U.S. government faces massive suit over 17th Street Canal breach

NEW ORLEANS – The federal government and Army Corps of Engineers are targeted in a new lawsuit that alleges flooding during Hurricane Katrina was the fault of a corps decision to allow dredging of the 17th Street Canal, weakening the soil base that supported its levees.
The suit, which seeks class-action status and unspecified damages, was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court by a legal team led by Joseph Bruno and representing seven residents of the Lakeview area. The neighborhood was hard hit by flooding when a levee on the east side of the 17th Street Canal broke. If class-action status is granted, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents and claims in the tens of billions of dollars could be affected.
The suit’s basic argument _ liability of the corps _ was bolstered by a decision last week. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval allowed to go forward a suit charging the corps with liability for flooding of eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish from the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. The ship channel, maintained by the corps, connects New Orleans’ inner harbor with the Gulf of Mexico. Bruno is also involved in this suit.
“That decision is a clear blueprint on the court’s thinking,” Bruno said Thursday at his law office in downtown New Orleans.
The corps declined to comment on the suit.
The issue in Thursday’s suit is whether the 17th Street Canal should be considered a navigable waterway or a flood control project. The canal is one of three arteries that drain water out of the below sea-level city during heavy rainfall. Levees on two of the canals broke during Katrina and caused massive flooding.
If the court determines the 17th Street Canal was a flood control project, then the 1928 Flood Control Act would shield the corps from liability. However if a judge decides it is a navigable waterway, then the corps, and by extension the federal government, may have to defend their actions at trial.
Though primarily a drainage waterway, fishing boats and other small vessels tied up along the canal near its mouth for years before Katrina.
The new suit’s claim is rooted in a permit the corps issued in 1984 that allowed the city to dredge and deepen the canal, amplifying its water-carrying capacity.
But that action, the suit claims, caused “subsurface destabilization of the levee” and eventually to its collapse under the pressure of the storm surge pushed into the canal from Lake Pontchartrain by the hurricane.
The plaintiffs argue the corps knew about weak soil under that area, and that maps dating as far back as the mid-1800s and subsequent academic studies showed the ground under the canal walls was made up of sand and other unstable soil.
Generally, engineers, including those in the corps, agree that sheet piling under the flood walls was too shallow, and the soil under them gave way during Katrina. To offset that, the corps wants to build new, stronger walls with deeper sheet piling in sections where the soil is weak.
Oliver Houck, an environmental law scholar at Tulane University, said the case may force Congress to consider broad compensation for Katrina victims.
“The highest potential of these cases is to prompt a more generous and complete 9/11-like response to this disaster,” Houck said. “Congress may be compelled to find a more generic solution than trying to settle thousands and thousands of individual claims.”