The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to release on Wed., June 20, a "Risk & Reliability" report about storm defenses in New Orleans. The report promises to deliver a more accurate tool for determining the intensity and effects of future storms than the far more limited Hurricane Category system, which is largely based on wind speed, according to a pre-release briefing by Corps personnel.

The report is the last of a nine-volume work produced by the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, established by Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, then chief of the Corps, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

IPET included more than 150 experts from private industry, governmental agencies and academia. Project Director Ed Link says the team was charged with five tasks: determining whether the system met the design criteria at the time of the storm; what surge and waves were generated by Katrina; how and why the system performed the way it did in response to the storm; the consequences of Katrina-related damage and risk to New Orleans and surrounding areas in the event of future hurricanes and tropical storms

Ongoing repairs to the hurricane protection system have benefited from IPET findings, which have been peer-reviewed by a special panel of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The National Research Council is also conducting an external review.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005 as a Category 3 storm but delivered much more damage than Camille in 1969, which was a Category 5. The new research attempts to explain why and to help better predict storm damage potential in the future. The reliability portion of the report also gauges current protection levels, ongoing improvements and future design changes of the Hurricane Protection System and measures how those improvements contribute to mitigating risk.

Several expert stakeholders are scheduled to be present when the report is released. They include: Link; Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp, the Corps' new commander and chief of engineers; Donald E. Powell, federal coordinator of Gulf Coast Rebuilding; Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, commander of the Corps' Mississippi Valley Division; and Karen Durham-Aguilera, director of Task Force Hope in Louisiana, the program responsible for overseeing the Corps' $5.7 billion, long-term planning and Hurricane protection systems work in New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana.

IPET released its final draft report on June 1, 2006. The report, along with more than 4,300 related documents, is available at https://IPET.wes.army.mil.