In Wake of Katrina, Corps Need Supervision

When Hurricane Katrina hit, New Orleans was wronged by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The catastrophic failure of the floodwalls and levees that the corps had built took hundreds of lives and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses. Reviews by government and independent experts, as well as the corps itself, uncovered colossal blunders in the design and construction of the region's flood protection system.

Those fatal missteps are the best argument for an independent peer review of corps projects. They are also the reason why such a review remains vital and urgent, as the agency is rebuilding and upgrading our hurricane protection.

U.S. Sens. Russ Feingold and John McCain have reintroduced a bill they first proposed in Congress last session requiring peer review for corps projects costing more than $40 million. The review also would be conducted if requested by the governor in an affected state, the head of a federal agency or the secretary of the Army.

The main elements of their legislation were incorporated into a water resources bill that died in conference committee last year.

The Feingold-McCain proposal would create the type of oversight the agency needs. It would cover most of the corps' large projects and keep the review outside of agency's control. A sham reform offered by a competing proposal last year would have required a review in only a small number of projects and put the corps in charge of policing itself.

But Louisiana Sen. David Vitter is raising valid concerns about the Feingold-McCain plan that should be addressed. As proposed, projects would be reviewed individually, instead of as part of a system. That could repeat one of the flaws identified by the corps' own investigation of the levee failures, which concluded that New Orleans' hurricane protection was a system only in name.