When Hurricane Katrina struck, I wondered if it might be the wake-up call our country needed to address its crumbling levee system. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The alarm went off, and America hit the snooze button.

America may be able to ignore the warning, but we, as an industry, cannot. It’s our duty — and some would argue our ethical responsibility — to act. That’s why many in the profession are calling for the engineering industry to lead a nationwide dialogue; one that increases in volume until it wakes up mainstream America and turns its collective concern into political action.

The United States has more than 100,000 miles of levees. They exist in every state. Some are multimillion-dollar concrete systems. Many are nothing more than piles of sand and dirt created by farmers as barricades against rising rivers that cyclically destroyed their crops. After more than 100 years, it becomes difficult to guess what is holding these homemade structures together: a miracle of physics or just plain luck. It certainly isn’t proactive investment. In real dollars, our country’s current water infrastructure budget is about 30 percent less than in the 1970s.

There is no doubt. Our water infrastructure is in jeopardy, and report after report confirms it. For example, every four years the American Society of Civil Engineers grades the nation’s water and transportation infrastructure. In its most recent assessment, the 2009 Report Card, our water infrastructure received a D–. Also, as of 2010, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has reported more than 300 levee systems nationwide have unacceptable maintenance ratings. Deficient conditions across the country include animal burrows, erosion, tree growth, floodwall movement and faulty culverts, any of which could prevent structures from functioning as designed. California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee are among America’s touchand- go areas.

All it would take to create a New Orleans-caliber disaster in south Florida is a stalled tropical storm — not even a hurricane. And, with water traveling quickly over such flat land, it’s not just the 40,000 nearby residents whose lives and homes would be in peril. The danger extends to Miami, where residents would have only hours to evacuate before their homes were inundated with water. The lives and property of 6 million to 8 million people would be at risk, not to mention irreparable damage to south Florida’s valuable agricultural crops and environmental wetlands. There also is concern about water supply. Lake Okeechobee provides water to most of Miami. When it goes, so goes the city’s potable water.

The threat is just as real in Sacramento, except the causes could be a flash flood sparked by warm rains hitting the snow-laden Sierra Mountains, a magnitude 4 earthquake or one animal burrowing one too many holes. Residential areas north of the city would be inundated with up to 20 feet of water. More than 30 percent of the water supply needed to support Southern California would be lost.

The economic consequences for Southern California, south Florida and the nation are unimaginable. If those nightmare scenarios play out, it will be because of our continued neglect. Florida’s Herbert Hoover Dike, which rests on a foundation of porous soil, has been compromised many times within the past five years. Sacramento’s levees have failed 162 times in their history, with one of the worst instances in 1996 when intense rains caused more than 100 levee breaches, resulting in deaths and more than $1 billion in damages.

Fixing our water infrastructure, however, is not a problem we can simply leave at the public sector’s doorstep. No, this solution requires both public and private sectors working together to identify priorities, produce a plan and develop a funding strategy. The good news is the solutions are out there. Among them:

• Pre-positioning contracts and contingency planning that can ensure the right resources, manpower, supplies and equipment are on site, so contractors can begin work at the first sign of a breach.
• Innovative financing and development techniques, such as public-private partnerships, that can close the funding gap to help public water agencies complete critical projects years ahead of schedule. Historically, our water infrastructure has been viewed as a public asset, and therefore, a public responsibility. We must change that outdated mind-set just as the surface transportation industry has. Through user fees and taxes, for example, we can create incentives for private investment that promise a return on investment without promising ownership.
• Integrated visualization and interactive gaming technology that allows the public water stakeholders to test-drive and modify a levee or dam’s design before breaking ground, perform what-if analyses or create simulations of what might happen if infrastructure problems are left unaddressed. Used correctly, this technology can be a persuasive tool in educating stakeholders and gaining their support for needed projects.
• New fiber-optic technology that will increase dramatically a public water agency’s ability to evaluate, maintain and monitor a levee’s “vital signs” in realtime, as well as warn the agency of a possible failure. For example, if water is seeping through a levee, the technology will detect it, alert authorities and automatically notify first responders.

The precedent for public-private financing began when Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act in 1986. It requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to have a nonfederal sponsor for every project. Depending on the project, the nonfederal sponsor funds anywhere from 25 percent to more than 50 percent of the total project costs. The act does not allow private funding, but it does open the door for discussion, which ultimately could lead to the legislation needed to grant such financing methods. Innovative financing is worth exploring. I believe if engineers were to approach a public water agency that had a backlog of water infrastructure projects and those engineers could show how those projects could be completed years ahead of schedule using a combination of public and private resources, they’d have the agency’s attention and possibly its business.

Pre-positioning contracts. Contingency planning. Innovative financing. Technology. Having the solutions isn’t the problem. What our country lacks, embarrassingly, is the will. That’s why our industry must take the lead.

People look to engineers and other professionals in our industry as experts. We are expected to have opinions about the state of our infrastructure and how to address it. So, I encourage you to use your professional position and network to educate the public. We need their mainstream muscle to make our water infrastructure a national priority.

For now, though, the responsibility rests on us. We can make fixing America’s levee system today’s action item or tomorrow’s tragedy. It’s our call.

America's water infrastructure