We also had a very complicated social and political environment that we were dancing around in. I work for the President, who was actively engaged and monitored our progress on a weekly basis. He visited New Orleans frequently, and was very concerned about how Task Force Guardian, assigned by the Corps of Engineers, would do this engineering work. The people who worked for and with me are the reason I got up every morning.

We had people on our project sites just about every day — residents who had lost everything. They were there to make sure that when we were doing this construction — which was at breakneck speed — we weren’t sacrificing quality to meet our schedule. We were under intense media scrutiny, and we welcomed it, understanding that this city evacuated three-quarters of its population, if not more. We welcomed the media to assist us in telling our story and how our progress was coming along. People had to make some very difficult decisions, weighing their level of risk in order to come back to this city and recover. The predominant factor in their risk assessment was the status of the levees and floodwalls that protected the city.

More Than Engineering

So we had more than engineering challenges. We also had a significant time constraint. Looming in front of us was June 1, 2006, which was the beginning of the next hurricane season. We didn’t know in the fall, winter, and spring that there would not be a hurricane in 2006. Our assumption going in was that on June 2, there would be a hurricane.

These before and after photos show the 17th Street canals in February of 2006

...and the rebuilt canal structures with pumps on either bank and across the canal.

There were lots of initiatives being undertaken by universities and government agencies to determine why the hurricane protection system in New Orleans failed. It was absolutely imperative that if someone was doing a study on why a particular floodwall failed and reached a conclusion, we had better find out why during the process of our project execution. We spiraled in multiple times the findings of several groups that were doing analyses across New Orleans on why things failed.

There were three technologies we used in our work. First, there was an extensive amount of computer modeling that was done to determine primarily what forces were exerted on the existing hurricane protection system. Second, we used supercomputers to try and figure out what forces and how much storm surge hit New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast. And we used scaled modeling of the 17th Street canal. This was all in an attempt to figure out where we had those breaches and why they occurred. When we found the answers, we got designers, engineers, and contractors who were doing the work in a room, at a table, and made sure that what they were building would account for what we identified had caused those breaches.