Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Army Corps of Engineers Building Levees Out of Newspaper
Extra! Extra! a photograph of a flood damaged Times-Picayune by an anonymous Flickr user.
Our latest scandal is unfolding daily. Intrepid television reporter Lee Zurik did a piece on newspaper in levees Floodwalls stuffed with newspaper?
“It’s like putting a Band-Aid on the hole of a gas tank of an airplane,†the resident said.
Instead of an airplane, it’s a floodwall, and instead of a Band-Aid, the witness says two years ago, he saw the contractor filling the expansion joint or opening between the floodwalls with newspaper.
“The whole length of the wall was stuffed with newspaper.”
And when he confronted the contractor, the contractor blamed Washington for the substandard work.
“He basically told me when Congress sent down the money, it would be repaired the proper way.”
The contractor is Ercon Corporation who’s website home page immediately raises the question who are these goobers? Their website seems to reflect their commitment to getting the job done.
For those of you who’ve been watching the planes grounded and cranes collapse, you might want to draw a parallel between these failures of oversight and this stunning failure to fulfill a federal contract, let me encourage you to do so. Keep an eye on this story, because it does not unfold the way you would expect.
At this point you might expect that the contractors would be in trouble, that their overseers would be irate that they’d stained the already indelibly stained name of the Army Corps of Engineers. You would be wrong.
This is a cadre whose tone deaf public relations. Who can forget the time the ASCE threatened to sue a high-school AP government class for a satirical YouTube video? The conviction with which the profession suppresses descent leaves us all very weary of any assurances they give us.
Least of all the assurance that newspaper stuffed levees are an accepted yet “expedient” construction method as offered in Corps explains newspaper’s use in floodwall. To quote New Orleans blogger Celcus in his post Yesterday’s Papers.
… cramming newspapers into a gap is considered a “method” as in “method of construction” consistent with standard practice. So that when they say such-and-such has been built to “industry standards” or the like, that can include newspapers stuffed into joints. Perhaps whatever the Corp does automatically becomes the standard, in some sort of transubstantiation.
The contractor was not at fault, since the newspaper stuffing was done by the capable hands of the Army Corps itself. Is that supposed to make us feel safer, or does it simply make it harder for anyone to take action?
Jeffery of the yellow blog writes in It’s Not the Preferred Technique.
So in December 2005, Donald Powell commits to building the “best levee system known in the world” and by May 2006, that’s already devolved into “expedient method to do minor repairs” by something other than the “preferred technique”.
Finally, who here can rest assured that “those three gaps were the only ones where such a method was used?” This is about as laughable as scandal as you could imagine and it’s especially funny that the response is “It’s all good.”
Will it take nothing short of another levee failure to compel the Army Corps to answer questions?
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Alan,
Shall I waste my time trying to explain this to you? Here’s the facts. There are expansion joints in these concrete walls. What keeps water from running through the joints is a thick slab of rubber called a waterstop. It is cast into the concrete in the middle of the joint. Because it’s rubber, the concrete can expand and contract freely and because of the rubber waterstop the water will not flow through.
But that’s not the end of it. The joint has to be sealed. This is required because if you don’t seal it it will fill with dirt and sand and soon that expansion joint won’t work. FYI, sand is quartz and does not compress much so if the joint fills with sand you’ve got no joint.
Are you with me so far? Okay, so how do you seal the joint to keep the trash out. You don’t want to fill the entire joint with liquid sealant–that’s a mess. So the sealant is only applied at the surface. How do you get the sealant to stay just at the surface? The typical method is to use a compressible joint material that comes in sheets to fill most of the joint and then you put the joint sealant on the surface. Alternatively, you could use something called a backer rod, which is again a compressible material that looks like a rope that you shove into the joint for an inch or so and then apply the sealant.
So let’s recap: Most important: the waterstop. Next important is the sealant to keep the joint functioning. What about the stuff you put into the joint? Doesn’t really matter. It just needs to hold the sealant in place until it hardens. This ain’t rocket science. The exact same methods are used to seal joints in concrete highways and bridges.
So now you have a location where newspaper was used in place of a backer rod. Does that make the wall ineffective. No. Does that mean water will come squirting through? No. You never see the waterstop in the news story because it’s sealed deep inside the joint and embedded in the concrete. What you see is the layer of sealant that was placed to keep dirt out and the doofus pulling the sealant loose so he can expose the backer material–the newspaper.
But wait! What about that evil contractor? How can he get away with furnishing newspaper when the US Government paid him to use high quality backer material? The answer is simple–Channel 4 got the story wrong. Those walls existed before Katrina. Post-K the work included maintenance on the joints and installing some paving around the walls. You know Post-K the Corps is building a lot of erosion protection around transition points and on the protected side of walls to defend from overtopping. Why are they doing that? Because according to you, the entire engineering profession is vile and disgusting and you can’t trust them.
Anyway, the joint repair was accomplished with government labor and the paving was done by the company Lee Zurik accuses of malfeasance and fraud. So the specification they showed on TV was not even the floodwall spec, it was the sloped paving spec! Way to go, Lee.
Anyway, that’s the story. Typical main stream media, when you watch the news clip, notice they spend all their time with the local politician and an engineer who they blindsided with bad information, and less than 15 seconds with the person most knowlegeable about the project. We all should know that something is wrong when the news reporter does all the talking and only allows the key person of the story a 4-second sound byte. And you should know better, too, Alan.
Peace,
Tim
Perhaps this particular incident of corner-cutting was not life threatening. But filling many sections of the earthen levees protecting east New Orleans with sand instead of good Louisiana clay took many lives not to mention homes and businesses. South Louisiana residents are right to sit up and take note of this incident of cost-cutting using newspaper. They are right to wonder what other time-saving techniques have been used in building our levees.
Yee Haw,
Duct tape, WD40 and bailing wire and you have Bubba’s essentials to fix almost anything in the world. You can bet that they can use newspaper too - just don’t need to carry it around with you - you can get it on the job - the inspector likes crossword puzzles and he’s always got one.
Git - R - Dunn
Hey Quid Pro! Thanks for that funny comment about the QC and QA guys! There’s always a welcome place in the room for someone with a knack for clever humor!
I cant claim to know more than our friend Tim here,
but Tim doesnt seem to cite his qualifications here.
What id like to see is someone (with credentials) explain this like Tim did.
Until then, I wont buy into it. To me its possible that the proper backing may make a difference.
If there is significant pressure on that joint, and the backing is newpaper instead of the rope-like material he speaks of, then might it give way ?
We still dont know for sure from a valid source…
Brad
http://batcave911.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/911review/
Tim, were you there ,i was. there were no stops just pure paper. i took the time to watch the job ,so hurry off to work im sure the corps needs you to pick up the next load of the times.
tim if you would have done your homework you would notice that the contract doesnt call for news paper
ohhhhhh ,Tim where is your next post????