Army Corps of Engineers: Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project

Army Corps of Engineers: History of the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project

The Hurricane Protection Decision Chronology (HPDC) was commissioned shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States on August 29, 2005. IWR was asked to convene an external HPDC team to collect, record, and analyze project memoranda, reports, and related documentation in order to describe and explain decision-making for the Lake Pontchartrain & Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project (LP&VHPP). The requested report was to provide an explanation, as opposed to an evaluation, of how Corps policies and organization, legislation, and financial and other factors influenced the decisions that led to the LP&VHPP protective structures in place when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. The HPDC focus on project decision-making is intended to complement the engineering forensics investigations on the performance of the LP&VHPP during Katrina, such as those conducted by the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force and other institutions.