With Levees Rated ‘Unacceptable,’ Officials Along the Mississippi Fight Back

Local officials said the corps, shaken by the widespread destruction from levee collapses after Hurricane Katrina, had raised its safety standards to unreasonable levels, overstated the risk and heaped millions of dollars of unnecessarily expensive repair and insurance costs on the community.

Similar disputes have been playing out in a number of cities in recent years as the corps has declared 10 percent of the levees in a new database of 2,200 federal levee systems “unacceptable,” including those protecting people in Dallas, Sacramento, St. Paul and Tulsa, Okla. About 80 percent are rated “minimally acceptable,” with many of those under orders to correct problems or risk falling into the unacceptable category. Just 9 percent of the levees in the database have been declared “acceptable.”

The battles are a result of a major effort by the corps to fully report the state of the nation’s levees. With stimulus money from the federal government, the agency increased the pace of its periodic inspections of the nation’s flood control systems and last fall unveiled the new national database, with ratings of each levee under federal jurisdiction. Reports on the much larger network of nonfederal levees are planned as well.

“Unacceptable” does not necessarily mean “unsafe” under most conditions, but the designation signals a heightened risk of failure under extreme flooding. The 65 miles of levees stretching along the eastern bank of the Mississippi here are intended to keep 112,000 acres and about 288,000 people dry; potential economic damages from a serious flood have been estimated at $12 billion.

Still, officials here said they believed that the corps was trying to shield itself from the embarrassment that followed Hurricane Katrina by issuing expensive and unreasonable requirements and oversight. “Basically, the corps has said, ‘We are not going to make those mistakes again,’ ” said Les Sterman, the chief supervisor for the Southwestern Illinois Flood Protection District Council. “It seems to me the risk that they’re mostly protecting from is the risk to the bureaucracy, as opposed to the risk to the public.”

Col. Christopher G. Hall, the commander of the corps for the St. Louis district, said the corps had not changed its standards. Instead, he said, improved technologies for assessing risks help engineers get a more accurate picture of the condition of the soil in and underneath the levees. People “don’t like to hear that they have a level of risk,” Colonel Hall said, adding, “Everybody lives with some risk.”

Eric Halpin, the special assistant for dam and levee safety at corps headquarters in Washington, says the agency is enforcing its rules more consistently than it had. “We’re going to hold public safety paramount,” he said. “The people that work and live behind the levees are the most important thing.”

Local officials worry that the corps’s action will cause the Federal Emergency Management Agency to alter its flood maps in ways that would require businesses and residents to buy millions of dollars in flood insurance. The classification of unacceptable also means that if a levee’s deficiencies are not fixed and it is damaged in any future flood, the federal government is not obligated to pay for its repair.

“You’re going to stop a lot of growth, and you’re going to hurt a lot of residents and businesses,” said Bill Mixon, an insurance agent in East St. Louis who often recommends flood insurance for his clients but opposes a FEMA-imposed requirement.

Moreover, said Mr. Sterman, the local levee official, the corps was hindering the community’s efforts to meet the standards required by FEMA to keep it from changing the maps. Specifically, the levee boards want to raise the level of protection to withstand what is known as a 1 percent flood — the kind of water levels that have a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year.