New Orleans is very unique — again, it is under sea level and there is a series of 76 pumps that collect the water when it rains and pumps it into three outfall canals, which then feed water out to Lake Pontchartrain. Unfortunately, with the hurricane, the exact opposite occurred. The hurricane pushed the storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain, up those canals. The canal walls failed, and the city flooded. If you add up the total amount of floodwalls and those three canals, it’s almost 14 - 1⁄2 miles of floodwalls. We made a decision in January of 2006 that the best way to reduce that risk was to close those canals with gates. In the face of a storm surge in the future, we could slam that shut, take the risk of those canals out of the equation, and provide a better level of protection for the City of New Orleans. We put seven gates inside one of those canals. Each one weighs 75 tons, and the gates themselves are 15 tons. We built them quickly by leveraging the existing offshore technology that resides in Louisiana with the offshore oil industry. So we had the expertise and we had the materials.

After the storm, the vessels across the region that had broken loose from the ferocity of the storm surge found their way onto our levees, and we had to take it upon ourselves to remove them, because the Coast Guard and the Navy did not see these officially as a threat to navigation. But they were sitting on our levees, so in order to get to the work, we had to move these seagoing barges and vessels — some of which, when fully loaded, weighed 300 tons.

I mentioned earlier about the soil stabilization, which is the center of all the problems in New Orleans. Soil stabilization was a key aspect we had to get right to build a better system. What we did was leverage recent technology that originated from engineers in Japan. One of our contractors brought a Japanese team here to help us stabilize the soil by drilling into the ground and injecting concrete, providing a stabilized base on which we could build our hurricane protection system. To build the three canal closures, we had to replace about 5 - 1⁄2 million cubic yards of clay.

Did we build a better, stronger system? You bet. We had to take some very innovative methodologies and apply them to our mission. At the end of the day, the engineering was done quickly, but it was done right. We provided increased stability, we used better soil, and we used several engineering features to make sure that this hurricane protection system is much better than it was before the storm. We also had to restore the confidence of the people who lived and worked behind those levees. We completed our engineering effort in 8- 1⁄2 months. We met our commitments to the people of New Orleans, and made the hurricane protection system better and stronger.

For more information, contact Colonel Setliff at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , or visit www.usace.army.mil.