ShareThisUp to 100,000 miles of levees, many of them at least a half century old and of uncertain structural soundness and capacity, may stand between flood waters and millions of Americans, a federal committee established to review levee safety is finding.
In business only since October, the National Committee on Levee Safety expects to deliver to Congress next month a package of findings and recommendations about the nation's patchwork of earthen berms, dikes and levees.
Conclusions of the 16-member committee thus far largely mirror the findings of a Scripps Howard News Service review of levee safety published last summer, soon after scores of levees along Midwestern rivers were overtopped and breached by record floods.
While the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has a fairly good idea about the condition of several thousand levees that are the federal government's responsibility to maintain or repair, no one knows how many there are outside the federal system, nor what they protect or what shape they're in, both the committee and Scripps found.
In addition, there are no consistent national standards for levee engineering or design, even among the several federal agencies that operate levees. There is no national safety policy for levees and fewer than half the states have an agency with oversight of the structures.
Committee members also note that many levees, particularly those outside the federal system, were not designed to protect the people or structures that are now behind them.
"This is going to be a call to action for levees in the U.S., for all levels of government,'' said Eric Halpin, the Corps special assistant for dam and levee safety and vice chairman of the committee. "It's not a question of if, but when and where, there will be another levee failure during a flood event."
Halpin and other members of the committee told reporters Wednesday that while engineers and levee owners need one set of standards to evaluate the structural integrity of levees, there also needs to be a separate system to evaluate the potential risks posed from the failure of levees.
Levees have come under scrutiny in thousands of communities around country recently because the Federal Emergency Management Agency is requiring that the structures be certified capable of holding back a 100-year level flood. If not, flood insurance maps will show land behind the levee as being in a flood plain, and most property owners will be forced to buy flood coverage.
But that certification process has been criticized for giving residents false confidence that a levee will protect them from any flood, even though FEMA still encourages owners to buy insurance. Halpin stressed that any new engineering standards "will not be safety standards. We want to move people away from any false sense of safety."
Committee member Les Harder, a levee specialist with the engineering firm HDR, Inc., said the panel is considering a 3-level system for assigning risk from levees, based on the number of people that could be flooded and to what depth.
"A levee that could flood 10,000 people to a depth over 3 feet would be classified high risk; something protecting farmland or a sparsely populated area would be low risk,'' he explained.
The experts also envision the federal government setting up a system of grants and other incentives to encourage states to set up their own levee safety programs, as well as a fund to support levee overhauls by local governments and other owners.
But before any standards can be applied, the committee will tell Congress that the Corps needs the authority and money to do a complete inventory of levees around the country, including an assessment of the condition of each structure and what it's meant to protect.
"That's the critical first step that has to happen now," Halpin said. "We can't really estimate the scope and cost of a safety program until we know what's out there."
(E-mail Lee Bowman of Scripps Howard News Service at bowmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
