g. Getting Started R/2022.05.13/ProQuest TDM Studio R Samples/), although if you set it up this way you will not be able to load in some key packages such as tidytext.

Once you have your own notebook, you can run the following code to read in your csv file:

########################################
## title: proquest exploratory analysis
## author: you!
## purpose: experiment with proquest tdm studio
## date: 
########################################
library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(stringr)

# check that your file is there (may need to change filepath depending on where your notebook is saved)
list.files("../output_files/")

## read in file (change the name to your file!)
congress_hearings <- read_csv("../output_files/Congressional_Hearings_for_NFIP_text_analysis.csv")

Great, now we have a dataset of congressional hearings from 2003-2010. But let’s say we only are interested in those that have the words “Hurricane” and “Katrina” in the title. We can limit our data to these by running the following:

# filter to only hearings with "Katrina" and "Hurricane" in title
katrina_hearings <- congress_hearings %>%
  filter(str_detect(Title, "(?=.*Hurricane)(?=.*Katrina)"))

# check names of titles
katrina_hearings$Title

We could now do various text analyses on this dataset. If we wanted to export our results, there is a specific process for that. We can’t export full text, so we will limit our data to only the dates and titles of hearings, and save these to the output file folder.

# limit to dates and titles
hearings_dates <- katrina_hearings %>%
  select(Title, Date)

# save to output folder
write_csv(hearing_dates, "../output_files/hearing_dates.csv")

Finally, we can make a copy of the Getting Started/2022.05.25/ProQuest TDM Studio Manuals/Export_Instructions.ipynb (click File -> Make a Copy…). It may help to move our export file (hearing_dates.csv) to Getting Started/2022.05.25/ProQuest TDM Studio Samples/output_files.

Once it is exported, we can read it into our local machine.

# read in data
hearing_dates <- read_csv("Data/hearing_dates.csv")

# histogram of dates
ggplot(hearing_dates, aes(x = Date))+
  geom_histogram(fill = "blue")+
  labs(x = "Date", y = "Count", title = "Congressional Hearings with 'Hurricane' and 'Katrina' in Title, 2003-2010")+
  theme_minimal()

In short, the pros and cons of working in ProQuest are:

  • Pro: can analyze data on the cloud. This is great when working with large datasets, as it frees up your local machine to do whatever else you want to use it for.
  • Con: Slow and finicky. This could change, but as of now, the ProQuest TDM system is not super fast, and may freeze or crash on you. Just something to be aware of.
  • Con: Time required to output results. You can’t just save your outputs from ProQuest TDM to your desktop and use them, you need to have them approved by the ProQuest team. This process shouldn’t take too long (usually less than an hour), but it could take longer, so it’s important to budget this into your project timeline if you use these data!

3.4 Combining Text Mining with In-Depth Reading

Sometimes, the most effective way to gather meaning from text is to combine qualitative and computational approaches. By this, I mean that you can use your machine to mine large swaths of text, but you can use other sources of knowledge to figure out how to classify data, or to refine your approach and gather meanings from the most interesting parts of your data. In practice, we are all always using some qualitative processes to determine how to advance our research questions, whether we acknowledge this or not.

As an example, we might be interested in how congressional hearings played out following Hurricane Katrina. We could use our corpus of text data from all the hearings to sort and filter to only the most relevant ones, and then read these in detail.

We can start by looking at congressional hearings here. Ideally, we would systematically download hearings that met a certain criteria. For example, all the hearings that come up when we search “Hurricane Katrina,” as well as possibly some other search terms, possibly from a specific committee. For now, we will look broadly, at ten different hearings on different topics related to Katrina. All of these showed up in the first three pages of search results for “Hurricane Katrina.”

We will download PDF documents for each of the hearings of interest, and put them in the same folder. To begin, we can read in the hearing called “Why did the Levees Break?” we will use a package called pdftools to get the text from the PDF files into R.

library(pdftools)
# read hearing into R
levees_hearing <- pdf_text("Data/Katrina_hearings/katrina_hearing_levees.pdf") %>%
  as.data.frame()

# set column names 
colnames(levees_hearing) <- c("text")

Great! Let’s take a look at our data.

Table 3.2: Hurricane Katrina Hearing: Why Did the Levees Fail?
text

S. Hrg. 109–526

                                                           HURRICANE KATRINA:
                                                         WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL?

                                                                      HEARING
                                                                              BEFORE THE

                                                          COMMITTEE ON
                                                     HOMELAND SECURITY AND
                                                     GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                                                      UNITED STATES SENATE
                                                        ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
                                                                            FIRST SESSION

                                                                           NOVEMBER 2, 2005

                                                               Printed for the use of the
                                                Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

                                                                                 (
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HURRICANE KATRINA: WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL?

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S. Hrg. 109–526

                                                           HURRICANE KATRINA:
                                                         WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL?

                                                                        HEARING
                                                                               BEFORE THE

                                                          COMMITTEE ON
                                                     HOMELAND SECURITY AND
                                                     GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                                                      UNITED STATES SENATE
                                                        ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
                                                                             FIRST SESSION

                                                                           NOVEMBER 2, 2005

                                                               Printed for the use of the
                                                Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

                                                                                  (
                                                                 U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
                                        24–446 PDF                          WASHINGTON : 2006

                                                  For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
                                               Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800
                                                       Fax: (202) 512–2250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402–0001
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman TED STEVENS, Alaska JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio CARL LEVIN, Michigan NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii TOM COBURN, Oklahoma THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware LINCOLN D. CHAFEE, Rhode Island MARK DAYTON, Minnesota ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico MARK PRYOR, Arkansas JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia

                                                         MICHAEL D. BOPP, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
                                                               THOMAS R. ELDRIDGE, Senior Counsel
                                                    JOYCE A. RECHTSCHAFFEN, Minority Staff Director and Counsel
                                                        DAVID M. BERICK, Minority Professional Staff Member
                                                               TRINA DRIESSNACK TYRER, Chief Clerk

                                                                                      (II)
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CONTENTS

                                  Opening statements:                                                                                                         Page
                                     Senator Collins .................................................................................................           1
                                     Senator Lieberman ...........................................................................................               2
                                     Senator Voinovich .............................................................................................            24
                                     Senator Akaka ..................................................................................................           27
                                     Senator Warner ................................................................................................            30
                                     Senator Carper .................................................................................................           32
                                     Senator Coleman ..............................................................................................             36

                                                                                         WITNESSES

                                                                          WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2005
                                  Ivor Ll. van Heerden, Ph.D., Head, State of Louisiana Forensic Data Gath-
                                    ering Team, Director, Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of
                                    Hurricanes, and Deputy Director, Louisiana State University Hurricane
                                    Center, Baton Rouge, Louisiana .........................................................................                     5
                                  Paul F. Mlakar, Ph.D., P.E., Senior Research Scientist, U.S. Army Research
                                    and Development Center, Vicksburg, Mississippi .............................................                                 8
                                  Raymond B. Seed, Ph.D., Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
                                    University of California at Berkeley, on behalf of the National Science
                                    Foundation-Sponsored Levee Investigation Team .............................................                                 10
                                  Peter Nicholson, Ph.D., P.E., Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental
                                    Engineering and Graduate Program Chair, University of Hawaii, on behalf
                                    of the American Society of Civil Engineers ........................................................                         14

                                                                        ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES
                                  Mlakar, Paul F.:
                                      Testimony ..........................................................................................................       8
                                      Prepared statement ..........................................................................................             98
                                  Nicholson, Peter:
                                      Testimony ..........................................................................................................     14
                                      Prepared statement with attachments ...........................................................                         121
                                  Seed, Raymond B.:
                                      Testimony ..........................................................................................................     10
                                      Prepared statement with attachments ...........................................................                         102
                                  van Heerden, Ivor Ll.:
                                      Testimony ..........................................................................................................       5
                                      Prepared statement with attachments ...........................................................                           49

                                                                                           APPENDIX
                                  Letter and e-mail from Raymond B. Seed .............................................................                        208
                                  Preliminary Report on the Performance of the New Orleans Levee Systems
                                    in Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 .........................................................                         224
                                  Questions and Responses for the Record from:
                                      Mr. van Heerden ...............................................................................................         162
                                      Mr. Mlakar ........................................................................................................     166
                                      Mr. Seed ............................................................................................................   170
                                      Mr. Nicholson ....................................................................................................      206

                                                                                                (III)
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HURRICANE KATRINA: WHY DID THE LEVEES FAIL?

                                                           WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2005

                                                                             U.S. SENATE,
                                                   COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND
                                                                     GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS,
                                                                                  Washington, DC.
                                    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:37 a.m., in room
                                  342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Susan M. Collins, Chair-
                                  man of the Committee, presiding.
                                    Present: Senators Collins, Voinovich, Coleman, Warner, Lieber-
                                  man, Akaka, Carper, Dayton, Lautenberg, and Pryor.
                                                OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN COLLINS
                                     Chairman COLLINS. The Committee will come to order. Today,
                                  the Committee continues its investigation into the preparation for
                                  and response to Hurricane Katrina. Our focus at our fifth hearing
                                  this morning will be on why the levee system in and around New
                                  Orleans failed.
                                     This flood-control system was not constructed as Katrina bore
                                  down on New Orleans. It is a project that dates back 40 years and
                                  was first authorized by Congress in the Flood Control Act of 1965.
                                  It is a project that has consumed $458 million of the taxpayers’
                                  money. Yet the project still is not complete, and key elements failed
                                  when put to the test.
                                     While some of the floodwalls and levees were overtopped, some-
                                  thing much more catastrophic happened that was not anticipated.
                                  Some levees and floodwalls failed outright, leaving gaping holes
                                  through which water rushed uncontrollably into the neighborhoods
                                  of New Orleans.
                                     The result was a city more than 80 percent underwater. Esti-
                                  mates by experts tell us that this was approximately twice the per-
                                  centage that would have flooded solely from overtopping and that,
                                  even in those parts that were expected to flood, the levee breaks
                                  caused the floodwaters to be far deeper.
                                     This flooding caused enormous destruction and tragic loss of life.
                                  It made inoperable a land-based relief plan and aggravated the suf-
                                  fering and deprivation of the survivors. It caused far more devasta-
                                  tion than would have occurred if the levees had held.
                                     Our four witnesses today are the leaders of forensic teams that
                                  are investigating why the levees and floodwalls failed. These teams
                                  are sponsored by the State of Louisiana, the National Science
                                  Foundation, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the U.S.
                                  Army Corps of Engineers. The National Science Foundation and
                                                                                      (1)
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2

                                  the American Society of Civil Engineers teams will be releasing a
                                  joint interim report detailing their initial findings at this hearing.1
                                     The testimony we will receive today demonstrates that many of
                                  the widespread failures throughout the levee system were not sole-
                                  ly the result of Mother Nature. Rather, they were the result, it ap-
                                  pears, of human error in the form of design and construction flaws,
                                  as well as a confused and delayed response to the collapse.
                                     For example, at the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals, the
                                  evidence suggests that the design and construction of the floodwalls
                                  did not adequately account for layers of unstable soil beneath these
                                  walls that became, literally, ‘‘slippery when wet.’’ Built on a weak
                                  foundation, these floodwalls could not stand up to the force of the
                                  water brought by the storm.
                                     We will hear that the flooding east of the Industrial Canal in
                                  New Orleans East and in the lower Ninth Ward was caused in part
                                  by the storm surge from the hurricane that flowed over the top of
                                  the levees and floodwalls protecting those parts of the city. But we
                                  will also hear that this flooding was made worse by poor design
                                  and a lack of a uniform, comprehensive approach to levee construc-
                                  tion.
                                     In addition, our witnesses will testify that some of the levees in
                                  St. Bernard Parish apparently were built with inferior material
                                  that washed away as Katrina hit, allowing the surge waters to flow
                                  more easily into that parish.
                                     We will also hear troubling concerns that the Army Corps’ ongo-
                                  ing repair and reconstruction efforts have been insufficient. At
                                  least one of the team’s leaders believes that these rebuilt levees
                                  may be at risk of failing in another storm, a disturbing finding that
                                  raises serious questions about the safety of the city’s returning
                                  residents.
                                     This Committee’s investigation of Hurricane Katrina has already
                                  exposed many flaws in what we thought was a coordinated home-
                                  land security system that has been built during the past 4 years.
                                  Our hearing today will demonstrate that these flaws go beyond in-
                                  effective coordination and communication among the various levels
                                  of government to the very structures that are supposed to protect
                                  the residents of New Orleans.
                                     The people of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes put
                                  their faith in the levee system, and many of those people have lost
                                  everything. Unless the cause of this failure is investigated thor-
                                  oughly and addressed, New Orleans will remain a city in jeopardy.
                                  Katrina was a powerful hurricane, but it will not be the last hurri-
                                  cane.
                                     Senator Lieberman.
                                               OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LIEBERMAN
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
                                  Thanks to the expert witnesses that are before us today.
                                     I do want to stress that these are expert witnesses. These aren’t
                                  political people or elected officials. I must say, therefore, the collec-
                                  tive weight of their expert testimony, as I have read it in prepara-
                                  tion for this hearing, makes this, in my opinion, a very important
                                       1 The report appears in the Appendix on page 224.
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3

                                  hearing because the collective weight of the testimony and the find-
                                  ings that they will bring before us today, for me is as disheart-
                                  ening, as heartbreaking, as infuriating, and ultimately as embar-
                                  rassing as the scenes of human suffering and degradation that we
                                  saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
                                     This was a powerful hurricane. Our Committee’s investigation
                                  began to determine why the Federal Government and the State
                                  and local governments failed to adequately prepare for and respond
                                  to the hurricane so that some of the human suffering that we saw
                                  on television from this distance would not have occurred.
                                     But today, your testimony tells us something different, which
                                  really is—it is just shocking, which is that, notwithstanding how
                                  strong Hurricane Katrina was, a lot of the flooding of New Orleans
                                  should never have happened if the levees had done what they were
                                  supposed to do. What we kept hearing leading up to the hurricane
                                  hitting landfall and, of course, afterward was that the levees had
                                  been built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane.
                                     The testimony we are going to hear this morning, as I have read
                                  it in preparation, tells me that Hurricane Katrina may have been
                                  as weak as Category 1 when it hit the canals along Lake Pont-
                                  chartrain. But the bottom line point here that cries out from your
                                  testimony is that, in fact, it was human error in the design and
                                  construction of the storm surge barrier system that caused nearly
                                  all of the flooding of downtown New Orleans from the Lake Pont-
                                  chartrain canals. And that a significant amount of the flooding of
                                  the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, the lower Ninth Ward and of so-
                                  called New Orleans East, occurred from the storm surge, but a lot
                                  of it occurred because of the failure of the levees on that part of
                                  town to do what they were supposed to do.
                                     This ultimately has to lead our Committee to ask some very
                                  tough questions of the Army Corps of Engineers since the Army
                                  Corps of Engineers, not singularly but significantly, as a Federal
                                  agency, was in charge over a long period of years of the construc-
                                  tion of these levees. We will ask those questions.
                                     I must say that I am troubled also to hear from some of the wit-
                                  nesses in the testimony and in remarks to the staff that investiga-
                                  tors from the three independent teams feel that they have not had
                                  the kind of cooperation that they should have had from the Army
                                  Corps of Engineers in providing access to important facts and evi-
                                  dence. I hope that lack of cooperation will end. We will have a wit-
                                  ness before us in a couple of weeks from the Army Corps of Engi-
                                  neers administrative wing, and I hope before then that the frustra-
                                  tion that the investigators are feeling with the lack of cooperation
                                  from the Corps will end.
                                     Also, as the Chairman has said, your expert investigations have
                                  now found that some of the work done to repair the levees, the re-
                                  construction efforts after Katrina, was done, we all understand, in
                                  haste and in very urgent circumstances, was plagued by a lack of
                                  engineering oversight and perhaps by the use of substandard mate-
                                  rials, and therefore, may not adequately, from what I read in your
                                  testimony, protect the City of New Orleans from high tides, let
                                  alone another hurricane.
                                     Gentlemen, I truly appreciate what you have done here and what
                                  you are going to tell us this morning. It is not pleasant to hear it,
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4

                                  but it is important to hear it. Because as we said at the beginning,
                                  the only way we are going to make sure that, to the best of our
                                  ability, the suffering that occurred as a result of Hurricane Katrina
                                  in New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast region doesn’t hap-
                                  pen again is by pursuing the truth of what happened here and then
                                  fixing it.
                                     I thank each of you—forensic teams operated under the auspices
                                  of the State of Louisiana, the National Science Foundation, the
                                  American Society of Civil Engineers, and the U.S. Army Corps of
                                  Engineers. Respectively, from all that I know, you include many of
                                  the foremost experts in this country in the design and operation of
                                  levee systems and the impact of hurricanes and storm surge upon
                                  them. We are also very privileged to have the benefit of the joint
                                  preliminary report of the teams from the National Science Founda-
                                  tion and the American Society of Civil Engineers that is scheduled
                                  to be released this morning, and I want to extend a special thank
                                  you to Drs. Seed and Nicholson and their teams for their hard
                                  work in finishing that report in time for today’s hearings.
                                     I thank all the witnesses for rearranging also what I know are
                                  very demanding schedules to be here this morning.
                                     As a Committee, we are going to ask some tough questions about
                                  why the levees failed and what needs to be done to repair and re-
                                  construct them now to protect the people of New Orleans and to
                                  enable the reconstruction of that great American city. We ask that
                                  you answer those tough questions with the same frankness that
                                  you have shown in the testimony that you have prepared for this
                                  morning. Thank you very much.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator.
                                     I want to welcome, officially, our witnesses to this hearing. As
                                  Senator Lieberman indicated, we have assembled what is truly a
                                  world class panel of scientists to help us understand this issue.
                                     Dr. Ivor van Heerden is the Deputy Director of Louisiana State
                                  University’s Hurricane Center and Director of the Center for the
                                  Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. He has an under-
                                  graduate degree in geology and both a Master’s and a Ph.D. in ma-
                                  rine sciences. He currently is the lead investigator selected by the
                                  State of Louisiana to review the levee failures in the New Orleans
                                  area.
                                     Dr. Paul Mlakar is a West Point graduate. He has both a Mas-
                                  ter’s and a Ph.D. in engineering science. Dr. Mlakar has served as
                                  the Chief of the Concrete and Materials Division of what is now
                                  called the Army Engineer Research and Development Center. Dr.
                                  Mlakar led the Corps’ performance study of the Pentagon after the
                                  September 11 attacks. He is the leader of the Army Corps of Engi-
                                  neers data gathering team investigating the levee failures.
                                     Dr. Raymond Seed is a professor of civil and environmental engi-
                                  neering at the University of California at Berkeley. He is an expert
                                  on the stability of dams, embankment soils, and buried structures.
                                  He holds an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and both a
                                  Master’s and a Ph.D. in geotechnical engineering, which I have
                                  never even heard of before. Dr. Seed is leading the National
                                  Science Foundation’s investigation of the levees.
                                     And finally, we will hear from Dr. Peter Nicholson, who is an as-
                                  sociate professor of civil and environmental engineering and Chair
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5

                                  of Graduate Programs at the University of Hawaii. He has under-
                                  graduate degrees in geology and geophysics and in civil engineer-
                                  ing, and both a Master’s and a Ph.D. in civil engineering, as well.
                                  Dr. Nicholson, who chairs the American Society of Civil Engineers
                                  Geo Institute Committee on Embankments, Dams, and Slopes, is
                                  leading the Society’s investigation of the levee failures.
                                    I spent some time going through the credentials of our witnesses
                                  to demonstrate what an extraordinarily well-qualified panel we
                                  have this morning. I think it is unusual for us to have four sci-
                                  entists testifying before this Committee, and we very much appre-
                                  ciate your sharing your expertise with us this morning.
                                    I am going to ask that you all stand and raise your right hands
                                  so that I can swear you in.
                                    Do you swear that the testimony that you are about to give to
                                  this Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
                                  the truth, so help you, God?
                                    Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I do.
                                    Mr. MLAKAR. I do.
                                    Mr. SEED. I do.
                                    Mr. NICHOLSON. I do.
                                    Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Dr. van Heerden, we are going
                                  to begin with you.

                                  TESTIMONY OF IVOR LL. VAN HEERDEN, PH.D.,1 HEAD, STATE
                                   OF LOUISIANA FORENSIC DATA GATHERING TEAM, DIREC-
                                   TOR, CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF PUBLIC HEALTH IMPACTS
                                   OF HURRICANES, AND DEPUTY DIRECTOR, LOUISIANA
                                   STATE UNIVERSITY HURRICANE CENTER, BATON ROUGE,
                                   LOUISIANA
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Can I have the first slide, please? This is a
                                  product from a model that we used to determine the surge, and
                                  this gives you an idea of what the flooding would have been in New
                                  Orleans if there hadn’t been a breach in the levee. It is a model
                                  we run on our supercomputer. This was actually the first warning
                                  that we put out 30-odd hours before landfall that New Orleans
                                  would flood. Next slide, please.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Could you describe that just a little more?
                                  In other words, how different would the flooding in New Orleans
                                  have been if the levees did not break?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. As a result of the breaches, a whole lot—the
                                  flooding was double what you see on that slide.
                                     The next slide actually is a satellite image that will show you the
                                  extent of the flooding. That is all the blue. So if we hadn’t had the
                                  breaches, this area wouldn’t have flooded and large sections here
                                  and in here wouldn’t have flooded. Next slide, please.
                                     This gives you an idea of the water depth, and you see the max-
                                  imum water depth is about 15 feet. If this hadn’t occurred, the
                                  water depth would have been maybe five to seven feet. I want to
                                  draw your attention to this area here and talk very briefly about
                                  the levee overtopping in this area, which was where Lake Pont-
                                    1 The prepared statement of Mr. van Heerden with attachments appears in the Appendix on
                                  page 49.
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6

                                  chartrain actually flooded into part of New Orleans. Next slide,
                                  please.
                                     This is a slide of the actual levee, and you can see its northern
                                  embankment, and right on the top here is a wreck line. That is the
                                  water line from the surge. But you will see the wall here is actually
                                  a few feet, a couple of feet lower. Next slide, please.
                                     And this is what happens when you get overwash. You create a
                                  scour trench, and this was one of the areas that Orleans East flood-
                                  ed. Next slide, please.
                                     I want to start with the 17th Street Canal and then go to London
                                  Avenue Canal. Next slide, please.
                                     This is the basic design of the walls, the so-called I-walls. There
                                  is sheetpiling driven in the ground and then a concrete wall on top,
                                  a soil embankment on either side. Very often, that soil comes from
                                  the dredging of the canal, so it is the material that was in the
                                  canal. Next slide, please.
                                     This is what we term a hydrograph. It gives you the height of
                                  the water with time, and I will draw your attention to the pink
                                  line. This is from the model. This is the water level that was expe-
                                  rienced in the 17th Street Canal at its mouth. The arrow indicates
                                  when we believe the breach actually occurred, so it was after the
                                  peak of the surge. Next slide, please.
                                     An aerial view right after the flood, and the important thing is
                                  right here in the middle, you can see a green bank and the wall.
                                  That is the area that slid. Next slide.
                                     This is taken on the water on day two. You can see there is the
                                  wall. We tried to line ourselves down the wall. And there is the
                                  former bank, and that used to be over here. Here are the wall seg-
                                  ments that moved 30-odd feet. Next slide.
                                     And then between them, there were sky areas and the walls also
                                  blew out, as well. Next slide, please.
                                     This is the actual soil that is left behind, the old embankment,
                                  and the thing that we saw was a lot of wood and organic matter
                                  in this bank, indicative that it was dredged out of the canal. Next
                                  slide, please.
                                     And, of course, as all of this moved, it acted as a bulldozer, and
                                  this yard used to be about four or five feet lower, and you can see
                                  how the hummocky terrain and the buildings and everything have
                                  moved. This is the bulldozing effect as that levee let go. Next slide,
                                  please.
                                     Underneath all of this is an old swamp, and you can see the cy-
                                  press stumps that occur in this area about every 15 feet. So New
                                  Orleans was built on an old swamp, and it suggests that where the
                                  17th Street Canal breach occurred, we were sitting on top of an old
                                  swamp deposit. Next slide, please.
                                     In addition, we tried to get the monoliths and the sheetpiling re-
                                  moved. We couldn’t, but this was something that disturbed us. It
                                  looks like the sheetpiling actually didn’t extend into this monolith.
                                  Unfortunately, this whole area has now been covered with the re-
                                  pair material, but it raises questions. Next slide, please.
                                     Right now, we are not sure exactly how the water got from the
                                  canal through onto the opposite side to soften the soils and lead to
                                  the actual sliding of the wall. There are three potential pathways,
                                  one in this highly organic old swamp material that was pumped up
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7

                                  to form the bank, the actual peat and swamp layer, and also these
                                  clays down here have lots of parallel lenses in them. The important
                                  thing was that sheetpiling, from all the records we can find, only
                                  went to minus-ten feet below sea level Next slide, please.
                                     An aerial sketch, if you will, of what happened. This levee section
                                  moved, and then these walls on either side collapsed. Next slide,
                                  please.
                                     This is at London Avenue at Filmore. This is the Western
                                  breach, very similar sorts of features. I want to draw your atten-
                                  tion to this little house and pine trees. Next slide, please.
                                     This is what it was like before Katrina. The house was down at
                                  the toe of the levee. You can see the pine tree. Next slide, please.
                                     And now it is way up, as a result of that heave, indicative again
                                  of the very similar failure at the 17th Street Canal of this section
                                  of the levee sliding outwards. Next slide, please.
                                     On the opposite side from that breach, the walls are broken, tilt-
                                  ed, cracked. Next slide, please.
                                     There is evidence of what we call sand boils, where the water has
                                  come underneath the levee and blown up on the top, on the back
                                  side. Next slide, please.
                                     And, in fact, there are also heaves you can see, not a good slide,
                                  but these planter boxes have moved and there was this little swim-
                                  ming pool that moved, as well. So some of the same features we
                                  saw at the 17th Street Canal, not as dramatic. Next slide, please.
                                     And what we believe happened at Filmore was basically the
                                  same thing. The sheetpiling came down to 11-and-a-half feet below
                                  sea level and the water found its way through. What is interesting
                                  on the opposite side of the canal, where it didn’t fail but it cracked
                                  the sheetpiling, we believe went down to minus 26 feet, seeming to
                                  suggest a deeper sheetpile would have helped. Next slide, please.
                                     The Mirabeau break on London Avenue, the thing that really
                                  strikes you when you get there is the sand. This is the top of a car,
                                  so you have four to five feet of sand. It looks like a river, the whole
                                  area. Next slide, please.
                                     And when you look at the actual break, the thing that struck us
                                  were the wall segments actually dipping down into what appeared
                                  to be a hole, and so perhaps a slightly different failure to the other
                                  areas. Next slide, please.
                                     And what we suspect is that this is a blowout hole that the soil,
                                  that the water made its way underneath and blew out, created a
                                  void, and these wall segments collapsed into that hole. Next slide,
                                  please.
                                     And again, the important thing at Mirabeau is you have this
                                  very thick layer of beach sand. It is very porous, very premeable,
                                  and it created, we believe, a conduit for the water to get from the
                                  canal under pressure and onto the other side, and the fact that you
                                  have all the sand amongst the houses, suggesting that this was the
                                  main failure mechanism. Next slide, please.
                                     The Industrial Canal failed just before the peak, right at the
                                  time the water started overtopping. Next slide, please.
                                     The breaches. Next slide, please.
                                     Next slide.
                                     Just to show you how it blew out, it removed all these houses,
                                  probably a 20-foot head of water. Next slide.
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8

                                    And on the ground, you see a scour trench where the pilings used
                                  to be, the wall used to be. Next slide, please.
                                    And where it hasn’t failed, there is this very typical scour trench
                                  all the way along, suggesting that it was just overwash that led to
                                  the failure of these sections of the levees. Next slide, please.
                                    There is the question of the barge. Next slide.
                                    What we found was evidence that the barge had gone through
                                  the wall. Next slide, please.
                                    But it was after the wall had collapsed, and that was given to
                                  us that the wall is at 45 degrees and the sheetpiling where the
                                  barge perhaps did knock the wall is horizontal, suggesting the wall
                                  was down before the barge came through. Next slide, please.
                                    What really struck us, though, was when you look down the
                                  length of the wall, it had these strange curves in it beyond where
                                  the actual breach is and then the signs of embankment failure in
                                  front of the walls. Next slide.
                                    And what you see here is a tilted wall and examples of where
                                  the soil has dropped down in both cases. And in this area, we saw
                                  something that we call percolation holes, where it appeared the
                                  water had actually started to scour down underneath the
                                  sheetpiling. Next slide, please.
                                    Again, swampy material. The bore hole data suggests that these
                                  are all soft or very soft clays. Next slide, please.
                                    And again, there appears to have been a number of potential
                                  mechanisms for the water to get under to lead to the failure as well
                                  as the overtopping, and right now, our investigation is looking at
                                  both, this being a failure related to the soil as well as the overtop-
                                  ping. Next slide, please.
                                    And being from Louisiana, I am obviously very concerned about
                                  what happens to the folk who trusted the system, and this is an
                                  example of how some of them actually got out. Thank you.
                                    Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Dr. Mlakar.
                                  TESTIMONY OF PAUL F. MLAKAR, PH.D., P.E.,1 SENIOR RE-
                                   SEARCH SCIENTIST, U.S. ARMY RESEARCH AND DEVELOP-
                                   MENT CENTER, VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. Madam Chairman and Members of the Committee,
                                  I am Dr. Paul F. Mlakar, Senior Research Scientist at the U.S.
                                  Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg,
                                  Mississippi, which is a component of the Corps of Engineers. I have
                                  spent most of my professional career of four decades in the Corps
                                  studying the response of structures to extreme loadings. This has
                                  included the performance of the Murrah Building in the Oklahoma
                                  City bombing and the Pentagon in the September 11 crash. I am
                                  a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the recipi-
                                  ent of their Forensic Engineering Award in 2003. I am also a Reg-
                                  istered Professional Engineer, legally obligated to protect the
                                  health, safety, and welfare of our citizens.
                                     As some of you know, the ERDC conducts research and develop-
                                  ment to enable the Corps to better perform its military and civil
                                  works mission in support of the Nation. We employ 2,500 people
                                  in seven laboratories located in four States. The staff is recognized
                                       1 The prepared statement of Mr. Mlakar appears in the Appendix on page 98.
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9

                                  nationally and internationally for its expertise in civil engineering
                                  and related disciplines. Our facilities include a number of unique
                                  devices that allow us to deliver technical solutions on the leading
                                  edge of science.
                                     I am pleased to appear today on behalf of the ERDC and the
                                  Corps to provide information as requested in your letter of October
                                  27. The Congressional interest in the performance of the storm
                                  damage reduction infrastructure in Hurricane Katrina is much re-
                                  spected and shared by the Corps. While we do not yet have the
                                  complete answers to all of the questions, we welcome this oppor-
                                  tunity to share our progress with you.
                                     The Corps takes its responsibility for the safety and well-being
                                  of the Nation’s citizens very seriously. In the case of the New Orle-
                                  ans area, we are determined to learn what failed, how it failed,
                                  why it failed, and to recommend ways to reduce the risk of failure
                                  in the future.
                                     So what have we done about these failures in Katrina? As the
                                  emergency operations wound down, the Corps asked me to lead in
                                  the collection of data for the study of the protection infrastructure
                                  affected. I deployed to New Orleans on the heels of Hurricane Rita
                                  and have spent most of the intervening period in the region. At
                                  various times, I have been joined by some 30 Corps staff and other
                                  colleagues. Our priority has been on the breaches in the metropoli-
                                  tan area that caused the greatest devastation, that is the 17th
                                  Street Canal, the London Avenue Canal, and the Inner Harbor
                                  Navigation Canal.
                                     To document exactly what happened, we have been diligently re-
                                  cording the damages and measuring the post-Katrina conditions.
                                  To eventually explain how and why, we have examined physical
                                  evidence to establish the maximum water elevations at various lo-
                                  cations. To establish the timeline of events, we have conducted de-
                                  tailed interviews so far with about 70 people who sat out the storm.
                                  To establish the soil properties, we have pushed a state-of-the-art
                                  instrumented cone to a depth of 80 feet at some 60 locations. We
                                  further collected samples of the soil at depth in 10 locations for lab-
                                  oratory testing. We have also electronically scanned 63 out of 235
                                  boxes of documents dealing with the design, construction, and
                                  maintenance of the projects involved.
                                     As we began, the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Uni-
                                  versity of California team sponsored by the National Science Foun-
                                  dation approached the Corps about similar studies of infrastructure
                                  performance they were undertaking in hopes of applying lessons
                                  learned to the levee systems in California. In the spirit of openness
                                  and full transparency, we invited these teams to join us for inspec-
                                  tions of the projects involved. We subsequently learned that the
                                  State of Louisiana would soon establish its own study team, and
                                  we invited the researchers from the Louisiana State University
                                  Hurricane Research Center to join us in advance of this official es-
                                  tablishment. The Corps gratefully acknowledges the assistance pro-
                                  vided by these teams in the collection of the data.
                                     So what is the way ahead? Over the next 8 months, an inter-
                                  agency performance evaluation task force commissioned by the
                                  Chief of Engineers will conclude the collection of the data, delib-
                                  erately analyze this information, and rationally test various
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10

                                  hypotheses about the behavior of the infrastructure. This work will
                                  comprehensively involve the following technical topics on 360 miles
                                  of diverse infrastructure. The topics are geodetic reference datum,
                                  storm surge and wave modeling, hydrodynamic forces, floodwall
                                  and levee performance, pumping station performance, interior
                                  drainage and flooding modeling, consequence analysis, and finally,
                                  risk and reliability assessment.
                                     The participants on this task force will be drawn broadly from
                                  Federal agencies, academia, State and local governments, profes-
                                  sional societies, and international experts. We will communicate
                                  our progress periodically through news releases, press conferences,
                                  and web postings. The final results will include conclusions as to
                                  the causes of the failures and recommendations for the future de-
                                  sign and construction of such infrastructure nationwide. These re-
                                  sults will be independently reviewed by an external panel of the
                                  American Society of Civil Engineers. At the request of the Sec-
                                  retary of Defense, the National Academies will also independently
                                  assess the results and report to the Assistant Secretary of the
                                  Army for Civil Works.
                                     Our scheduled completion date is July 1. In the meantime, our
                                  progress will be shared with and used by our colleagues in the
                                  Corps responsible for the reconstruction of the protection in New
                                  Orleans.
                                     My written statement contains further information about your
                                  specific questions, and I request that it be entered into the record.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Without objection.
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. In closing, I advise against reaching conclusions to
                                  the very important questions before appropriate analysis is accom-
                                  plished. Speculation concerning the understanding of why damage
                                  occurred in Katrina is not adequate to build back a reliable flood
                                  protection system. My testimony illustrates the Corps’ continuing
                                  commitment to the pursuit and use of sound science and engineer-
                                  ing principles in the execution of our civil works mission.
                                     On behalf of the Corps, thank you for allowing me the oppor-
                                  tunity to present this testimony today.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Dr. Seed.
                                  TESTIMONY OF RAYMOND B. SEED, PH.D.,1 PROFESSOR OF
                                   CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF
                                   CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, ON BEHALF OF THE NATIONAL
                                   SCIENCE FOUNDATION-SPONSORED LEVEE INVESTIGATION
                                   TEAM
                                     Mr. SEED. Can I get my first Power Point image? In fact, you can
                                  skip to the second one.
                                     Madam Chairman and Members of the Committee, good morn-
                                  ing. My name is Raymond Seed, and I am pleased to be asked to
                                  appear before you today to testify on behalf of the levee investiga-
                                  tion team sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation. A
                                  large number of leading national and international experts with a
                                  tremendous amount of forensic experience in sorting through major
                                  disasters have worked very hard this past month, and I am pleased
                                  to be able to present you with the first copy of the preliminary re-
                                       1 The prepared statement of Mr. Seed with attachments appears in the Appendix on page 102.
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11

                                  port of the findings of the combined ASCE and NSF-sponsored field
                                  investigation teams.1 I am very grateful for their tremendous ef-
                                  forts in getting this material ready for you today.
                                     Our hearts go out to the many people who have lost everything,
                                  even in some cases their lives, in this catastrophic event. Our
                                  teams have had considerable previous experience in many other
                                  disasters, including numerous major earthquakes around the
                                  world, the recent Indian Ocean tsunami, floods and levee failures,
                                  the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and more. But we were not
                                  prepared for the level and scope of the devastation that we wit-
                                  nessed when we were in New Orleans. It must be the intent of our
                                  work that something like this will not be allowed to happen again.
                                  Next.
                                     With that in our minds and in our hearts, I must make it clear
                                  that we know a great deal about what happened, and in many
                                  cases, why, and that it is my intent today to speak as openly as
                                  possible. Our team, to a man and to a woman, feels that the people
                                  of the New Orleans region and the Nation and our government at
                                  all levels need and deserve nothing less. Important decisions are
                                  being made that will affect people’s lives for years to come. We rec-
                                  ognize the importance of providing the best possible informed infor-
                                  mation, responsibly studied and professionally and thoughtfully
                                  synthesized, that we can at this early juncture. Better and more
                                  complete information will continue to evolve over the coming year,
                                  but that will be too late for many ongoing decisions being made
                                  right now today.
                                     Our preliminary report presents a consensus document, and it
                                  presents the initial observations and findings that we were able to
                                  agree to release with all the team members and organizations in-
                                  volved. If you will ask, I will do my best to answer questions well
                                  beyond the scope of our initial preliminary report.
                                     Why did the levees and floodwalls fail? This is a map of the Cen-
                                  tral New Orleans region, prepared initially by the U.S. Army Corps
                                  of Engineers and then modified to reflect additional findings of our
                                  investigation teams. It shows the locations of many levee breaches
                                  that occurred with stars and dots and serves as a good base map
                                  for our discussions today. Not shown on this map are the additional
                                  flood protection levee systems that extend down the lower reaches
                                  of the Mississippi River, which begins here and runs about to the
                                  floor of the room, providing a narrow, additional protected corridor
                                  down to the Gulf.
                                     The storm surges produced by Hurricane Katrina resulted in nu-
                                  merous breaches and consequent flooding of approximately 75 per-
                                  cent of the metropolitan areas of New Orleans. Most of the levee
                                  and floodwall failures were caused by overtopping as the storm
                                  surge rose over the tops of the levees and their floodwalls and pro-
                                  duced the erosion that subsequently led to failures and breaches.
                                  Overtopping was most severe at the east end of the flood protection
                                  as the waters of Lake Borgne were driven west, producing a storm
                                  surge on the order of roughly 20 feet in the area right here and
                                  massively overtopping the levees across this stretch. Next photo.
                                       1 The report appears in the Appendix on page 224.
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12

                                     This photograph and the one which follows it—next—show two
                                  sections of those levees, or at least two sections where those levees
                                  had previously existed. They are massively eroded. There is vir-
                                  tually nothing left of these levees along some parts of this stretch.
                                     A very severe storm surge also occurred farther to the South,
                                  along the lower reaches of the Mississippi River, and significant
                                  overtopping produced additional breaches in this region, as well.
                                  Next.
                                     That is the section off the bottom of the map. Next.
                                     These are some of the homes in that area. This photograph
                                  shows houses in the Plaquemines Parish corridor where the levee
                                  on the left, just off the photograph, breached and overtopped, and
                                  the storm surge carried the houses across and deposited them on
                                  the right-hand levee, which fronts the Mississippi River just to the
                                  right and has the main rip-rap and slope protection across the
                                  front face here. This was a catastrophic breach. Next slide.
                                     Overtopping was lesser in magnitude along the Inner Harbor
                                  Navigation Channel and along the Western portion of the MRGO
                                  Channel, which are the two main conduits through here and along
                                  here. But the consequences were no less severe. This overtopping
                                  again produced erosion and caused numerous additional levee fail-
                                  ures. Next.
                                     This photograph shows the well-known breach at the West end
                                  of the Ninth Ward. I didn’t show this earlier, but we spent some
                                  time figuring out the answer to the chicken and the egg question
                                  here, and it is our preliminary opinion that the infamous barge was
                                  a passive victim which was drawn into a breach that was already
                                  open at this location. Most of the failures in the Central New Orle-
                                  ans area were the result of overtopping, and one of the common
                                  failure modes was simply water cascading over the concrete
                                  floodwalls and then carving sharply etched trenches on the back
                                  sides of these walls. The next photo. The next photo.
                                     This is an example of that, one of many. There is a large breach
                                  just in the background here. This is just West of the Port of New
                                  Orleans. Many failures of this type. This reduced the lateral sup-
                                  ports at the back sides of the walls and left them vulnerable to the
                                  high water forces on their outboard faces.
                                     Another repeated mode of failure and distress throughout the
                                  central region were problems at transition sections, where two dif-
                                  ferent levee or wall systems joined together. The next slide. This
                                  is one of those sections. You can see here a structural wall which
                                  carries a gate structure over here for a road to pass through. It
                                  meets an earthen levee over here with a rail line crossing it, so
                                  there are three different intersections here. The intersection itself
                                  was a soft spot. Each of the individual sections was better de-
                                  signed, but they didn’t join well. This was a common problem.
                                  There is a need to better coordinate these connections and their de-
                                  tails.
                                     Farther to the West, in the East Bank Canal District, three levee
                                  failures occurred on the banks of the 17th Street and London Ave-
                                  nue Canals, and these failure levels occurred at water levels well
                                  below the tops of the floodwalls lining these canals. These three
                                  levee failures were likely caused by failures in the foundation soils
                                  under the levees, and the fourth distressed section on the London
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13

                                  Avenue Canal shows signs of having neared the occurrence of a
                                  similar failure prior to the water levels having receded. Next.
                                     This photograph actually shows a breach on the 17th Street
                                  Canal being closed, and Dr. van Heerden showed earlier, this is the
                                  original inboard half of the embankment which just slid to the
                                  right, roughly 45 feet at the location of the piece of chain-link fence
                                  right here, a massive lateral translation as a result of foundation
                                  instability.
                                     The section across the canal on the East bank of the London Ave-
                                  nue Canal, North failure section, was very seriously distressed. Dr.
                                  van Heerden showed that one. In our view, it was at the point of
                                  incipient failure and was only saved by lowering of the water in the
                                  canal, possibly as a result of the other two breaches. That section
                                  is very seriously damaged and requires remediation before it can
                                  again safely hold high waters, and that will be another question
                                  which we will deal with later in this talk.
                                     The road forward. Major repair and rehabilitation efforts are un-
                                  derway to prepare the New Orleans flood protection system for fu-
                                  ture high water events. The next hurricane season will begin in
                                  June 2006. We have a hurry on our hands. Based on our observa-
                                  tions, there are a number of things we would like to point out.
                                     Although it is somewhat customary to expect levee failures when
                                  overtopping occurs, they are not a requirement. There are things
                                  that can be done in terms of design details that would have pro-
                                  vided better overtopping protection. Inboard face scour protections,
                                  splash slabs, rip-rap protection, even paving would have made a
                                  big difference at some of these sites and might have prevented
                                  some of the failures we observed.
                                     As the system is being repaired and rebuilt, it would be advan-
                                  tageous to better coordinate the crest heights of the various sec-
                                  tions. Better coordination between individual units would be a good
                                  idea.
                                     Areas in which piping and internal erosion occurred are now
                                  weakened segments. There is a need to go back and assess the re-
                                  maining segments that did not fail and be sure they still have their
                                  full integrity. Some of them will be found to have been damaged,
                                  in all likelihood.
                                     Levees are series systems, where the failure of one component,
                                  one single segment, means the failure of the whole system. The
                                  failure of several levees at less than their full designed water
                                  height in this hurricane warrants a thorough review of the overall
                                  system.
                                     In the short term, as repairs continue, we would like to see the
                                  sheetpiles, which are currently being operated as floodgates at the
                                  north end of the canals, continue to operate in that fashion. The
                                  Corps of Engineers does have good plans for moving forward on the
                                  five main downtown breach repairs, and we think they should oper-
                                  ate those canals in that fashion until those can be implemented.
                                     The Corps, like other public agencies, routinely hires outside
                                  boards of consultants for critical dam projects where public safety
                                  is at interest. We are not aware of any major dams in the United
                                  States which basically protect larger, more vulnerable populations
                                  than the New Orleans levee system, and we hope the Corps will
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14

                                  be encouraged to empanel such a body to oversee their work in
                                  New Orleans.
                                    The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are stretched very thin right
                                  now, trying to respond and effect emergency and interim repairs in
                                  the wake of this catastrophe. It must be the job of the Federal Gov-
                                  ernment and oversight committees such as yours to ensure they
                                  have the adequate resources and technical capabilities on hand to
                                  get the job done safely and well. The Corps has responsibility for
                                  many potentially high-hazard dams and levee systems, and we
                                  must all be able to have high confidence in their ability to perform
                                  these tasks.
                                    The ASCE and NSF teams have been drawn in inadvertently
                                  into some of the ongoing levee repair work, and we feel that right
                                  now, the Corps of Engineers is stretched very thin in the New Orle-
                                  ans region.
                                    This concludes my testimony. Thank you.
                                    Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Doctor. Dr. Nicholson.
                                  TESTIMONY OF PETER NICHOLSON, PH.D., P.E.,1 ASSOCIATE
                                   PROFESSOR OF CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
                                   AND GRADUATE PROGRAM CHAIR, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII,
                                   ON BEHALF OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGI-
                                   NEERS
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. Thank you, Madam Chairman, Members of the
                                  Committee. Good morning. My name is Peter Nicholson, and I am
                                  pleased to appear before you today to testify on behalf of the Amer-
                                  ican Society of Civil Engineers as you examine the effects of Hurri-
                                  cane Katrina on the infrastructure of Coastal Louisiana, particu-
                                  larly on the levee system that protects the City of New Orleans.
                                     I was asked by ASCE to assemble an independent team of ex-
                                  perts to travel to New Orleans to collect data and make obser-
                                  vations to be used to assess the performance of the flood control
                                  levees.
                                     One of the goals of the assessment team was to gather data and
                                  attempt to determine why certain sections of the levee system
                                  failed and why others did not. These determinations may help to
                                  answer the question of whether the failures were caused by local-
                                  ized conditions and/or whether surviving sections of the system
                                  may only be marginally better prepared to withstand the type of
                                  loads that were generated by this event. Could I have the next
                                  slide, please.
                                     The team that we assembled consisted of professional engineers
                                  from ASCE with a wide range of geotechnical engineering expertise
                                  in the study, safety, and inspection of dams and levees. While in
                                  New Orleans and the surrounding areas, we examined levee fail-
                                  ures as well as distressed and intact portions of the levee system
                                  between September 29 and October 15.
                                     Our levee assessment team was joined by another ASCE team of
                                  coastal engineers and another team primarily from the University
                                  of California, Berkeley, under the auspices of the National Science
                                  Foundation. Our three teams were joined in the field by the U.S.
                                  Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development
                                       1 The prepared statement of Mr. Nicholson appears in the Appendix on page 121.
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15

                                  Center Team, led by Dr. Paul Mlakar, and we would like to thank
                                  Dr. Mlakar and the ERDC team for their logistical support.
                                     What we found in the field was very different than what we had
                                  expected, given what we had seen in the early media reports. Rath-
                                  er than a few breaches through the floodwalls in the city caused
                                  largely by overtopping, we found literally dozens of breaches
                                  throughout the many miles of the levee system. As geotechnical en-
                                  gineers, we were particularly interested to find that many of the
                                  levee problems involved significant soil-related issues. Next slide,
                                  please.
                                     We have seen many of these same slides. Dr. van Heerden and
                                  Dr. Seed have stolen a little of my thunder. Playing clean-up here
                                  is going to be a little tough. We have seen this slide before, the
                                  17th Street Canal breach, and we observed, as said, intact soil
                                  blocks that had experienced large translation and heave. Next
                                  slide.
                                     We have seen slides like this. Here is the translated section we
                                  have seen before. It used to be over here. Next slide.
                                     And here again, just a slightly different view looking the other
                                  way than the former slides, where the levee had been here, and
                                  here is that elevated section or block with the chain-link fence.
                                  This movement would be consistent with the failure of the soil em-
                                  bankment or the foundation soils beneath. While we cannot yet de-
                                  termine conclusively the exact cause of the breach itself, the type
                                  of soil failure may well have been a significant contributing factor.
                                  Next slide.
                                     We have also seen London Avenue Canal breach, another view
                                  of the clubhouse, here from a different view, here taken from the
                                  top of the temporary repair that used to be down in the backyard
                                  of the house below. Next slide, please.
                                     Again, in that same area, we saw a tremendous amount of sand
                                  deposited, and we believe this material to be either from the foun-
                                  dation material beneath the embankment as well as material that
                                  may have been scoured from the canal. Next slide.
                                     Again, we were very interested in the non-failed section across
                                  the canal where we observed this floodwall and underlying em-
                                  bankment in severe distress. You can see it is out of alignment.
                                  Next slide, please.
                                     It was observed that we saw tilting on the inside of the wall,
                                  cracking, as we had seen before. This wall was badly out of align-
                                  ment. And as a result of the tilt, there were gaps between the wall
                                  and the supporting soil on the canal side. We also observed that
                                  there was evidence of soil movement, seepage, and piping as indi-
                                  cated by a number of close examinations. Next slide.
                                     Sinkholes behind the wall near the crest of the embankment.
                                  Next slide.
                                     As well as we have seen the examination of sand boils and
                                  heave. We have seen slides like this before. Next slide.
                                     Further to the South, we had the second breach of the London
                                  Avenue Canal. Here, as they were trying to close the repair, drop-
                                  ping sandbags into the open hole. Next slide.
                                     And again, we have seen the buried car with huge volumes of
                                  sand deposited, much more than could have come from the em-
                                  bankment, and we believe these were scoured from the canal itself.
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16

                                  By the time we got there, there was very little evidence left to ex-
                                  amine the mechanisms at this site.
                                     It is very important that the impact of the levee breaches outside
                                  of the City of New Orleans not be overlooked, and many of the sec-
                                  tions of the system were severely tested by overtopping, as we have
                                  heard earlier. Many portions of the levees were breached or se-
                                  verely distressed, causing significant heavy flooding, in many cases
                                  complete destruction of the thousands of neighborhood homes.
                                     The hurricane produced a storm surge that varied considerably
                                  depending on location, including the combined effects of orienta-
                                  tion, geography, topography with respect to the forces of the pass-
                                  ing storm. Hydraulic modeling of the surge, courtesy of LSU and
                                  Dr. van Heerden’s group, and I have a few of his slides, as well.
                                  Next slide, please.
                                     We have seen this before, the hydrograph showing essentially
                                  two different levels of storm surge, as we have heard, in the Indus-
                                  trial Canal and much less in the city, significantly different levels
                                  of the storm surge as the storm passed. Next slide.
                                     As the storm passed to the East of New Orleans, the counter-
                                  clockwise swirl, essentially, of the storm generated a large surge
                                  from the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Borgne that impacted the East-
                                  ern-facing coastal areas of the New Orleans area and the lower
                                  Mississippi delta. Next slide.
                                     The surge was, as we have seen this, as well, courtesy of the
                                  Hurricane Center, concentrated into this funnel area here up
                                  through the MRGO Channel into the Industrial Canal or the Inner
                                  Harbor Navigational Canal, and much less so to the north in Lake
                                  Pontchartrain.
                                     As shown by these models and the field evidence, this surge,
                                  which impacted the lakefront and the three canals within the cen-
                                  tral part of the city, was noticeably less severe. Field data indicated
                                  that the surge levels from the lake did not reach the elevation of
                                  lakefront levees and was well below the top of the height of the
                                  floodwalls bordering the interior canals, where three notable
                                  breaches occurred.
                                     Where the storm surge was most severe, causing massive over-
                                  topping, the levees experienced a range of damage from complete
                                  obliteration to intact with no signs of distress. Much of the dif-
                                  ference in the degree of damage can be attributed to the types of
                                  levees and materials that were used in their construction. The most
                                  heavily damaged and/or destroyed earthen levees that we inspected
                                  were constructed of sand or shell fill, which was easily eroded.
                                  Next slide.
                                     And we have seen this slide, as well, before. This was the area
                                  along the MRGO that took the brunt of the storm as it came in,
                                  or the brunt of the surge through Lake Borgne from the East and
                                  just took out this section of the wall. Next slide.
                                     This is another aerial view showing where the flooding occurred,
                                  color coded here with the deepest flooding in dark blue, getting
                                  lighter to the yellow. So we can see the massive storm surge com-
                                  ing in from the East, or from the right in your picture, coming over
                                  that destroyed levee and also overtopping walls and breaching both
                                  on either side of MRGO as well as from the canals within the city.
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17

                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Can you do us a favor and define MRGO?
                                  It is the Mississippi River——
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, MRGO.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Right.
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. Next slide, please.
                                     This is just a lot of the embankments that were obviously over-
                                  topped. This is a photograph that we got from personnel at the en-
                                  ergy plant, which watched through the storm. There is actually an
                                  earth embankment under here being overtopped by the flood wave.
                                  Next slide.
                                     This is another example of one of the earthen levees that had es-
                                  sentially been gutted by the overtopping flow. Next slide.
                                     We have seen this same slide when Professor Seed shared a lot
                                  of the slides. Essentially, nothing left of that embankment levee.
                                  Next slide.
                                     This is an example of some of the embankments which were
                                  overtopped but survived quite well. In this area, we had a signifi-
                                  cant area of marshland in front, essentially helping knock down or
                                  keep the storm surge or the waves to a lesser extent.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Where was that one?
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. This is in the first line of defense on the Eastern
                                  edge of New Orleans East. Next slide.
                                     Moving back into the Industrial Canal, we have seen some of
                                  these slides, as well. Next slide.
                                     We have seen this slide twice, I think, already. We can go to the
                                  next one.
                                     We have seen the type of damage. This is just inside of that
                                  breach in the lower Ninth Ward. Next slide.
                                     And we have also seen a similar slide like this showing the scour
                                  on the backside of those walls that are overtopped as well as the
                                  misalignment of those I-walls or floodwalls just to the North of the
                                  lower Ninth Ward breach. Next slide.
                                     Again, the scour behind the overtopping. The soil line used to be
                                  up here. This soil has all been removed, essentially destabilizing
                                  behind the wall. Next slide.
                                     This is on the North side of the MRGO, overtopping, severely
                                  scoured out behind and caused breaches and failure of those walls.
                                  Next slide.
                                     We also saw a lot of problems with transitions. We can see two
                                  different problems here, different materials, and different heights.
                                  Oftentimes, there was a weak connection between the two, but in
                                  addition, the lower heights would direct the water to flood over
                                  sometimes the weaker material first. Next slide.
                                     If this was earth versus concrete, obviously the earth loses. Next
                                  slide.
                                     This is what happens if that is allowed to go further. The earth
                                  line was up here. This was earth embankment, which has now
                                  been severely scoured away and breached through, essentially.
                                  Next slide.
                                     More concrete to sheetpile, again, with the difference in height,
                                  directed the flow over this area first, and sheetpile being weaker
                                  than concrete, sheetpile loses. Next slide.
                                     We also saw this type of very complex transition where we had
                                  all the different problems, different material types, concrete to
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18

                                  pavement on soil to ballast under railroad tracks to earth embank-
                                  ment. We had breaches on this side and this side. This raises an-
                                  other question of where we have the types of transitions between
                                  parts of the levee system that were maintained, designed, and con-
                                  structed by different authorities or different agency groups. Here
                                  we had an earthen levee constructed by one group, the railroad
                                  taking care of their own business, different heights, so we have a
                                  complete mix of things happening there. I am finished.
                                     Well, I think we can answer the rest as we end. Madam Chair-
                                  man, this concludes my testimony, and we will be pleased to take
                                  questions. Thank you.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Your testimony was very helpful.
                                     Dr. Seed, I want to begin my questioning with you today. At
                                  least twice, you wrote to the Army Corps of Engineers, on October
                                  11 and October 18, to raise very serious concerns about the ade-
                                  quacy and the integrity of the repairs that the Army Corps and its
                                  contractors were making to the levees and the floodwalls, and I
                                  want to read for the record—we will put the entire letter of October
                                  11—and the e-mail of October 18—into the record, but I want to
                                  read some excerpts.1
                                     On October 11, you wrote that the situation at the 17th Street
                                  Canal ‘‘warranted an urgent response’’ because the repair was ‘‘ac-
                                  tively eroding.’’ In this same letter, you wrote that the ‘‘current em-
                                  bankment section was poorly configured with regard to the ongoing
                                  risk of failure.’’ You wrote that certain repairs were leaking. In the
                                  case of the 17th Street Canal repairs, you wrote that ‘‘rapid erosion
                                  and blowout would become likely.’’ At the Southern London Avenue
                                  break, you said that it was leaking into the city more than at the
                                  other two breaks and you called it a ‘‘potential hazard.’’ You urged
                                  ‘‘urgent and resolute further action.’’
                                     You also flagged the fact in your subsequent e-mail that contrac-
                                  tors working on some of the levee repairs were not doing it prop-
                                  erly and that there was inadequate oversight from the Army Corps.
                                  In that same e-mail, you said to the Army Corps, you warned of
                                  a ‘‘significant flow’’ of water and that there was no possibility of
                                  controlling storm surge rises at sections of the Industrial Canal
                                  levee so that further action may be urgently warranted.
                                     These raise very serious questions in my mind about the integ-
                                  rity of the repairs that have been undertaken and whether the re-
                                  turning residents of New Orleans are still at risk. What is your as-
                                  sessment today of the sufficiency of the repairs, and do you think
                                  there is a serious public safety issue still in New Orleans?
                                     Mr. SEED. Those are two separate questions.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Yes, and I shouldn’t have combined them.
                                     Mr. SEED. That is all right. I am a professor. We do that for a
                                  living.
                                     The first question is the most complex. We haven’t been on the
                                  ground in New Orleans now for several weeks and more, and so we
                                  are not entirely clear what the details of those current configura-
                                  tions are.
                                     In response to the first letter, which you discussed, the Corps did
                                  respond quickly and very well, and those sections were rapidly im-
                                       1 The letter and e-mail appear in the Appendix on page 208.
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19

                                  proved. Behind that, though, was a week of back-and-forth inter-
                                  action between our team and the Corps in which the responses, in
                                  our view, were insufficient and sometimes misdirected, and it be-
                                  came clear to us that they were struggling to get the right kind of
                                  people put in charge of the projects to get our concerns addressed.
                                  My understanding from their last response is they do, in fact, have
                                  the right kind of people now directing these projects, and so we
                                  have a better feeling about them.
                                     The second letter addresses the two breaches on the Industrial
                                  Canal at the West end of the Ninth Ward, which when we left the
                                  sites had been further remediated, but which, in our view, were not
                                  adequate for a high-water incident, for instance, another hurricane
                                  storm surge as the storm season isn’t yet behind us, or even a very
                                  high tide. A week ago Monday, October 24, they developed a large
                                  seep at one of those two sections, the northern of the two, and that,
                                  in our view, was not entirely unexpected.
                                     The Corps does now have five contracts let and, I believe, signed,
                                  and they have five outsourced engineering firms doing the final de-
                                  sign work on more permanent closure sections. These will all in-
                                  volve sheetpile curtains, which will be far deeper than the original
                                  sheetpiles that were installed in these sites, and the configurations
                                  will be far more stable than they were before. So there do seem to
                                  be suitable patches on their way to being in place at these five loca-
                                  tions. So with regard to these five particular sites, I don’t believe
                                  there is a long-term significant risk to the City of New Orleans.
                                     The other half of the question, though, is what is the state of the
                                  overall safety of the City of New Orleans, and the answer there is
                                  the section that crossed along the North breach has not yet been
                                  addressed nor remediated. It is clearly a very weakened situation,
                                  and it was probably at the point of incipient failure in this last
                                  event. It certainly hasn’t had its situation improved by the suf-
                                  fering it went through. It has, in fact, deteriorated. And there are
                                  many sections around the system that need to be investigated more
                                  thoroughly.
                                     There are also ongoing repairs of literally, as Dr. Nicholson said,
                                  dozens of breaches, and the section up along what we like to call
                                  as locals the MRGO section is vastly eroded. That is a very difficult
                                  construction project, simply in terms of time, if the race is to get
                                  things put back together for the next storm season in June. So
                                  there is a tremendous logistical difficulty and the Corps of Engi-
                                  neers is working very hard at all this. They are also stretched very
                                  thin. It is a challenge for anybody. It is a very difficult challenge.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Dr. Nicholson, what is your assessment of
                                  the current state of repairs and the adequacy as far as people com-
                                  ing back into New Orleans to live and work?
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. Well, as Dr. Seed had mentioned, the repairs of
                                  the damaged sections, of the breached sections in town seem to be
                                  coming along quite well and seem to be adequate, with perhaps the
                                  exception of the Industrial Canal area, which we hope they are
                                  going to be taking care of fairly soon.
                                     As far as the safety of the entire New Orleans area, as engineers,
                                  we look at safety or risk on a scale or as a factor of safety. So there
                                  are different levels of safety. There are always going to be some
                                  risks, particularly in a large storm.
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20

                                     For the short term, my opinion is that short term, without a
                                  storm, they are probably adequately safe. Certainly with a large
                                  storm, as we are not yet out of hurricane season, as Dr. Seed had
                                  just mentioned, and certainly for the next hurricane season, there
                                  are significant risks and safety. With evacuation, proper evacu-
                                  ation, certainly the property is at risk and there is a large degree
                                  of safety to the property, but I believe as far as the safety of re-
                                  turning there with the potential to evacuate, I see that there is
                                  adequate safety.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Dr. van Heerden, Senator Lieberman men-
                                  tioned in his opening statement that we have heard time and again
                                  that the levees were constructed to withstand what I understand
                                  is called a standard project hurricane, and that is usually stated
                                  to be a Category 3 hurricane. We have also heard, well, the reason
                                  the levees failed is Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane that simply
                                  overwhelmed the design of the levees. But it is my understanding
                                  that your analysis suggests that the hurricane was not that strong.
                                  Could you elaborate on that and tell us what your assessment
                                  showed?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Certainly. If you look at New Orleans, there
                                  was basically two different surges. The surge on the right side of
                                  the eye was the sort of surge you would expect with a Category 3
                                  storm, and that was where we saw the 18 to 20 feet of water in
                                  the funnel. But on the left-hand side, or the West side of the eye,
                                  the winds were much lower, more of the order of a Category 1
                                  storm. The surges were not Category 3 surges. If Katrina had gone
                                  to the West of New Orleans, we would have seen about 15 feet of
                                  water in Lake Pontchartrain and obviously flooded a much greater
                                  area.
                                     So as far as we could see, based on the model, and we have also
                                  spent many hours going out and measuring the heights of water
                                  lines, the surge in Lake Pontchartrain wasn’t that of a Category 3
                                  storm, and nor did it exceed the design criteria of the standard
                                  project hurricane.
                                     We have tried to understand what the standard project hurricane
                                  is, and if one uses the frequency that is in the Corps of Engineers
                                  definition, that is one is to 200 years, then you are talking about
                                  a Category 5 storm. If you use the central pressure of 27.6 inches,
                                  then you are talking about the potential of a Category 4 storm.
                                     In terms of the definition of the winds, we found two different
                                  definitions, and it is very difficult to work from those definitions to
                                  come up with the Saffir-Simpson. However, in the 1965 document,
                                  they talk about trying to design to the 1915 hurricane. The 1915
                                  hurricane was a Category 4 hurricane. In 1969 documents, they
                                  talk about designing to Hurricane Betsy, again, which was a Cat-
                                  egory 4 storm.
                                     So there is some confusion, exactly what is the standard project
                                  hurricane, but in our opinion, the design criteria on the 17th Street
                                  and London Avenue Canals were not exceeded.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. So to summarize before I move on to Senator
                                  Lieberman, is it fair to say that the levees should have survived
                                  Hurricane Katrina, given that Hurricane Katrina by the time it
                                  struck New Orleans was at a lesser category than the standard
                                  project hurricane?
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21

                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Madam Chairman, yes, it is fair to say that
                                  they should have stood the surge.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Lieberman.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman.
                                     Dr. van Heerden, let me pick up from Senator Collins’ line of
                                  questioning. I understand you to be saying that, because as we all
                                  remember, Hurricane Katrina went more to the East of New Orle-
                                  ans than it was originally thought. That on the Eastern part of
                                  New Orleans, there was a significant surge and perhaps the hurri-
                                  cane was at a Category 3 or higher at that point. But the point
                                  that strikes me as very significant here is that insofar as Lake
                                  Pontchartrain is concerned, it, in your opinion, was significantly
                                  less than what we are calling a Category 3 hurricane, is that cor-
                                  rect?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Yes, sir, that is correct.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. And if I understand this correctly, most of
                                  the flooding of downtown New Orleans came from Lake Pont-
                                  chartrain. Obviously, there was other significant flooding to the
                                  East in the New Orleans East, lower Ninth Ward, but when it
                                  came to downtown New Orleans, the 17th Street Canal, the Indus-
                                  trial Canal, and I believe it is the London Street Canal, those fed
                                  the flooding of downtown New Orleans, is that right?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Downtown was principally the 17th Street
                                  Canal and the London Avenue Canal——
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. London Avenue——
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN [continuing]. As well as some breaches on the
                                  Industrial Canal. When you get to Orleans East, the flooding oc-
                                  curred not only from the Industrial Canal, but also from the
                                  breaches that the others have spoken about along the Gulf Inter-
                                  coastal Waterway.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Correct. Let me come back and focus on
                                  Lake Pontchartrain because now you have told us that by your es-
                                  timate, expert estimate, Hurricane Katrina was well below Cat-
                                  egory 3 as it hit Lake Pontchartrain. So do I correctly conclude that
                                  your determination is that the water of Lake Pontchartrain did not
                                  overtop the levees along the canal? In other words, the water did
                                  not reach a level to overtop those levees along Lake Pontchartrain?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. In the 17th Street Canal and the London Av-
                                  enue Canal, the waters did not get high enough to overtop those
                                  levees from——
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Right.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I went up in a boat on the 17th Street Canal,
                                  and what we saw were water lines that indicated that the max-
                                  imum water level was about three feet below the top of the wall.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. So the fact that the water came surging
                                  through those levees and those canals from Lake Pontchartrain
                                  was the result of a failure of the levees, not that the water went
                                  over them?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. That is correct, sir.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Dr. Seed and Dr. Nicholson, do you and
                                  your investigation agree with those conclusions? Here, I am focus-
                                  ing on Lake Pontchartrain, that the water—the flooding didn’t
                                  occur from the water overtopping the levees, but that the levees
                                  simply failed. Is that your conclusion, Dr. Seed.
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22

                                     Mr. SEED. Our preliminary conclusion on all three of those sec-
                                  tions is that the failure was produced somewhere in the foundation
                                  or the lower levels of the embankments themselves, but certainly
                                  the earthen embankments became unstable and the floodwalls
                                  were no longer supported.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. And Dr. Nicholson.
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. I concur with the other two.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. And this led to my conclusion from your tes-
                                  timony that I stated at the outset, that it was human error in the
                                  design and construction of the levees that led to a significant part
                                  of the flooding of New Orleans, that, in fact, if the levees had done
                                  what they were supposed to do, notwithstanding the strength of
                                  the storm on the East part of town, on Lake Pontchartrain, it
                                  wasn’t that strong. If the levees had done what they were designed
                                  to do, a lot of the flooding of New Orleans would not have occurred,
                                  and a lot of the suffering that occurred as a result of the flooding
                                  would not have occurred. Am I correct in drawing that conclusion,
                                  Dr. Seed and Dr. Nicholson?
                                     Mr. SEED. The latter part of your conclusion is unequivocally cor-
                                  rect.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Which is—just to clarify——
                                     Mr. SEED. Which is that the levees would have been expected to
                                  perform adequately at these levels if they had been designed and
                                  constructed properly. The opening sentence was a little bit trouble-
                                  some inasmuch as you said it would be the result of human error.
                                  It may not have been the result of human error. There is a high
                                  likelihood that it was, but we are receiving some very disturbing
                                  reports from people who were involved in some of these projects,
                                  and it suggests that perhaps not just human error was involved,
                                  but there may have been some malfeasance. Some of the sections
                                  may not have been constructed as they were designed.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes.
                                     Mr. SEED. That needs further investigating.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. That is very important. So it was not only
                                  an error, or might be called technical judgment about what was
                                  necessary there, but that, in fact, the construction work done on
                                  those levees was not up to the design specifications, is that what
                                  I am hearing you say?
                                     Mr. SEED. We are pursuing stories of that, in fact, and we are
                                  seeing evidence from what we saw in the field versus some of the
                                  design drawings we have been able to obtain so far that would sug-
                                  gest that some of those stories might bear some fruits. We are con-
                                  tinuing to study it.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. And help us understand, leaving that aside
                                  for a moment, the malfeasance possibility, what the errors in de-
                                  sign were here. Was it a failure—I have heard you refer at dif-
                                  ferent times to the soil configuration. Was it a failure to allow for
                                  the unique qualities of the soil there?
                                     Mr. SEED. Somebody asked me about a month ago the difference
                                  between a dam and a levee.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes.
                                     Mr. SEED. In principle, a dam is tall and narrow and a levee is
                                  short and very long. The real difference is that with a dam, we pick
                                  our sites and we pick them very carefully. We build levees usually
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23

                                  at the edge of swamps, sometimes in swamps. We routinely get
                                  very poor foundation conditions, so the poverty of the foundation
                                  conditions is not unexpected.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Not unusual. That is where levees are built.
                                  Right.
                                     Mr. SEED. Not unusual and we are used to that. What makes the
                                  New Orleans levees unusual is the high stakes involved in terms
                                  of the inboard population being protected. These are very high-risk
                                  levees with regard to consequences. In a system with several hun-
                                  dred miles of levees, it is very difficult to do suitable investigation
                                  and basically to nail all the details. The problem with the levee
                                  system is if you leave one detail unnailed, you leave a vulnerability
                                  which may in the end bring the whole system down.
                                     The local conditions at the sites of the three main breaches on
                                  the canals, the one on 17th and the two on London, were very chal-
                                  lenging local conditions.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Right.
                                     Mr. SEED. There was some accommodation of that in the design,
                                  and we are studying very hard right now to determine if, in our
                                  opinion, the accommodation was suitable. Performance would be
                                  suggesting that it might not have been.
                                     And the other half of the question is whether they were actually
                                  built the way they were designed, and there are some issues there.
                                  We are hoping very much to be able to, for instance, pull some of
                                  the sheetpiles and see what length they actually are. We have sev-
                                  eral sets of design documents which suggest different lengths, and
                                  we have several reports that perhaps none of those lengths is the
                                  correct answer. But these things are still out there and pulling a
                                  couple of sheetpiles is a clear step.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. And you are still at work on it, but I hear
                                  you say that notwithstanding the unique circumstances of the soil
                                  in the vicinity of the construction of those levees to protect New Or-
                                  leans, particularly facing Lake Pontchartrain, within your field,
                                  within your expertise, that was not an impossible task, that it
                                  could have been done, from what you know now, a lot better than
                                  it, in fact, was done, so that the levees would have withstood the
                                  water surge.
                                     Mr. SEED. There was a second message, though, in what I said,
                                  and that is that borings were spaced at intervals, many miles of
                                  levee were being designed, and at some cost and some price, it
                                  would be possible to do a better and safer job. An important issue
                                  to get to later in the studies is whether, in fact, the level of protec-
                                  tion that was paid for was delivered. But I think we have to also
                                  acknowledge the fact that the budgets were tight, people were
                                  squeezed, and we may not have been paying for enough protection.
                                  So it may be a double-ended question.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Well, that is an important question for us
                                  as elected officials, particularly those who fund the Army Corps of
                                  Engineers. But it is just an infuriating conclusion here, if what
                                  stands in the remaining investigations, that, in fact, a lot of the
                                  damage to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina flooding was pre-
                                  ventable. And it would have been prevented if the design and con-
                                  struction of the levees, particularly along Lake Pontchartrain and,
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24

                                  to some extent, to the Eastern part of the city, had been done ac-
                                  cording to professional standards and specifications.
                                     Mr. SEED. They were done according to professional standards
                                  and specifications. I want to be very careful there. They weren’t
                                  necessarily done in the way, in hindsight, we would have liked to
                                  have them be done, and that is because professional standards, and
                                  so on, cover some range. But there certainly was the possibility to
                                  have engineered the system to perform better.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Dr. Mlakar, I apologize because I have only
                                  got about a half-minute left, but I hope there is time for you to re-
                                  spond insofar as you are able at this point in your investigations.
                                  I do want to say that I was troubled—I understand the difficulty
                                  and I caught your words of rational conclusions here. One of the
                                  problems we are facing is the movement of the calendar. If your re-
                                  port is not coming until July 1 of next year, and the hurricane sea-
                                  son begins again on June 1, by which time the Corps has said it
                                  would restore the levees to at least the pre-Katrina levels, how is
                                  your report going to be helpful, or as helpful as it should be?
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. We will be sharing our interim progress with my
                                  colleagues in the Corps of Engineers who are responsible for the re-
                                  construction. So while the final report, due to the serious delibera-
                                  tions and complexity of the problem, will take until July, the in-
                                  terim progress will be shared much before that as the decisions
                                  have to be made.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. OK. Thank you. Thanks, Madam Chairman.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Voinovich.
                                               OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH
                                     Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you, Madam Chairman, for holding
                                  this hearing and raising important questions about the levees in
                                  New Orleans, and I just want to thank this panel. You have been
                                  terrific. It is nice to have such expertise before us today and com-
                                  ing from an objective point of view without any kind of axe to
                                  grind, as so often is the case when we have hearings before this
                                  Committee and many other committees.
                                     I think it is important to learn from our mistakes and not to re-
                                  peat them in the future. Today’s testimony confirms what I have
                                  known since I was chairman of the Subcommittee on Transpor-
                                  tation and Infrastructure. That was my first 2 years in the Senate.
                                  I lucked out, and I was chairman of the Transportation and Infra-
                                  structure Subcommittee. I had the Army Corps of Engineers under
                                  our jurisdiction, and at that time, I concluded that we were not
                                  funding the Army Corps of Engineers to the extent that they
                                  should be funded. We can sit here and we can criticize, but I think
                                  we should look at ourselves in the mirror and the administrations,
                                  not only this Administration, but previous administrations should
                                  do the same thing.
                                     In the 1960s, we were spending, in 1999 dollars, about $4 billion
                                  on projects, $4 billion. Today, the last average from 1999 has been
                                  about $1.5 billion. Our operation and maintenance, in 1999, we
                                  were behind about $250 million. Today, it is $1.250 billion. The
                                  real question is, had we done our job, had the administrations
                                  asked for the money that the Army Corps of Engineers should have
                                  received and had this Congress responded to that, and I kept say-
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25

                                  ing, we need it, we need it, please, from the head of the Army
                                  Corps of Engineers, ask for the money. It just wasn’t there.
                                     And, by the way, we then added on to them these ecological res-
                                  toration projects. In other words, in addition to just the Army
                                  Corps of Engineers work, we are saying now we have these
                                  environmental restoration projects. We are going to throw that on
                                  top of you.
                                     Yes, sir, Dr. Seed.
                                     Mr. SEED. The Corps of Engineers knows how to build levees and
                                  how to make them safe. Euphemistically, we say somebody wrote
                                  the book. The Corps of Engineers literally wrote the book repeat-
                                  edly on the creation and the safe creation of levees. Their compac-
                                  tion standards, their design standards are widely copied and emu-
                                  lated throughout the country and throughout the world.
                                     The Corps of Engineers is also struggling right now to repair fail-
                                  ures in the New Orleans area, and it is painfully clear to our inves-
                                  tigation team that they are struggling for lack of technical man-
                                  power, and we find that to be very daunting. We haven’t done a
                                  formal study of the national staffing of the Corps yet, but we hope
                                  to engage in that. We have been taking personal surveys among
                                  our friends and colleagues, former students. The assistant coach of
                                  my soccer team is also a geotechnical engineer, and he is working
                                  on a big Corps levee project in Yuba City, California.
                                     And in all of our contacts, we are finding a shortage of
                                  geotechnical engineering capability and the elongage of cost effi-
                                  ciency, which is people with degrees in economics and management
                                  and a lack of engineering. The stunning parallel to us is NASA be-
                                  fore the Challenger disaster and NASA afterwards, where they re-
                                  instituted their engineering and scientific capabilities at the cost of
                                  cost efficiency.
                                     I think we need to take a very strong look at ourselves as a Na-
                                  tion. We have strangled the Corps of Engineers in terms of budgets
                                  and support. They have responded by doing what was necessary to
                                  get their jobs done as best they could. But I think the human error
                                  issue in New Orleans is not going to be something which we can
                                  be pointing fingers at the Corps for. I think the finger pointing will
                                  be at ourselves when we are all done.
                                     Senator VOINOVICH. Well, the National Academy of Sciences has
                                  come out with some recommendations, ten recommendations on
                                  what we need to do to deal with the lack of scientists and engineers
                                  in this country, and I am hopeful that the Senate and the House
                                  and the Administration will adopt their recommendations and
                                  spend the money and make the sacrifice that we need in order to
                                  deal with this ongoing problem.
                                     This Committee has spent its time on looking at the issue of
                                  human capital, and if you go back to almost any problem we have,
                                  it is not having the right people with the right knowledge and
                                  skills at the right place and at the right time. Go back and look
                                  at it. We have neglected human capital on the Federal level for-
                                  ever, and it is time for us to change that, and I am glad that you
                                  brought up the lack of folks that they need to get the job done.
                                     Here we are today, and we have to make decisions about New
                                  Orleans. Are we going to go to a level three and rebuild this thing
                                  and get it so that we can get to level three, and if we were to do
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26

                                  that and we decided to go to level five, would we do it differently?
                                  Do you understand the question? In other words, we have concrete,
                                  and we have under-soil that shouldn’t be there. We are going to get
                                  in there and make it better, assuming you have the resources to
                                  do it. But the question is, if you go to a level three and the decision
                                  then is to go to a level five, would you do it differently in terms
                                  of going to the level three? In other words, can you take it to level
                                  three, do it right, and then say, if we go to level five, can you build
                                  on top of that, or if you are going to go to level five, would you do
                                  it differently right from the get-go?
                                     Dr. Mlakar or any of you, chip in on it.
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. Thank you, Senator. Probably if we decided to go
                                  to level five from the get-go, there might be some different options
                                  open to us than if we first went to level three and then went to
                                  level five. I am here primarily to talk about the fact-finding we are
                                  doing to figure out exactly what happened, but as a general answer
                                  to your question, yes, there are probably some different options on
                                  which way you want to authorize us to go.
                                     Senator VOINOVICH. And then the question is, if you go to level
                                  three and then the decision is to go to level five, what is the time
                                  span, and then what do you do in the interim period? What if we
                                  have another hurricane? If we don’t rebuild to level three the way
                                  it is supposed to be done, then the folks will still be very vulnerable
                                  in New Orleans. Can I have some comments from some of the other
                                  witnesses?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I would respectfully encourage to go to a level
                                  five to start. From the hurricane statistics side, in the last 50
                                  years, a major hurricane has come close to New Orleans on about
                                  eight different occasions, and just a slight change in the track of
                                  any of those hurricanes would have created a similar sort of flood-
                                  ing. Southeast Louisiana is a hurricane-prone area, and speaking
                                  as a Louisianan, I would encourage that we go to Category 5 from
                                  the beginning. Thank you.
                                     Senator VOINOVICH. Dr. Seed.
                                     Mr. SEED. Speaking as a Californian and as an American, there-
                                  fore not from Louisiana, I think if you do a Category 3 first design
                                  and then go to a Category 5, many of your design elements will be
                                  compatible and extendable. Some of them will not. There will be
                                  some sunk costs which will essentially be a temporary, interim
                                  measure.
                                     Designing for a full Category 5 is no walk in the park. It prob-
                                  ably involves restoration of offshore barrier islands and a lot of
                                  issues that are going to be well beyond concrete and rebar and
                                  sheetpiles and earth levees. It is a very complex issue and a very
                                  difficult one, and in the end, you are also still going to have a sys-
                                  tem which will be untested until it is tested. One of the great prob-
                                  lems with levee systems is there is no way to do a dry run to see
                                  how you are doing.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Could I make one more comment?
                                     Senator VOINOVICH. Sure.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. We heard in the testimony that those levees
                                  that were faced by wetlands weren’t eroded, and we saw that in the
                                  slide. So I would encourage that at the same time we restore the
                                  levees, we restore our coastal wetlands. These wetlands are our
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27

                                  outer line of defense. These wetlands are what take the stuffing out
                                  of the hurricanes, the barrier islands and the wetlands. Perhaps
                                  this is a unique opportunity to both reconstruct the levees and get
                                  the coastal restoration program going.
                                     Senator VOINOVICH. Dr. Nicholson, would you like to comment on
                                  this?
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. Well, as Dr. van Heerden just mentioned, we did
                                  observe that where the wetlands gave you a first line of defense,
                                  not necessarily line of defense, but it certainly helped reduce the
                                  wave heights and the impact on those levees. We saw that very
                                  clearly. So that restoring the wetlands would certainly give you a
                                  front line to help reduce the impact.
                                     Senator VOINOVICH. The conclusion I get from all of you, then,
                                  is that if you were in our shoes and having to make a decision,
                                  even if we decided that we were going to build to a level five, then
                                  it is incumbent on us to build to level three and do it the right way.
                                     Mr. SEED. Probably the safest and secure answer to that is there
                                  is no way to do a level five quickly, and the people of New Orleans
                                  will need protection before that can be completed.
                                     Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Akaka.
                                                    OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AKAKA
                                     Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
                                     I want to add my welcome to all of our witnesses, and I would
                                  like to add a special aloha to Dr. Nicholson, who, as Senator Col-
                                  lins mentioned earlier, is a professor at the University of Hawaii
                                  at Manoa. Dr. Nicholson, I want you to know that I am honored
                                  that you are leading the American Society of Civil Engineers team
                                  and lending your expertise to this worthy cause. I am pleased to
                                  have you join this hearing today.
                                     Dr. van Heerden, you have written movingly about the situation
                                  in the State of the Emergency Operations Center, that Monday
                                  evening, as you realized the levees were falling, you assumed that
                                  ‘‘the Corps of Engineers, who basically owned the levees, would be
                                  warning everyone’’ and you thought that ‘‘the Corps must be moni-
                                  toring the levees’’ and that they would sound the alarm. Have you
                                  learned why the Corps did not warn everyone and why they
                                  weren’t monitoring the levees?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. No, we haven’t. The first call that we got that
                                  indicated something was amiss was when I was at the State Emer-
                                  gency Operations Center, and that was around eight o’clock on
                                  Monday evening, and quite honestly, at that time, everybody was
                                  congratulating themselves that we had dodged the bullet. We first
                                  heard of a nursing home somewhere, they had two feet of water in
                                  it and the water was rising half-a-foot an hour. They weren’t sure
                                  where it was and they weren’t sure if it was salt or fresh water,
                                  which would have been a key. Then, as far as I know, they lost
                                  telephone contact. But whether a warning was given, certainly at
                                  eight o’clock in the State Emergency Operations Center, we were
                                  unaware of it.
                                     Senator AKAKA. Dr. Mlakar, I know you are not here to represent
                                  the Corps, but I would like to give you a chance to comment, if you
                                  are willing to do that, on this.
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28

                                     Mr. MLAKAR. Thank you, Senator. Yes, I am here as a technical
                                  expert leading the collection of the data to figure out exactly what
                                  happened, and I am really not prepared to answer this question on
                                  our emergency response but will be very pleased to get back with
                                  you for the record on that point.
                                     Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much.
                                     Dr. van Heerden, I understand that in the summer of 2004, you
                                  and others from the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center
                                  participated in a simulation of a Category 3 storm hitting New Or-
                                  leans. That exercise predicted that flooding would leave 300,000
                                  people trapped in New Orleans. On Sunday, August 28, just over
                                  a year later, your LSU team warned FEMA and other disaster offi-
                                  cials that there would be a significant event in New Orleans. What
                                  was FEMA’s reaction when they were warned both in the summer
                                  exercise and immediately prior to the levees breaking that there
                                  was a disaster in the making?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. That is a hard one to address. In the 2004
                                  exercise, I think for the most part, this was the first time anybody
                                  had ever really thought about the consequences of a flooding event
                                  of New Orleans, maybe the first time that some of the agencies
                                  really understood what the consequence could be if the city was
                                  flooded.
                                     The only comment I had was I knew from our public opinion sur-
                                  veys that 68.2 percent of the people would leave and that would
                                  leave about 300,000 behind, and if you flooded the city, you would
                                  have over 800,000 homeless. And so we tried to press with FEMA
                                  the need to perhaps preposition tents and to perhaps find the prop-
                                  erties in Louisiana, whether it was State parks or farmland, where
                                  you could erect these tents for these evacuees as the first line, and
                                  I was told very bluntly that Americans do not live in tents, and I
                                  was obviously very disappointed because I knew that we would
                                  have this problem that we had where citizens were bused all over
                                  the place, families were split up, and in many cases, there wasn’t
                                  the first-line medical surveillance that could happen if you had an
                                  organized tent city or series of cities.
                                     In terms of FEMA in response to New Orleans, we made all our
                                  predictions, our storm surge model outputs available to FEMA offi-
                                  cials via the Internet, and at the State EOC, we briefed them,
                                  briefed everybody there, including FEMA, and then the Times-Pica-
                                  yune Newspaper on the Sunday morning before the storm took one
                                  of our storm surge outputs and created a color graphic and indi-
                                  cated then that the flooding was going to happen.
                                     Senator AKAKA. I was particularly interested in what response or
                                  reaction FEMA had about your findings and what had happened
                                  there.
                                     Dr. Seed, a member of your team was quoted in the press stating
                                  that your team was denied access to certain Army Corps of Engi-
                                  neers employees. Can you comment on these reports and describe
                                  exactly what your team requested from the Army Corps of Engi-
                                  neers and also what responses you received from them?
                                     Mr. SEED. We have had highly variable levels of cooperation from
                                  the Corps of Engineers. It has fluctuated with regard to the units
                                  of the Corps we have been in contact with, the locality of those peo-
                                  ple, and also the time of the week.
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                                     We had a marvelous experience in the field for 21⁄2 weeks, where
                                  the various teams arrived, we were squeezed as to numbers of peo-
                                  ple we were allowed to bring in because there were questions about
                                  ingress and safety and also whether, in fact, investigation teams
                                  might be in the way as emergency operations were proceeding.
                                  When we arrived on the ground, we learned rapidly that the situa-
                                  tion was bigger than we could handle, and we pooled our resources.
                                  The Corps team, the investigation team led by Dr. Mlakar, literally
                                  worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the teams, and we did
                                  as much study as we could quickly because bulldozers were scoop-
                                  ing up and burying vital data. So cooperation and collaboration of
                                  teams on the ground in the critical 21⁄2 weeks of the field studies
                                  was superb.
                                     We were routinely promised we would be able to meet with local
                                  representatives from the Louisiana District, who have an intimate
                                  knowledge of the history and the evolution of many of these sites,
                                  which is fundamentally critical if you are working under those
                                  kinds of time constraints and you only have limited manpower. We
                                  never actually met any of those people at any of the sites. They
                                  were always busy doing other emergency work, and that was very
                                  disappointing to us. That was the source of Dr. Bea’s concerns.
                                     We received a wonderful inbriefing document with maps and
                                  some cross-sections of some of the levees, which was tremendously
                                  useful. We were, however, not able to obtain any of the subsequent
                                  follow-on documents that we had requested, in fact, a list of docu-
                                  ments which we had developed jointly amongst the various teams,
                                  including input from the ERDC team, until this past Saturday,
                                  when all of a sudden many documents were posted electronically
                                  on a website.
                                     So the Corps of Engineers seems to be moving in fits and starts.
                                  Sometimes, they are very cooperative. Sometimes, they are not. I
                                  was listening with painstaking diligence to Dr. Mlakar’s comments
                                  in the opening session. The Corps of Engineers has repeatedly
                                  promised to provide documentation and access to all the teams.
                                  This involves background design documents and design memo-
                                  randa, construction memoranda, maintenance and inspection re-
                                  ports. It also extends to ongoing studies they are doing right now,
                                  the borings and sampling and the test data. A lot of that stuff is
                                  very important. They have consistently promised that stuff will be
                                  forthcoming.
                                     In his comments today, that last piece was missing. He an-
                                  nounced an intent to develop this information, but he did not an-
                                  nounce an intent to share it with the other investigation teams. I
                                  am hoping that was an omission, not a deletion.
                                     Senator AKAKA. Do you think the Corps was deliberately keeping
                                  you from meeting people?
                                     Mr. SEED. The Corps of Engineers has just suffered a major
                                  blow. The people that work for the Corps of Engineers do so be-
                                  cause they have a desire to do good things and make people safe,
                                  and when your work doesn’t go well in that regard, it is a very dif-
                                  ficult situation.
                                     I think the Corps is struggling to get its hands around all of this
                                  at many levels, locally and at the national level. To their credit, as
                                  time passes, we do see them consistently making the right steps in
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30

                                  the end. We did see the interim levees repaired in fits and snatches
                                  for a while, and then when we pointed out the flaws, the flaws
                                  were rapidly and appropriately addressed.
                                     It did take us many weeks of struggle to get our investigation
                                  teams in and on the ground. The Corps was expressing concerns
                                  about the safety of the teams and logistical issues and the possi-
                                  bility they might interfere with the operations. Members of our
                                  team have directed these types of operations. They certainly know
                                  their way around a levee and around construction equipment.
                                  There is no way they would be an obstruction in the field, and their
                                  personal safety was not much of an issue. We have been to coun-
                                  tries like the Northwest corner of India up against the Pakistan
                                  border and many of us who have had 12 inoculations are immune
                                  even to mosquitoes from the Louisiana area, to a large extent. So
                                  we thought that was perhaps also a delaying tactic. We would have
                                  liked to have gotten in quicker. But in the end, the teams were let
                                  in. That doesn’t always happen.
                                     So it is a very mixed bag. We are seeing mixed responses, but
                                  we are seeing the Corps consistently in the end responding ade-
                                  quately to get the job done. That lifeline hasn’t been cut yet. We
                                  are concerned, though, that as the heat goes away, they continue
                                  to respond adequately to get the job done. There are a great many
                                  documents, and so on, we are going to need in the months ahead,
                                  and the data they are currently developing is, of course, fundamen-
                                  tally important.
                                     Senator AKAKA. Thank you, Dr. Seed. Thank you, Madam Chair-
                                  man.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you.
                                     Before I call on Senator Warner, let me address the issue of doc-
                                  uments. It is very troubling to this Committee that the forensic
                                  teams that are looking into the failures of the levees have not re-
                                  ceived complete and total cooperation from the Army Corps. I do
                                  want to point out that Dr. Mlakar is not the individual making doc-
                                  ument decisions, but I also want to assure you, Dr. Seed, and oth-
                                  ers involved in these reviews, that this Committee is committed to
                                  making sure that you have all the documents that you need from
                                  the Corps to complete your analysis. That is absolutely critical to
                                  your work. It is also critical to our work. And we, too, have had
                                  difficulty in receiving the documents that we need from the Army
                                  Corps and from the Department of Defense, in general. So this is
                                  an issue that this Committee will follow up on, and it is appro-
                                  priate that I now call on the distinguished chairman of the Armed
                                  Services Committee who perhaps can assist us in this matter, also.

                                                    OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR WARNER
                                    Senator WARNER. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
                                    First, the Senate has approached, I think in a very reasonable
                                  way, the extraordinary broad analysis that we must provide about
                                  this natural catastrophe to our Nation and the human suffering it
                                  involved. There are four of us on this Committee who serve on the
                                  Environment and Public Works Committee, and the distinguished
                                  Ranking Member being one of the four, Senator Voinovich, Senator
                                  Carper, and myself. I want to say from the outset what I am sure
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                                  everybody knows, that the Corps has the primary responsibility for
                                  issues relating to these levees and so forth. We all recognize that.
                                     I have personally talked to General Strock. I have a high regard
                                  for his professional capabilities. He has forthrightly said, we
                                  haven’t had the time yet to develop the answers that are needed,
                                  and they are busy doing so. As a matter of fact, I think almost each
                                  of you are in some form of consultation with the Corps on this. So
                                  time is needed. But I will join with others on this Committee to as-
                                  sure the Chairman and Members of this Committee that such docu-
                                  ments in the possession of the Corps are made available to this
                                  Committee and in a timely way.
                                     But I think I have listened very carefully, and this is an excel-
                                  lent panel, by the way. I commend the Chairman and the Ranking
                                  Member for bringing it here, very competent individuals. I draw on
                                  a modest background of civil engineering in my college and univer-
                                  sity years. You are quite right about going, Senator Voinovich, from
                                  a level three to a level five. Ideally, the footings and so forth re-
                                  quired for a level five are probably markedly different than what
                                  you need for a level three in many instances. Nevertheless, we are
                                  not here for that question.
                                     But I did want to just lay a benchmark about the Corps, and
                                  they are working very hard on this, and the Environment and Pub-
                                  lic Works Committee has purposely allowed them more time before
                                  they are brought before us as witnesses, but we will assure you
                                  that this Committee is well served by their documents.
                                     I would like to go to another matter, Madam Chairman, and that
                                  is one that Dr. Ivor van Heerden raised, and others, about if we
                                  go to a level five and so forth, we have to rely on much more than
                                  what man can devise. It is what nature can devise by way of these
                                  natural barriers, which through the years there has been some ero-
                                  sion, and the loss of the natural sediment from the river has not
                                  provided the help that nature needs to reestablish itself.
                                     So this brings me to the channel called, as I understand it,
                                  MRGO, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a manmade navigation
                                  channel that provides a direct shipping lane from the Gulf of Mex-
                                  ico to the marine terminals in New Orleans. I wonder if that
                                  should not be reexamined in the light of the overall approach to the
                                  revitalization of this whole area.
                                     It is my understanding that over the years, experts have worried
                                  that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet would allow a severe storm
                                  surge to give a direct hit at New Orleans. Is there any data to sup-
                                  port that did happen in this instance? That concern appears to
                                  have been one that we have got to address. This project also has
                                  disrupted the natural flow of sediment, which is critical in pro-
                                  viding the buffer zones that you referred to.
                                     So, therefore, I just wonder, do you feel as we address this prob-
                                  lem, and given that there has been some reduction in the naviga-
                                  tion use of this outlet and it has become somewhat less significant
                                  now—I have just been told that, I cannot corroborate it, but I
                                  will—should the MRGO be a part of the solution to providing for
                                  the future preservation of this area in the face of natural disasters?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Senator, yes, we believe that a really hard
                                  look needs to be put on MRGO, whether it is actually needed, and
                                  certainly from our computer modeling, we know that where MRGO
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                                  joins the Gulf and Coastal Waterway, the area known as the funnel
                                  is where we really get the amplification of the surge. If MRGO was
                                  to be abandoned, there is the potential of using parts of it as a con-
                                  duit to funnel sediments elsewhere. Obviously, you can’t have sedi-
                                  ment in a channel that you have still got navigation.
                                     Senator WARNER. Thank you.
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. First, Senator, I would like to thank you for your
                                  acknowledgement that there is a great deal of effort involved in
                                  providing this information, and General Strock and all of us are,
                                  indeed, committed to be absolutely open and transparent in this
                                  study.
                                     As far as MRGO and the natural barriers and this larger picture,
                                  I am really here as a technical expert on what happened in Hurri-
                                  cane Katrina. We will have some information about that in our
                                  final conclusions, to what extent the loss of the wetlands, to what
                                  extent MRGO might have played a role in that. Others in the
                                  Corps are looking at these larger questions, and perhaps I would
                                  like to defer to them to answer.
                                     Senator WARNER. Thank you very much. Dr. Seed.
                                     Mr. SEED. We haven’t studied yet, the degree of vulnerability in-
                                  troduced by the MRGO, but it doesn’t appear to have been a large
                                  issue in this particular case. The larger question is to how to move
                                  forward to something like a higher degree of protection, possibly a
                                  Category 4 or 5 system as is being discussed. It is a broader issue
                                  than reconfiguring something as simple as the MRGO when the
                                  barrier islands—it probably involves reconfiguring how that was
                                  even created in the New Orleans area and how they are coordi-
                                  nated.
                                     It involves the need to have somebody be in charge of the overall
                                  system and resolve the differences between the different groups
                                  who have to interact at connections and cross-connections. It in-
                                  volves handling issues like the Corps of Engineers, who build lev-
                                  ees and then nominally turn them over to locals after some period
                                  of time and those interfaces. There are a lot of organizational
                                  issues which need to be resolved to move the city safely forward.
                                     Senator WARNER. Thank you.
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. Similarly, the hydraulics of MRGO and the fun-
                                  nel factor are a bit out of my purview. As a geotechnical engineer,
                                  we are looking at other issues as far as the levees were concerned.
                                  But certainly, this is an area where there has been a lot of discus-
                                  sion and should be looked into further. I have seen some of the
                                  modeling done by the LSU Hurricane Center that has suggested
                                  that may certainly help at least part of the protection, or could be
                                  a buffer zone, if you will. But that is an area which is really beyond
                                  the scope of what we are looking at.
                                     Senator WARNER. I thank the Chairman.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Senator Carper.
                                                    OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
                                    Senator CARPER. Again, our thanks to each of you for joining us
                                  today.
                                    I appreciate the use of the technology and all the maps and the
                                  photos that you showed, and you used a pointer of some kind, a
                                  laser pointer that was actually difficult to follow. I do pretty well
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33

                                  in my color blindness tests and so forth, but it was just hard to
                                  pick it up on the charts, so I just share that with all of you so that
                                  next time it might be even more helpful to all of us.
                                     Dr. van Heerden, if I could start off with the first question for
                                  you, please. Last month, at a hearing on another committee that
                                  I serve on, the Environment and Public Works Committee, a Lieu-
                                  tenant General whose name is Strock, Carl Strock—I don’t know
                                  if you know him, but he is the Chief of Engineers. He stated that
                                  the path of Hurricane Katrina was such that the wetland loss was
                                  not an issue in this particular storm. I would just ask for you to
                                  react to that comment.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. If we had the wetlands we had in the 1870s
                                  now——
                                     Senator CARPER. In the when?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I say 100 years ago, the surge would have
                                  been dramatically less, and there are two very important reasons
                                  for that. First off, if you imagine a hurricane moving forwards with
                                  very strong winds, the winds that are blowing on land are on the
                                  right-hand side and that is blowing the water towards the land.
                                  But on the left-hand side, the winds are blowing offshore and that
                                  is blowing the water away from the land.
                                     So if you have very significant and healthy wetlands and barrier
                                  islands on the left-hand side, you start to suck the wind energy out
                                  of that storm. On the right-hand side, if you have substantial wet-
                                  lands and barrier islands, you add significant friction to that surge.
                                  And if you have ever had the opportunity to go into the Louisiana
                                  cypress swamps, which used to be very——
                                     Senator CARPER. I have never had that opportunity.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Do come down. But if the cypress swamps
                                  that used to exist where MRGO, along the course of MRGO that
                                  got destroyed by the salt, what you see is a 60 to 70-foot high wall
                                  of gray tree stumps, and when that water tries to flow through
                                  that, there is a lot of very significant friction, and you lose that
                                  flow.
                                     An example of how valuable the wetlands are, Hurricane Andrew
                                  made landfall in Louisiana in 1992, I believe it was, and made—
                                  its path came up the central part of Louisiana where we have ex-
                                  tremely healthy wetlands and two new emerging deltas, two areas
                                  of net land growth, and the surge in Morgan City, which was some
                                  20-odd miles inland, was only seven feet. So to me, that is—and in
                                  terms of the wind between the coast and Morgan City, the wind
                                  lost 50 percent of its energy. That is an example of how valuable
                                  those wetlands are in reducing hurricane impacts, both wind and
                                  surge.
                                     Senator CARPER. How do we go about rebuilding the wetlands?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. If you look at it, all of coastal Louisiana was
                                  built by the Mississippi River and the sediment in the river is, in
                                  essence, a renewable resource. The river floods every year. All we
                                  have got to do is find efficient methods to get that sediment out of
                                  the river and back into the wetlands. In our toolbox, we can have
                                  major diversions, perhaps diverting 50 percent of the river. We
                                  know that used to happen every 1,000 years and that is what built
                                  large parts of Louisiana. There may be opportunities to do that
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34

                                  now in the lower part of the river system, maybe into the Breton
                                  Delta.
                                     The next tools in our toolbox are siphons and minor or smaller
                                  diversions, and we have a couple of those, and that is where you
                                  simulate the distributory channels that used to operate when the
                                  river flooded, and you can get the sediment a little further, and
                                  greater volumes.
                                     Another important way would be to use what we call mini-si-
                                  phons. These are very small siphons spaced every few miles down
                                  the river that would in many ways simulate a natural flooding
                                  event because you would put—you wouldn’t flood anybody locally,
                                  which is a concern, but you would put significant amounts of fresh
                                  water and especially the nutrient-rich waters into the wetlands.
                                     And then also in the toolbox is the restoration of our barrier is-
                                  lands, and in Federal waters, there are some fantastic sand re-
                                  sources that are there that could be mined and that sand then used
                                  to build barrier islands. I believe it is very doable and would really
                                  aid Louisiana in terms of hurricane impacts.
                                     Senator CARPER. All right. Thanks very much.
                                     I have a question that I would invite any of the panelists to an-
                                  swer. I will give you a break, Mr. van Heerden, for a moment, but
                                  I would ask any of the others who would like to take a shot at this
                                  to do so.
                                     Many of the Corps’ calculations regarding how to build levees to
                                  protect New Orleans from a Category 3 hurricane were done, I
                                  think someone said, in the 1960s, and since then, New Orleans has
                                  subsided, but there has been a great deal of additional develop-
                                  ment, as we all know, and hundreds of square miles of wetlands
                                  have been lost. An independent analysis was done, I think for the
                                  Times-Picayune Newspaper back in 2002. I think it was called
                                  ‘‘Washing Away.’’ It showed that therisk might now be twice as
                                  large as the Corps had estimated.
                                     How has this affected the Corps’ assumption and design rec-
                                  ommendations? Is there any attempt to review and update the as-
                                  sumptions regarding the design? Mr. Mlakar.
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. Yes, sir. I would say that we don’t have an answer
                                  or conclusion about that right now, but that is certainly going to
                                  be a subject of our study.
                                     Senator CARPER. I am sorry, say that one more time.
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. We don’t have the answer to that right now, but
                                  I think we will have something to report on that at the end of our
                                  study.
                                     Senator CARPER. And that will be roughly when?
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. The study will be done July 1.
                                     Senator CARPER. All right, thank you. Yes, sir, Mr. Seed, an easy
                                  name for me to pronounce.
                                     Mr. SEED. And I apologize for my name being so simple. People
                                  tend to remember it, although sometimes I get called ‘‘Bird’’ several
                                  years later. [Laughter.]
                                     I have a partial answer for that, and our sense is the partial an-
                                  swers are important at this early stage. Hydrology has advanced
                                  considerably over the past half-century, and there are numerous
                                  projects, Corps projects, Bureau projects, and projects owned by
                                  neither involving levees and also large and high-risk dams whose
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                                  hydrology needs to be updated and the ramifications of which need
                                  to be studied.
                                     The difference between levees and dams is that dams tend to get
                                  reassessed every 5 and 10 years in a fairly formal system. There
                                  is a National Dam Safety Program which foments that. We don’t
                                  have a National Levee Safety Program. It is a missing piece, and
                                  we would like to see one established.
                                     Many levees are beginning to protect large populations. Levees
                                  used to exist in the swamps, which were unpopulated. We have a
                                  huge problem in California with our Sacramento Delta, where peo-
                                  ple are now moving into the delta because the real estate around
                                  the delta is both built in and hugely expensive, and we are pro-
                                  jecting having over 200,000 people move into that area in difficult
                                  and tenuous situations over the next 10 years alone. The prudence
                                  of that is also a political issue in California.
                                     We also have in California a city, Sacramento, with levee flood
                                  protection, nominally engineered by the Corps. The design level of
                                  flood protection intended for New Orleans was to be a so-called
                                  200-year level of protection, which means about once every 200
                                  years, you would expect to lose it in a major hurricane. As the Pica-
                                  yune said, the better estimate today might be roughly half that. We
                                  have levee systems in Sacramento which are nominally engineered
                                  to a 75-year level of protection, and the local understanding is it
                                  may be half of that. There are efforts to raise Folsom Dam now to
                                  help staunch some of the flooding and raise those levels. But we
                                  have levee systems throughout the United States at various levels
                                  of protection, and it is possible that those all need to be reassessed
                                  in terms of their levels of prudence.
                                     Senator CARPER. Mr. Nicholson, do you want to add anything?
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. Yes, just two things. First of all, I am not in a
                                  position to comment on what the Corps is doing or has understood
                                  about reevaluating the effect of the wetlands, but I did want to con-
                                  cur that the ASCE also believes that support of a National Levee
                                  Inspection Safety Program similar to the National Dam Safety Pro-
                                  gram that exists now would certainly be important, particularly in
                                  protecting those large urban areas. It is vitally important as they
                                  have been neglected to a much greater extent than our national
                                  dams.
                                     Senator CARPER. One last quick one for you, Dr. Seed. You stated
                                  in your testimony that some inexpensive modifications to the levees
                                  and floodwalls could have prevented some of their failures. What
                                  would be the reasons for choosing not to undertake those modifica-
                                  tions?
                                     Mr. SEED. It is almost a policy issue. The Corps of Engineers was
                                  authorized, which is a very specific term, to provide a certain level
                                  of protection for the people of New Orleans, and they specially
                                  sized the elevations of the tops of the levee and floodwall systems
                                  targeted at that. They typically overbuilt them in many areas by
                                  a foot and sometimes two to allow for long-term settlement, and
                                  the region is also subsiding. But by and large, that was the target,
                                  and they met it.
                                     It was not their policy to think about what would happen if you
                                  got one or two more feet of water. Therefore, there was no design
                                  provision for one or two more feet of water, but it may well be that
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36

                                  with some inexpensive additions that might have added, at best, a
                                  few percent to the overall project cost, one or two or sometimes
                                  three feet of water for a few hours might have been accommodated
                                  safely. Our sense is that there is a bit of a policy issue there which
                                  needs to be evaluated.
                                    Senator CARPER. All right. Thanks to all of you. Thanks very
                                  much.
                                    Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Coleman.

                                                OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COLEMAN
                                     Senator COLEMAN. Thank you, Madam Chairman, and thank you
                                  for holding this important hearing. Gentleman, though I didn’t
                                  have the time to listen to your testimony, I have read your state-
                                  ments. Just a couple of questions. I am still trying to understand
                                  what happened here.
                                     We have heard a lot of talk about building to a level five and the
                                  timing that would take and the cost that would take, but my kind
                                  of basic question as I kind of listened to the testimony, I think all
                                  of you have commented that the levee failure—I think, Mr. van
                                  Heerden, I think you talked about geotechnical engineering failure
                                  and talked about high porosity and permeability of soils. I think,
                                  in fact, every individual talked about the soil being an issue, that
                                  it wasn’t the surge, as you read the paper, that the surge over-
                                  came, but there were issues with the soil, geotechnical issues, I
                                  think is the phrase that was used.
                                     So my first question is, did the levees break because they were
                                  not geared to deal with a Category 5 hurricane, or, in fact, what
                                  we really dealt with was something less than a Category 5 here?
                                  I am trying to understand why. Is there anybody here who is say-
                                  ing that the reason for the failure was because the levees were not
                                  adequate to protect against a Category 5 hurricane?
                                     Mr. SEED. There are two pieces of that. As Dr. Nicholson said,
                                  there were several dozen levee failures, breaches, and distressed
                                  sections. A majority of them were the result of overtopping, and
                                  that simply means that the hurricane was bigger than the levees
                                  were built to take and that will be a policy issue. You could pay
                                  more and get bigger, taller systems that would have taken more
                                  storm surge.
                                     But three of the particularly devastating failures, the ones on the
                                  17th Street and London Avenue Canals, failed at far less than de-
                                  signed water surge levels because they were on the left flank, far
                                  away from where the hurricane was, and the water surge wasn’t
                                  so big there. So those were, in fact, foundation failures.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. So those, just to understand, if they were
                                  built to level 3 but didn’t have the foundation failures, we would
                                  not have seen the extent of damage that occurred?
                                     Mr. SEED. A considerable fraction of the flooding and some of the
                                  loss of life would have been prevented.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. I don’t want to get into any finger-pointing
                                  here, but how would that have been prevented? What should have
                                  gone on that didn’t go on to have prevented those structural fail-
                                  ures?
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37

                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. I will take that one. First of all, I think I would
                                  be careful with the use of ‘‘structural failure.’’ As geotechnical engi-
                                  neers——
                                     Senator COLEMAN. I am not a geotechnical, so give me the right
                                  phrase. It is important that we define this. And again, my concern
                                  is that there is so much talk about Category 5, but as I read your
                                  reports—and there are cost issues, let me just say, there are cost
                                  issues. I fully agree with my colleague from Ohio about the need
                                  to have more scientists, more engineers, but I don’t agree that the
                                  issue is simply more funding, and I don’t believe—I would say, re-
                                  spectfully, Mr. Seed, that this kind of conflict, if we put more into
                                  cost efficiency, that somehow that takes away from efficiency. In
                                  the private sector, it doesn’t work that way. You can get cost effi-
                                  ciency and have people do the right job. So I am not a believer that
                                  if we would have thrown more money in, necessarily. If that is the
                                  case, I would support that.
                                     So I am trying to understand the nature of the problem, why the
                                  problem was there, and what I am least clear on, that it wasn’t
                                  necessarily a problem because we weren’t at Category 5, the ability
                                  to deal with Category 5. We had less than that, and yet we still
                                  saw the breaches. So help me understand why that occurred and
                                  how that could have been prevented.
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. OK. Well, in fact, this is a multi-faceted issue
                                  because we had a number of different types of flood control struc-
                                  tures. We had different heights of storm surge in different areas.
                                  And so this discussion of Category 3, Category 5, as Dr. van
                                  Heerden said, really is a term that is used for the size of the storm,
                                  and there are a couple different definitions which make it even
                                  more complicated. Really, the individual flood protection is de-
                                  signed for a certain level of storm surge.
                                     As Senator Lieberman had asked, if they had performed as they
                                  were intended, certainly, we would have seen a lot less flooding.
                                  Exactly what went wrong and what failed is precisely what we are
                                  trying to do, and we certainly need additional studies. We, in the
                                  field, observed many different types of failure mechanisms. There
                                  is not one thing that went wrong. In different areas, in different
                                  types of levees, we saw different types of failures.
                                     So in some cases where we saw the overtopping, it is fairly easy.
                                  It is the more difficult ones, such as those floodwalls in town on
                                  the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals where we, in fact, have
                                  some pretty good ideas of what had gone on. We understand or we
                                  can observe some of the mechanisms that had led to the failures.
                                  But exactly what went on, and again, we aren’t looking at finger-
                                  pointing at this point.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. Let me ask you, who has the responsibility for
                                  checking the soil——
                                     Mr. SEED. Can I tackle that next because I think I have the an-
                                  swer you are looking for, and I think the question you asked is the
                                  one that we were all hoping to hear today. It is certainly why I flew
                                  out from California on the red-eye.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. I have taken that flight. [Laughter.]
                                     Mr. SEED. That is the only way we get to Washington from
                                  Berkeley.
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                                     Throwing more money into the bucket is not going to fix the
                                  problem. For more money, you can buy higher levees, and for more
                                  money, you can buy an increased level of safety, but what you need
                                  is an increased level of assurance of safety, and to get an increased
                                  level of assurance of safety, you need to make some fundamental
                                  changes as to how levee systems in the New Orleans area are de-
                                  signed and built and maintained.
                                     No one is in charge. You have multiple agencies, multiple organi-
                                  zations, some of whom aren’t on speaking terms with each other,
                                  sharing responsibilities for public safety. The Corps of Engineers
                                  had asked to put flood gates into the three canals, which nominally
                                  might have mitigated and prevented the three main breaches that
                                  did so much destruction downtown. But they weren’t able to do
                                  that because, unique to New Orleans, the Reclamation Districts
                                  who were responsible for maintaining the levees are separate from
                                  the Water and Sewerage District, which does the pumping. Ordi-
                                  narily, the Reclamation District does the dewatering pumping,
                                  which is separate from the water system. These guys don’t get
                                  along. The Sewerage District was so concerned they wouldn’t be
                                  able to pump through gates which had to be opened and closed that
                                  in the end, the Corps, against its desires, was forced instead to line
                                  the canals, which they did with some umbrage, and the locals bore
                                  a higher than typical fraction of the shared cost as a result of that.
                                     The constant interaction between different groups who fight over
                                  turf, pride, and other issues to the detriment of public safety needs
                                  to be stopped. There needs to be some overall coordination. Levees
                                  in the New Orleans area are at different heights. You can stand—
                                  we have a photograph in our report at one section where you can
                                  clearly see five different elevations, all within 100 yards of each
                                  other. If you have five different elevations within 100 yards, the
                                  person who built the lowest section wins because they become the
                                  public hazard. There is a need to coordinate these things.
                                     At a more global level, if someone is to be in charge, in all likeli-
                                  hood, it needs to be somebody very much like the Corps of Engi-
                                  neers, quite likely the Corps of Engineers. The Corps of Engineers
                                  needs to have the manpower and the technical expertise in terms
                                  of boots on the ground to get that job done.
                                     Standing in the field, we saw sections which just didn’t look en-
                                  tirely prudent. These weren’t individual sections of a levee or of a
                                  wall, these were sections where a levee and a wall joined together
                                  and the joint didn’t look right. Now, we had the benefit that nature
                                  had highlighted that for us by scouring around the edge so we
                                  could all see that there was a scour path, but we all thought, look-
                                  ing at them, maybe we would have foreseen the scour path had we
                                  been standing there before the hurricane. Hindsight is 20/20, but
                                  we think perhaps we would have noted that. It doesn’t seem to us
                                  that people stood there and looked at that. There seems to have
                                  been a shortage of boots on the ground.
                                     We are seeing design documents which are signed off and ini-
                                  tialed and checked by just one individual and not by several, as
                                  would be customary, and we are seeing the Corps stretched very
                                  thin, trying to do the work to build and to complete the building
                                  of a very complex system, and it doesn’t feel like the manpower and
                                  especially the technical expertise is entirely at the level we would
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                                  like to see it at to get a job of this nature and this sensitivity ac-
                                  complished.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. Mr. van Heerden.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I met with Colonel Wagenaar last week, the
                                  District Engineer in New Orleans, and recognizing, as Professor
                                  Seed does, that perhaps they don’t have all the technical expertise
                                  they need at this point in time, we offered from the University of
                                  Louisiana to help. We have got, obviously, a lot of engineering de-
                                  partments, geotechnical engineers, and so maybe as a beginning or
                                  a short gap or whatever, we suggest that the Corps of Engineers
                                  reach out to academia and try and capture some of the talents and
                                  expertise in the universities.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. If I may, and this is just a comment, Madam
                                  Chairman, I served as Mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota. We are at the
                                  beginning of the navigable headwaters. The Mississippi starts
                                  there and is navigable right down to New Orleans. When I was
                                  Mayor, we had floodings that came very close to flooding situations.
                                  We have a major power plant on the Mississippi, and we were
                                  within a short level of major problems. I worked extensively with
                                  the Corps. We actually built a gate and a floodwall around one of
                                  the neighboring islands, which was the Corps really going outside
                                  of the way they usually operate so that citizens could use this is-
                                  land when there wasn’t a problem with the flood, but you could
                                  close the gate and provide protection. They showed great flexibility.
                                     But I really do appreciate two things that I have heard here, and
                                  one of which reminds me of what we heard in the post-September
                                  11 hearings. Who is in charge? If you see a problem, how do you
                                  get it done? We are all listening to this and saying, we have heard
                                  this before, the kind of silo effect in government.
                                     So I would just say thank you, one, for expressing the need to
                                  coordinate, and then the second piece, which we have heard before,
                                  too, is the need for government to reach out. Whether it is FEMA
                                  calling Wal-Mart and figuring out how to position supplies or the
                                  Corps working with academia and others, and we did that in our
                                  development, to take advantage of the talent that is out there. So
                                  it isn’t necessarily just throwing more money. I am not against that
                                  where it is needed. But it is about how you use it efficiently and
                                  how decisions are made, and so I do appreciate your response.
                                     Mr. SEED. Could I add a third piece to that, though, and that is
                                  something we saw with NASA and the Challenger and we see in
                                  other agencies. It is important that we don’t just simply reach out
                                  to academia. The Corps, in streamlining its operations, is out-
                                  sourcing an increasing fraction of its work in engineering and espe-
                                  cially in geotechnical engineering. I should welcome that because,
                                  of course, I could do work for the Corps and I could get paid for
                                  it as opposed to doing these investigations where we are all volun-
                                  teers and my wife is nuts. [Laughter.]
                                     But against my own better judgment, I am going to tell you that,
                                  I think, the Corps of Engineers needs to have a very strong inter-
                                  nal capability because what happened to NASA was they lost the
                                  ability to keep track of the outsourced engineering. You bring ele-
                                  gant people in from the outside. If you can’t deal with them on a
                                  level playing field, you have a hard time checking what they are
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                                  doing and problems can arise. It is important that the Corps have
                                  an internal capability which matches the problem, as well.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. You have made that point quite clear today.
                                  Thank you.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator Coleman. You brought
                                  up an incredibly important issue. Our full Committee investigation
                                  has already revealed that there was a great deal of confusion
                                  among the Army Corps, the Levee Board, the State Department of
                                  Transportation, and the Water and Sewer District on who was re-
                                  sponsible for what, and that is an issue that we are going to be
                                  pursuing in a subsequent hearing because there is also evidence
                                  uncovered by our investigators that that confusion about who is re-
                                  sponsible for what delayed the response when the levees failed, and
                                  it is incredibly important that we pursue that issue and focus not
                                  just on the specifications that are needed for the new, improved
                                  levee system, but also the organizational issues that will clearly
                                  designate an agency to be in charge. So I appreciate your raising
                                  that issue.
                                     I do want to follow up on that issue with Dr. Nicholson because
                                  we have had a number of experts, including Dr. Seed today, who
                                  have suggested that the failure to have one department or agency
                                  with clear control and responsibility for the designing, the building,
                                  and the maintenance of the levees contributed to the damage from
                                  Hurricane Katrina. From your perspective, what would be some of
                                  the problems from a civil engineering standpoint associated with
                                  the lack of a comprehensive effort and with a lack of a clear role
                                  designating responsibilities?
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. I see that really as a two-part question, or two-
                                  part answer. Certainly, we observed in the field where you had dif-
                                  ferent organizations in charge of the design, maintenance, and even
                                  the construction of certain parts of levees, where they came to-
                                  gether, that was one of the transition problems we saw and——
                                     Chairman COLLINS. If I could just interrupt you for a second, is
                                  that the issue with the transition points that both you and Dr.
                                  Seed referred to, where you have very different materials being
                                  used, where the seams don’t seem to go together in a logical way
                                  once they are uncovered?
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. Well, certainly we find that each individual or-
                                  ganization will do as they see fit, and when the two sections of the
                                  flood control system operated or owned, designed, and maintained
                                  by each of those different organizations come together, they may be
                                  in two different manners. They may have two different heights.
                                  They may be two different materials.
                                     And so the transition from one to the next needs to be more con-
                                  tinuous. We need to maintain or improve the connection between
                                  those two. If they are at different heights, if they are different ma-
                                  terials, those are two of the big transition problems. As I showed
                                  in my last slide there, we have also got different organizations such
                                  as the railroads coming in with a very different purpose and aspect
                                  of what they believe is their greatest importance. They may not
                                  have in their mind the same, not just agenda, but the same com-
                                  prehension of what their part of the responsibility is. And so that
                                  is a very difficult question or problem that we see.
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                                     How to answer that, as has been brought up, perhaps the solu-
                                  tion would be to put one organization in charge and to oversee and
                                  essentially be responsible for that, and overseeing and essentially
                                  having authority over the other organizations.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Dr. Seed, do you agree with that?
                                     Mr. SEED. Yes. The important analogy here is that building a
                                  levee system is like building a boat or building a Space Shuttle.
                                  You have a lot of pieces that have to fit together perfectly because
                                  if you have a flaw, you are going to lose the whole thing. It is not
                                  necessarily reasonable to think you can build 80-some-odd miles of
                                  levees in a ring if you have got a half-dozen or more different par-
                                  ties involved and if you do it in 143 individual projects. It is per-
                                  haps better to have an overall vision and one group responsible,
                                  like the captain of a ship, whose job it is to be sure that the ship
                                  is seaworthy before it sails.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Dr. Mlakar, what is your opinion on that?
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. I think the results of our studies, I believe, ma’am,
                                  you began by saying we need to really investigate this thoroughly,
                                  and I think the final results will have some recommendations along
                                  those lines.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. You are withholding judgment for now.
                                     Dr. van Heerden, what do you think? Should we have one agency
                                  with clear, overall responsibility?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Madam Chairman, my comment is going to
                                  politically raise some hackles in Louisiana, but I believe there
                                  should be one Levee Board. It is a scale of efficiency. It is a scale
                                  of expertise. And it becomes a case of when you have all these dif-
                                  ferent agencies, one hand doesn’t know what the next hand is
                                  doing. So in my opinion, yes, we need one Levee Board, and they
                                  should be controlling all the levee systems, not a large number of
                                  levee boards, each funded in a different way, each appointed in a
                                  different way, in many cases, levee board members not being engi-
                                  neers or having experience in drainage or understanding some of
                                  the models.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you.
                                     Dr. Nicholson, just one final question. Dr. Seed raised the issue
                                  of possible malfeasance or corruption in the construction or the ma-
                                  terials used for some of the levees as opposed to the specifications
                                  not being adequate, but of perhaps the case where the specifica-
                                  tions were adequate but the contractor did not comply. Did you see
                                  any examples of the inferior materials being used in the levees as
                                  part of your review?
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. We don’t have exact information to answer the
                                  first part of that question as far as what was specified or not used
                                  as specified. We did see what we considered to be inferior materials
                                  in some cases, perhaps, but that may well have been allowed in the
                                  specifications.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Could you give us an example of the inferior
                                  materials?
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. I think the best example of that was using sand
                                  and the so-called shell fill as embankment material, the highly
                                  erodible materials that may have been sufficient if you had not had
                                  any erosion, but as soon as you start that erosional process, they
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                                  quickly disappear, and we saw wide evidence of large sections of
                                  the levees simply gone.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Lieberman.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Thanks again.
                                  The panel has been really superb. I thank you for your public serv-
                                  ice and what you are doing in coming before us.
                                     I want to take you to a different part of your investigations,
                                  which is to say the Committee has obviously focused on why the
                                  levees failed, but also, for various reasons, when the levees failed.
                                  Knowing when the levees failed will help give us some under-
                                  standing of the specific period during the storm when the breaks
                                  happened and the different water levels and forces at work at that
                                  time.
                                     Second, knowing when the levees were overcome or failed will
                                  help us understand when different parts of the city and the sur-
                                  rounding parishes began to flood and help us assess how and when
                                  the State, local, and Federal officials learned of these breaks and
                                  responded to them.
                                     So if I could start with you, Dr. van Heerden, if you would please
                                  walk us through your best estimates this morning of when the var-
                                  ious levees failed causing the flooding of New Orleans.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. We set up something called our stop-clock
                                  program where we created a hotline for people to phone us when
                                  they returned to their homes to tell us the times on hand-face
                                  clocks, and working—this is now just preliminary data——
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Right.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN [continuing]. But we started in the lower
                                  Ninth Ward. It appears that they started to flood from the East,
                                  in other words, from the area of the funnel, as early as 5 a.m., and
                                  by 6 a.m., it had reached Tennessee Street, which is very close to
                                  where the two big breaches occurred.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Right.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. At 5 in the morning, there was—where the
                                  railroad crosses the Industrial Canal at Interstate 10, from the
                                  water level record in that area, we understand that the sandbags
                                  that they had used to seal the levees at the railroads blew out.
                                  That was, we believe, around 5 a.m.
                                     In terms of the two large breaches on the Industrial Canal, ap-
                                  parently they occurred between 7:15 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., and that
                                  is just from testimony. We don’t have the clocks here.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Right.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. In terms of the London Avenue Canal, again,
                                  this is all very preliminary data, the Mirabeau breach, the one on
                                  the South, the one closest into the city, we believe occurred be-
                                  tween 9 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. The one at Filmore Street, between 10
                                  and 10:30 a.m. We have got a number of clocks at 10:15 a.m. And
                                  then at the 17th Street Canal, between 10 and 10:30 a.m. But this
                                  is very preliminary data. We are still getting lots of phone calls.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. It is very significant because based on the
                                  data you have, the preliminary conclusions, the major levee failures
                                  had occurred by mid-morning on August 29 and the flooding, there-
                                  fore, had begun. Part of what we are pursuing here is when—of
                                  course, it was a chaotic situation, very difficult in many ways to
                                  determine what was happening, but for various reasons, word did
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                                  not apparently reach people at the top of the Federal Government
                                  until, by some estimates, Tuesday, and that may have affected, ob-
                                  viously, what the response would be.
                                     Do any of the others of you on the—yes, Dr. Mlakar, do you have
                                  some conclusions about the time of the levees——
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. We don’t have conclusions yet, but we are looking
                                  into that issue, exactly when it did fail.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes.
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. That is very important to understanding how and
                                  why it failed. Like Dr. van Heerden, we have been looking at
                                  clocks. We have got on the order of 50. You know, the clock might
                                  stop when it loses power, the clock might stop when it is flooded.
                                  There are some issues there that we have got to sort through.
                                     We have talked to 70 eyewitnesses out of an identified group of
                                  100—that is still growing—to get their recollections. As you can
                                  well imagine, we might have one person recall 8 a.m. and the per-
                                  son across the street is sure that it was still dry at 10 a.m., so we
                                  have got some issues in resolving the witness testimony.
                                     And then finally, in addition to that, we have identified some se-
                                  curity cameras that were operating that should have a very good
                                  field of view on what was happening, and we are in the process of
                                  acquiring their tapes.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Security cameras that were there for that
                                  reason, or just for reasons——
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. For some other reason, perhaps a 7-Eleven, a bank,
                                  or whatever is just surveiling and you happened in the field of view
                                  to have an area that is eventually breached and flooded. So we are
                                  in the process of synthesizing all that information, and as part of
                                  this, we will be getting together with my colleague from LSU and
                                  combining their information with our information to give all of us
                                  the best estimate of when. And while we are primarily interested
                                  in that information for helping us understand the how and the
                                  why——
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Because you will relate it to what the storm
                                  was doing at that point.
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. Exactly. It will also be information useful for your
                                  slightly different purpose.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Absolutely. Dr. Seed and Dr. Nicholson, do
                                  you reach independent judgments about the times at which the lev-
                                  ees broke?
                                     Mr. SEED. We have been funneling our information in terms of
                                  witnesses’ statements, and so on, to the other two groups because
                                  we lack the manpower and resources to really do a full processing
                                  of that. But the timelines described by Dr. van Heerden would
                                  make sense with the geotechnical observations we see in the field,
                                  and so they are consistent.
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. I would have to agree with that, as well.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you all. Thanks, Madam Chairman.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Coleman.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Just a couple of
                                  other areas of inquiry.
                                     Mr. Seed, you have talked a lot about NASA and the compari-
                                  sons to NASA. One of the things that you have in the NASA pro-
                                  gram is you have redundancies, and levees don’t appear to have
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                                  redundancies, though I am wondering, and perhaps you can edu-
                                  cate me on this, what are the redundancy options, doable options?
                                  Is it wetlands? Is it barriers? Is that what one would call a redun-
                                  dancy? This investment, I keep coming back to the cost issue, the
                                  former mayor in me. I guess I am going through the protection
                                  about Category 3 versus Category 5. Does the existence of
                                  redundancies, does that move something from a Category 3 to a
                                  Category 5 or does it just strengthen the ability to withstand a
                                  Category 3? Help me understand this redundancy issue.
                                     Mr. SEED. Not necessarily. Redundancy is hugely expensive in
                                  the context of levees. The only really thorough redundant system
                                  in the world is that of Holland, which in the mid-1950s the entire
                                  Nation was flooded by a North Sea storm, and so they have tre-
                                  mendous incentive, literally the entire country was flooded. They
                                  operate in polders, which are essentially like the containment com-
                                  partments in a ship, so that if their exterior coastal defense is
                                  breached, you flood only a section and then you hit a second levee.
                                  And so they have defense in depth. But if that is the single leading
                                  issue for your nation, you can put a large fraction of your national
                                  resources into that.
                                     I don’t think we can get a large fraction of our national resources
                                  into the New Orleans levees in the next week or two. I don’t think
                                  that is going to happen. So redundancy is very expensive. More
                                  likely, we are going to have to build levees which are vastly more
                                  secure. In California, we have a few places where we have sacrifi-
                                  cial islands. We have things that are designed to fail like a fuse
                                  in an electrical system, which will reduce water levels and take
                                  water levels down. So there are a lot of options we can look at
                                  there, but by and large, in the New Orleans area, given the geome-
                                  tries, redundancy would be very difficult to achieve.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. Do you other gentlemen want to comment on
                                  that issue?
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. Only that restoring the wetlands would, in
                                  essence, act in a small way as a second barrier.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. Let me just touch on two other points. One,
                                  is there—and this may not be for your panel, but I am interested,
                                  are any lessons to be learned here about the relationship between
                                  FEMA and the Corps? Is there anything anybody wants to com-
                                  ment on regarding FEMA and the Corps in terms of interaction,
                                  communication, efficiency of what one does helping the other, or
                                  perhaps hindering the other?
                                     Mr. SEED. Two separate operations, in our view, speaking for our
                                  team, the Corps’ job is to prevent these things from happening in
                                  the first place and then to fix them afterwards, and FEMA does the
                                  middle piece, which is the emergency.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. Is there a notification piece, though? What I
                                  am hearing, clearly, the Corps has a question about timing or has
                                  a part in saying, hey, we have a problem. And again, this may not
                                  be your area of expertise, but at a certain point, knowing there is
                                  a problem and then being able to respond, I think there would be
                                  some issues there.
                                     Mr. SEED. Well, I guess the heart of the issue we discussed ear-
                                  lier, if the lines of responsibility and who is in charge aren’t clear,
                                  it is very hard to decide who needs to be issuing warnings and pub-
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                                  lic notices, and the Corps’ policy is to build these systems and then
                                  turn them over to locals. They don’t remain the proprietors forever.
                                  So there are some difficult issues there.
                                     The turning over is also problematic. California has a great
                                  many Corps-built levees which are now turned over to locals who
                                  then have deep pockets liability for these kinds of things. You, of
                                  course, can’t sue the Corps of Engineers as a Federal agency. They
                                  have tremendous immunity for water-related and safety-related
                                  projects. So when they get turned over to the locals, the locals
                                  aren’t necessarily all that pleased to be getting them because they
                                  acquire the liability, whereas while the Corps operates them, they
                                  are a little bit protected.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. And they acquire the maintenance responsi-
                                  bility, also.
                                     Mr. SEED. They do, but it is the liability which is crushing. So
                                  there are some issues as to how levees happen in the United
                                  States. I am hoping that all this will trigger an investigation at a
                                  more global level of where levees are, what the conditions of levees
                                  are, and more fundamentally, how levees happen, how they are de-
                                  signed and built, how they are constructed and maintained, and
                                  how people allow decisions with regard to who lives where and who
                                  lives above sea level and the levels of protection and so on. It is
                                  a huge, festering national issue which has been off the radar
                                  screen.
                                     As my wife likes to tell me, levees are currently sexy for maybe
                                  a month or two, but by and large, when these disasters aren’t hit-
                                  ting, levees are just big piles of dirt. They are not all that attrac-
                                  tive. They don’t get much attention.
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. Sir, I believe your question was about the relation-
                                  ship between FEMA and the Corps. We certainly appreciate your
                                  interest in that, but I think you are right. There are probably oth-
                                  ers in the Corps that are much more qualified to speak to that than
                                  I.
                                     Senator COLEMAN. Let me just say, Madam Chairman, you
                                  raised the issue about inferior materials, malfeasance, corruption,
                                  and I just want to say, I think we really have to look into that. I
                                  was in Armenia not too long ago, and things are falling apart there
                                  because everything was built with, like, 15 percent less rebar be-
                                  cause it went into the pockets of someone. That is corruption on a
                                  clear level.
                                     And we hear a lot of murmuring, and maybe folks don’t want to
                                  talk about it, we hear murmuring about New Orleans, Louisiana
                                  has had a history of corruption in public officials. It has happened.
                                  I don’t want to offend anybody, so I think we have to get beyond
                                  the murmuring and take a very close look, a very earnest look. Is
                                  that an issue? Contractors, were they not putting in the materials
                                  they were supposed to? And again, we don’t have the answers. We
                                  clearly saw inferior materials. But I think we have to have the
                                  courage to take a look at that and not to point a finger or to offend,
                                  but to say we have an obligation to make sure that what was done
                                  was done right.
                                     Thank you, Madam Chairman.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Akaka.
                                     Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
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                                     Let me ask this fast question before I ask my last one, and this
                                  is to Dr. Seed. You stated that throwing money at the Corps will
                                  not solve the problem, but you also said that the Corps is lacking
                                  staff, or the quote is ‘‘boots on the ground.’’ To clarify, is there a
                                  way to fix the staffing issue without additional funding, in your
                                  opinion?
                                     Mr. SEED. No. My comment was intended in the other direction.
                                  I don’t think simply putting additional funding in guarantees you
                                  are getting good boots on the ground. You can spend that money
                                  in other ways. I am hoping that there is some oversight capability,
                                  and I am hoping that if funding is injected, there will be some reor-
                                  ganization and some rebuilding of some of the engineering exper-
                                  tise, which was formerly very impressive in those areas of endeav-
                                  or.
                                     Senator AKAKA. My final wrap-up question, Madam Chairman, is
                                  for Dr. Nicholson and Dr. Seed. You both made specific rec-
                                  ommendations for what can be done to improve the New Orleans
                                  levee system in the future, and I want to open this question also
                                  to the two other witnesses. Which recommendations can be imple-
                                  mented in the short term and are relatively inexpensive, and which
                                  recommendations require more time and resources to implement?
                                  Also, if you care to respond, which measures the Corps of Engi-
                                  neers should have implemented prior to Katrina. Dr. Seed.
                                     Mr. SEED. Those are three different questions. I guess I am infer-
                                  ring a third one there. The things that can be done quickly aren’t
                                  necessarily the ones that need to be done as quickly. There is an
                                  urgency to some of them, and the third one is the easiest question.
                                     The Corps of Engineers were given operating instructions. They
                                  were given orders. They were authorized for certain things, and
                                  they strove to fulfill those specifications. It would be good if their
                                  instructions were more flexible. It wasn’t their job to do the kinds
                                  of things that we see that could have been done better. That wasn’t
                                  part of their task. It wasn’t their assignment. So it is a little bit
                                  unfair to do finger-pointing because something was omitted. More
                                  troubling are the three canal failures, which appear to be founda-
                                  tion issues. That will be a tougher issue.
                                     What can be done quickly, you can get yourself more protection
                                  by installing splash pads on the inboard faces of a lot of the
                                  floodwalls. That would be a very inexpensive and rapidly imple-
                                  mentable fix.
                                     Some things are much harder than that, but they are more ur-
                                  gent. Getting the MRGO levee segment back up and operating is
                                  hugely vital. That was the back door. It is across 15 miles of
                                  swamp from the developed areas, but the water came across that
                                  swamp, and it didn’t even slow down. It was not interested in doing
                                  so. And so the Ninth Ward and the St. Bernard Parish were essen-
                                  tially toast from the first time that flood hit. Getting those levees
                                  rebuilt is hugely urgent and very difficult to do in a timely manner.
                                     At a more global level, if the system is going to work, putting
                                  somebody in charge is important. It is not very expensive to put
                                  somebody in charge necessarily, but it is going to take some time
                                  to achieve that because you are going to have to enact legislation
                                  and take some level of control, probably at a Federal level.
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                                     And finally, if the Corps of Engineers is going to be that some-
                                  one, and they would appear to be the only suitable candidate, the
                                  Corps of Engineers is also going to have to do some restructuring
                                  and some rebuilding of some of its capabilities, and that will not
                                  be a short-term issue. It is much easier to whittle down an organi-
                                  zation than it is to rebuild it. You can do a lot of damage in 3 or
                                  4 years that might take a decade or longer to repair.
                                     Senator AKAKA. Dr. Nicholson.
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. I would agree with much of what Dr. Seed said
                                  as far as overtopping protection and getting the MRGO length of
                                  levee restored, as that is the front line of protection for much of
                                  that area. Certainly the whole St. Bernard Parish area took that
                                  as their—or lost that front line of protection.
                                     But to go a little step further, for quick and inexpensive, those
                                  are very difficult things. Those two options are maybe the two that
                                  would be quick and inexpensive. But at the next level, and this
                                  may not be quick and not all that inexpensive, would be, as I think
                                  we both agreed earlier, would be the enactment of a National Levee
                                  Safety Program which would oversee New Orleans at about the
                                  same cost, and I believe that is about $10 million a year for those
                                  two programs, to have a levee protection program in New Orleans,
                                  as well as in California. It would help to get more attention paid
                                  to those vital infrastructure elements.
                                     Mr. SEED. And not just New Orleans and California. We have
                                  levees in a lot of places. Most States have levees. We have massive
                                  levee systems up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys. We
                                  have levees in the Charleston area. So I would hope it is something
                                  which would have some national interest at this point.
                                     Mr. NICHOLSON. I should say, even Hawaii has a small section
                                  of levees.
                                     Senator AKAKA. Dr. Mlakar.
                                     Mr. MLAKAR. Yes, thank you. Rather than speculate as we are
                                  just getting into this of what we need to do in the short- and the
                                  long-term, I would like to answer your question by reiterating the
                                  Corps’ commitment here in a thoroughly open and transparent
                                  manner to getting to the answers and finding out the how and the
                                  why it happened, and then I think the answers to your questions
                                  will be clear.
                                     Senator AKAKA. Dr. van Heerden.
                                     Mr. VAN HEERDEN. I have two comments. One is the academics
                                  of how the soil failure actually occurred don’t detract from the fact
                                  that we had soil failure and you can very visually see those levee
                                  systems slid many tens of feet. So what I would ask is that we
                                  identify other areas in our levee systems that perhaps didn’t fail
                                  or could have failed where we have similar soil conditions and per-
                                  haps come in and drive a secondary line of sheetpile down to 50,
                                  60, 70 feet, whatever the case may be, to create that barrier to stop
                                  the seepage.
                                     The second thing is, and very important to Louisiana, some of
                                  our parishes, some of the levee boards do not have a very strong
                                  or robust economic base in which to get funds. Just as the Federal
                                  Government took over the building of the levees after the 1927
                                  flood on the Mississippi, and they paid for them and built them,
                                  perhaps this is a time in terms of some of our jeweled cities like
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48

                                  New Orleans for the Federal Government to offer the same level
                                  of support and come in and build the levees without us having to
                                  rely on the limited incomes of some of these parishes and levee
                                  boards in Louisiana.
                                     Senator AKAKA. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you.
                                     I want to thank all of our witnesses today for truly excellent tes-
                                  timony. Your testimony and statements have been extremely help-
                                  ful to us as the Committee continues its investigation into the
                                  preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina. It is absolutely
                                  critical that we get a better understanding of why the levee system
                                  failed and you have helped us to do so today.
                                     I want to assure you that your full statements and any addi-
                                  tional material that you may wish to submit will be included in the
                                  hearing record. In addition, Members of the Committee may have
                                  some additional written questions which we will be submitting to
                                  you. I very much appreciate the efforts that all of you made to be
                                  here today.
                                     The hearing record will remain open for 15 days. I want to also
                                  thank our staff for their hard work on this investigation.
                                     Senator Lieberman.
                                     Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Very briefly, I
                                  join in the thanks. It strikes me, as I have listened to you this
                                  morning and read your papers, that you are men of science and you
                                  speak in technical terms and very reasoned tones, but the testi-
                                  mony that you have given really cries out to us to act decisively.
                                  And if I might add, generously in terms of support for the Army
                                  Corps, to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again be-
                                  cause you do deepen, in your testimony and your investigation, you
                                  deepen the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and the failure associated
                                  with it because you now tell us that not only was it a failure of
                                  governmental preparation and response to the flood, but the flood
                                  itself could have been significantly prevented had the design and
                                  construction of the levees been what they should have been.
                                     I would ask you this as you go forward in continuing your work.
                                  It may be that what you find not only helps us understand what
                                  happened, but as you have suggested a few times today, you may
                                  also come across some indications of, for want of a better term,
                                  what I would call a ticking time bomb, some other vulnerability, as
                                  I think you said at the end, Dr. van Heerden, that didn’t fail this
                                  time but might again. And, we want to work together to make sure
                                  that it doesn’t next time.
                                     But I know most of you are working with, talk about not much
                                  resources, a lot of you are giving your own time, and this is an
                                  enormously important contribution you are making that only peo-
                                  ple of your experience and expertise can make, so thank you very
                                  much.
                                     Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. This hearing is now adjourned.
                                     [Whereupon, at 12:19 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
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APPENDIX

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We have a dataframe with one row per page of the congressional hearing document.

# unnest tokens
tidy_hearing <- levees_hearing %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>%
  anti_join(stop_words)
  
# take a look 
head(tidy_hearing)
##        word
## 1       hrg
## 2       109
## 3       526
## 4 hurricane
## 5   katrina
## 6    levees

Let’s look at the top words from the hearing on levees.

# look at top words
tidy_hearing_counts <- tidy_hearing %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE)


# now we can look at the top 20
head(tidy_hearing_counts, 20)
##        word   n
## 1        09 726
## 2      6601 617
## 3      2006 365
## 4        37 365
## 5      2002 364
## 6        31 364
## 7     00000 363
## 8    024446 363
## 9       0ct 363
## 10    24446 363
## 11      aug 363
## 12     docs 363
## 13      fmt 363
## 14      frm 363
## 15      jkt 363
## 16      pat 363
## 17       po 363
## 18      psn 363
## 19 saffairs 363
## 20     sfmt 363

Hmmm, our top three words all look like junk text. This doesn’t seem right! We can search for some of these “words” in our PDF file (just using ctrl+f), and realize that they are mostly invisible document markers. Therefore, we should remove them. We can do this by adding all of these “junk words” to our stop_words dataset.

We can do this by first using the View() function to examine the words and n values for tidy_hearing. We notice that all of the words that appear over 300 times are junk words (as a side note: why do we think there are so many words that appear 363 times?).

Next, we can use the filter and select functions to limit our data to the words that appear over 300 times. These functions are incredibly useful, so be sure to familiarize yourself with these if you are unsure what is going on here. We can also search the document for other words that we may want to remove. For example, we will include the word “6633” in our new stop words.

library(magrittr)
# vector for additional stop words
addl_stop_words <- tidy_hearing_counts %>%
  filter(n > 300 ) %>%
  select(word)

# include 6633 as well
addl_stop_words %<>%
  bind_rows(data.frame(word = "6633"))

Now we have the additional stop words, and we want to add these to our stop_words data. We can do this by creating a custom dataframe of stop words:

# add additional stop words
custom_stop_words <- bind_rows(data.frame(word = addl_stop_words,  
                                      lexicon = c("custom")), 
                               stop_words)

# examine new stop words dataset
head(custom_stop_words)
##   word lexicon
## 1   09  custom
## 2 6601  custom
## 3 2006  custom
## 4   37  custom
## 5 2002  custom
## 6   31  custom

Let’s remove these from our hearing data as well, and then look at the most frequent words.

# remove custom stop words
tidy_hearing %<>%
  anti_join(custom_stop_words)

# look at top words
tidy_hearing_counts <- tidy_hearing %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE)


# now we can look at the top 20
head(tidy_hearing_counts, 20)
##         word   n
## 1     levees 127
## 2    senator 126
## 3      corps 121
## 4      levee  92
## 5    orleans  91
## 6      slide  86
## 7         dr  80
## 8       seed  76
## 9  hurricane  72
## 10  chairman  62
## 11     water  62
## 12 engineers  60
## 13       van  57
## 14   heerden  56
## 15     level  56
## 16     canal  55
## 17     storm  54
## 18     surge  48
## 19 lieberman  47
## 20 nicholson  44

Great! We see that words like “levees,” “senator,” and “corps” are the most prominent. These are all fitting with the topic and the setting (corps probably being used as in “the Army Corps of Engineers”, who built the levees). Are there any surprises in our top 20?

It is wise to qualitatively explore our text documents as we learn more about them. We notice that the word “van” appears 57 times, but upon inspection we see that van Heerden was the Head of the Louisiana State Data Forensics Gathering Team and a key witness for the hearing. “Seed” is also a name, and “slide” is used in the context of van Heerden and Nicholson saying “next slide” many times. We can also learn more about what happened during Hurricane Katrina by reading the hearing testimony. For example, Joe Lieberman states that “if the levees had done what they were designed to do, a lot of the flooding of New Orleans would not have occurred, and a lot of the suffering that occurred as a result of the flooding would not have occurred,” which is confirmed by Dr. Seed, who was leading the National Science Foundation’s investigation of the levees.

Finally, we can get details by qualitatively examining documents that are impossible through text analysis alone. For example, we can look at photos of distressed or damaged levees like the one below to see more details on the structural failures.

3.5 Comparing Multiple Text Documents

To get a broader understanding of how text is used in this hearing, we might want to compare it to another. Let’s download and use the hearing on the National Flood Insurance Program. We can combine the two hearings into a single dataframe using the bind_rows function (and we also add a variable called hearing to each to specify which hearing it is).

# read hearing into R
nfip_hearing <- pdf_text("Data/Katrina_hearings/katrina_hearing_nfip.pdf") %>%
  as.data.frame()

# set column names 
colnames(nfip_hearing) <- c("text")

# set dataframe with both hearings 
df_hearings <- bind_rows(nfip_hearing %>%
                           mutate(hearing = "nfip"),
                         levees_hearing %>%
                           mutate(hearing = "levees"))

Like before, we will use unnest_tokens to get our data in tidytext format. I’ve also added some custom stop words that are relevant to the NFIP hearing, which I don’t display here, because the process is the same.

# get our data in tidytext format
df_hearings_tidy <- df_hearings %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>%
  anti_join(custom_stop_words)
##        word
## 1        09
## 2      6601
## 3      2006
## 4        37
## 5      2002
## 6        31
## 7     00000
## 8    024446
## 9       0ct
## 10    24446
## 11      aug
## 12     docs
## 13      fmt
## 14      frm
## 15      jkt
## 16      pat
## 17       po
## 18      psn
## 19 saffairs
## 20     sfmt
## 21      txt
## 22  verdate
## 23     6633
## 24       12
## 25       35
## 26       19
## 27     2007
## 28   000000
## 29    33994
## 30      jul
## 31    kevin
## 32   sbank4
## 33     6621

Like before, we can gather counts of words in the two documents. However this time, we will use group_by() to specify that we want separate counts for each of the hearings.

# look at top words for each hearing
tidy_hearing_counts <- df_hearings_tidy %>%
  group_by(hearing) %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE) 


# limit to top 20 words in each hearing
tidy_hearing_counts %<>%
  filter(row_number() < 21)

tidy_hearing_counts %>% 
  head(20)
## # A tibble: 20 × 3
## # Groups:   hearing [1]
##    hearing word           n
##    <chr>   <chr>      <int>
##  1 nfip    flood       1524
##  2 nfip    insurance   1109
##  3 nfip    program      803
##  4 nfip    nfip         567
##  5 nfip    senator      476
##  6 nfip    fema         381
##  7 nfip    risk         375
##  8 nfip    chairman     362
##  9 nfip    percent      326
## 10 nfip    national     265
## 11 nfip    maps         257
## 12 nfip    claims       253
## 13 nfip    federal      248
## 14 nfip    mitigation   248
## 15 nfip    billion      237
## 16 nfip    floodplain   228
## 17 nfip    shelby       226
## 18 nfip    hurricane    222
## 19 nfip    sarbanes     211
## 20 nfip    people       208

And we’ll do a side-by-side plot of the top words for each hearing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is not too much overlap between the two hearings. Words like “senator,” “chairman,” and “hurricane” appear in the top 20 words in both hearings, but otherwise these words are distinct. It may be that if we looked at a deeper list of words for each we would see substantially more overlap.

3.6 Comparing Word and Document Frequencies

Extending the previous example, let’s say we have several documents and we want to compare word frequencies in each. We will use 11 different hearings related to Hurricane Katrina.

# create vector with names for each hearing
katrina_hearings <- c("crime",
                      "environment",
                      "evacuation",
                      "finance",
                      "flood",
                      "fraud",
                      "housing",
                      "military",
                      "nextphase")


# use a for loop to gather them all
for(hearing in katrina_hearings){
  
  # read hearing into R
new_hearing <- pdf_text(paste0("Data/Katrina_hearings/katrina_hearing_",
                               hearing,
                               ".pdf")) %>%
  as.data.frame()

# set column names 
colnames(new_hearing) <- c("text")

# specify which hearing it is
new_hearing %<>%
  mutate(hearing = paste(hearing))

df_hearings <- bind_rows(df_hearings,
                         new_hearing)

}

We’ve looked at word frequencies in the previous sections, but these frequencies do not account for words that are common across documents, such as “senator” or “chairman.” We might instead be interested in words that are uniquely prevalent in each document. To examine this, we will use Text Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, or TF-IDF. The IDF part of this concept can be calculated as follows:

\[ IDF(term) = ln\bigg(\frac{n_{documents}}{n_{documents containing term}}\bigg) \] And the TF part of the equation, which we have already used, can be represented as \(TF(term) = \frac{n_{term}}{n_{alltermsindocument}}\), or the proportion of all terms in the document that are the term of interest. When we combine these, we have:

\[TFIDF = TF \cdot IDF\] Intuitively, we can think of this as a measure of popularity of a term in a document, which adjusts (inversely) for how popular this term is in other documents. So if a term like “insurance” is popular in the NFIP hearing and does not appear very much in other hearings, we would expect this to have a high TF-IDF score, whereas a term like “senator,” which appears in all the documents, would have a lower TF-IDF score. This allows us, in theory, to isolate the words that convey the most meaning about the individual content of each document.

hearing_words <- df_hearings %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>%
  count(hearing, word, sort = TRUE)

total_words <- hearing_words %>% 
  group_by(hearing) %>% 
  summarize(total = sum(n))

hearing_words <- left_join(hearing_words, total_words)

Similarly to above, there are a lot of “junk words” in our hearing_words dataframe now. Note that we have not removed stop words here. I will look through hearing_words to define the junk words, and I’ll remove these junk words as follows:

junk_words_hearings <- c("6601", "09", "30", "2007", "15", 
                         "po", "27", "2002", "00000", "034671",
                         "0ct", "34671", "apr", "fmt", "frm", 
                         "hfin", "jkt", "k", "psn", "sfmt", "terrie",
                         "txt", "verdate", "2006", "37", "024446", 
                         "24446", "aug", "c", "docs", "pat", 
                         "saffairs", "sfmt", "6602", "s", "12", "35",
                         "19", "6601", "00000", "000000", "33994",
                         "jul", "sbank4", "6633", "6621", "18", 
                         "34", "f", "07", "24251", "hcom1", "joep",
                         "bahamonde", "oct", "037361", "37361", 
                         "027030", "27030", "040461", "40461", 
                         "cmorc", "gpo", "sjud1", "109.53", "08", 
                         "027023", "27023", "p", "2008", "06", 
                         "024244", "24244", "feb", "g", "01", 
                         "024442", "24442")

# turn to datafrmae
junk_words_hearings <- data.frame(word = junk_words_hearings)

# anti join with dataset
hearing_words %<>%
  anti_join(junk_words_hearings)

Finally, we can calculate the TF-IDF for this group of documents.

hearing_tf_idf <- hearing_words %>%
  bind_tf_idf(word, hearing, n)

We can then plot the top 10 (or any number) of words for each document according to the TF-IDF.

library(forcats)

# limit to 10 words 
hearing_tf_idf_10 <- hearing_tf_idf %>%
  group_by(hearing) %>%
  slice_max(tf_idf, n = 10) %>%
  ungroup()

# plot results
ggplot(hearing_tf_idf_10,
       aes(tf_idf, fct_reorder(word, tf_idf), fill = hearing)) +
geom_col(show.legend = FALSE) +
facet_wrap(~hearing, ncol = 4, scales = "free") +
labs(x = "tf-idf", y = NULL)

What do we notice? There are a lot of proper nouns - names of people and places specific to each hearing. This is how TF-IDF works. It identifies the words that are uniquely important to each document, which, in these cases, tend to be senators, names of government organizations, and programs. This is no replacement for in-depth reading and analysis, but it does give us a cursory summary of what each hearing focused on.

3.7 Problem Set 3

Due: July 17th, 2023

Recommended Resources:

Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach

ProQuest LibGuides

  1. Using the guardian_katrina.csv dataset (from Canvas Files), create a graph that compares word frequencies for different types of news stories (for example, World news vs. U.S. news). Motivate your comparison with some intuition or evidence, and tell us why this comparison is interesting. If you have more than two categories, try using the facet_wrap() command to display all the different graphs (an example of this can be found in the Text Mining with R book).Explain what you see in your visualization(s) and results.

  2. Create an account on ProQuest DTM, and create a visualization for news related to Hurricane Katrina. Explain what news sources you included and why. Produce the three types of visuals, and say a little bit about what each might mean (or whether there is any significance to these). Note: you can take a screenshot of these and include the image in your markdown with the following code:

knitr::include_graphics("image.png")

But if you are unable to visually display these in your output, it is ok to just describe them in words!

  1. Now, try creating a dataset in the workbench. See section 3.3 for instructions on saving the dataset as a .csv file and beginning to work with it in ProQuest’s Jupyter Notebooks. Create some simple frequencies of dates or news sources, and try to export these as a csv file. (Remember that you will not be able to export the full text). Then load the csv into your local R and create a graph using ggplot2. BONUS: If you are feeling ambitious, you can try installing the tidytext package in ProQuest TDM Studio, and exporting some word frequencies or other summary statistics. Just FYI, installing tidytext in ProQuest requires some additional effort. For instructions, see Getting Started -> 2022.05.25 -> ProQuest TDM Studio Manuals -> TDM_Studio_Manual.ipynb.

  2. Download at least two of the files from the “Katrina Hearings” folder in Canvas (within the Data folder), or choose your own congressional hearings here and download PDFs. Convert the documents to tidytext style using the unnest_tokens() function, and remove stop words. Show the first few rows of each dataset using the head() function.

  3. Compare the frequencies of words between the two hearings. First, use the count() function to generate counts of words in each document, and compare the two using tables or a plot. Then, read portions of each document in more detail to explain some of the trends that you see. Are you able to say something meaningful about the congressional discourse? Why or why not?

3.8 Final Project Proposal

Final projects can be completed in groups of up to four students. The proposals can also be collaborative, but each student should turn in one.

Proposals should answer the following questions:

  1. What is your research question? Why does it matter? How does it relate to climate change and society?

  2. What data will you use to answer the question? Do you have access to these data?

  1. What methods will you use to answer your research question?
  • Most projects will use some of the methods that we haven’t yet covered. This is great, just show that you have an idea of where you are heading!
  1. What kind of product will you create? How do you want others to read or engage with your project?
  • In most cases, projects will be R Markdown documents or Jupyter Notebooks, both of which can be published as websites.