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This website was created by concerned engineers from New Orleans and south Louisiana as a struggle against the intimidation of civil engineers by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the ASCE.

A press release, available on this website, issued by the ASCE on June 1, 2007 contained language that indicated that the ASCE’s ability to be an impartial external monitor of the Corps’ activities is questionable.

The purpose of this site is to host a sign-on letter to facilitate members of the ASCE nationwide in signing a letter to the President of the ASCE demanding a formal retraction with accompanying press of the June 1 press release by the ASCE.

If you feel that making statements critical to the activities of the Corps of Engineers compromises your ability to participate in large civil works projects paid for by the US government, you are not alone.

If you sense that the ASCE has made statements that are erroneous and provided seemingly technical data that simply runs in the face of the facts of Katrina’s effects on south Louisiana, please consider signing this letter. Whenever errors are stated as facts, there can be no clear understanding of the simple truths about the failure of the federal levees that flooded New Orleans and south Louisiana.

The destruction of Louisiana’s wetlands from navigational projects and oil exploration left the state more vulnerable to storm surges than ever. The shoddy construction, careless maintenance and misguided polices that created the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW), and the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal (IHNC) should have addressed long ago by the Corps.

If you sense that permits issued for dredging the London Avenue and 17^th Street Canals should not have been issued unless detailed engineering analyses using a reasonable and conservative set of geotechnical data was performed, the world needs to know. If you know that the switch to the “high level plan” should have prompted the Corps and Levee Boards to focus on raising all the flood protection to an appropriate height all around New Orleans, with suitable engineering effort, we need to spread the word.

Isn’t it high time that the construction inspectors in the “Construction Division” at the Corps are engineers with direct communication with the designers? Shouldn’t they respect the design engineers instead of holding the typical seething resentment of “those guys in the office.”

Now is the time to commit ourselves to hold the factual issues out for all to see for at least two more decades. If the issues are forgotten or swept under the rug, we are doomed to see the death and devastation repeated. If the scenario is repeated, the civil engineering profession will be held accountable because we are the ones that know, or should know, what happened.