Looming questions

Friday, May 16, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the thousands of levees that protect America’s cities and towns from floods, does not know the locations and conditions of these earthen barriers.

Eric Halpin, special assistant for dam and levee safety for the corps, told the Associated Press that corps officials have “to get our arms around this issue and understand how many levees there are in the country, who’s watching over them (and) what populations and properties are behind them.”

A levee expert from the University of California, Berkeley, told the AP that many of these structures are decades old and were not built to withstand major events.

About 2,000 levees are operated by the corps or by local agencies that have partnered with the corps, the AP reports. These typically protect major cities, such as New Orleans and St. Louis. But thousands of other levees across the nation are privately owned and maintained. Most protect agricultural land, but others are designed to protect cities and industrial operations.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 prompted Congress to give the corps funding to compile an inventory of the levees it directly maintains or helps to pay for. That task has been completed, corps officials said.

But hundreds — perhaps thousands — of other levees large and small have gone unaccounted for. Last year Congress passed the National Levee Safety Act, which calls for the corps to compile its first-ever comprehensive inventory of all levees, but no funding was included in the legislation to do so. And Congress isn’t expected to provide any until at least 2009, the AP reports.

This doesn’t make sense. These levees are the first line of defense — and in some places, the only defense — against rising floodwaters. People’s lives and property can depend on the success or failure of these structures. Congress was right in passing legislation to provide better levee oversight, but such work cannot be done without funding.