This was a very tragic storm of intense magnitude that overwhelmed the hurricane protection system that was designed to protect the city. The city was under mandatory evacuation orders, but there were several thousand people that elected not to evacuate. Unfortunately, when the hurricane protection system — a very complicated system of levees, floodwalls, floodgates, and pumps that surround the city — were overwhelmed, those people were at the mercy of Hurricane Katrina.

What you had, again, was a city surrounded by water that was predominantly under water and sinking over time, protected by earthen levees 15 to 18 feet high with floodwalls of similar height. There were 76 pumping stations that were required to pump rainwater out of the city. It had a very complex, defensive, protective system that had evolved over centuries. The first levees in New Orleans were built in the 1700s, so it was completely overwhelmed by the hurricane.

This photo shows the maximum flooding depths around downtown New Orleans following Katrina’s

That became my mission: to fix 220 miles of levees and floodwalls, to restore the pump stations to their effectiveness so the city could recover, and repair the gated structures. I summarize a very lengthy process that came down from The White House that said, in my words, “a very big storm, awful lot of damage, go fix it.”

Constructing a Plan

We had a plan, and this had been rehearsed. What we did not anticipate was the scope, the scale, and the magnitude of the damages that we would have to physically restore. What this required was for us to rewrite the books. The Corps of Engineers has been around for a long time — 227 years. We haven’t always operated the same way, but generally speaking, we did a very sequential engineering process that we learned in school: Assess, design, construct. But we realized that with the amount of damage we were talking about, we could do that, but we would probably be done in about 30 years, which is what it took to build the original protection system that was destroyed when Katrina hit.

It was a very unique challenge. We had to operate in an environment that was unexpected. There was no infrastructure and no power. There was water that you couldn’t drink, and on top of all that, we had to bring in what we thought would be an army of contractors to do the work and yet, there was no infrastructure — no roads and no housing to support them. We had to build our own camps and we had to ask our contractors to build their own camps and bring trailers with power and water to each one of these project sites just to facilitate their work.

We had companies that wanted to go to work, but their employees had evacuated, and we had companies who wanted to go to work and had employees, but their vehicles were under water. We had to marry these two just to get things done. We had to act as a government representative first, but we also had to act as a representative of the City of New Orleans, which needed this work done before the next hurricane season started on June 1 — just nine months away.