Before Hurricane Katrina caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans last August, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers had neglected the dikes for decades, says Ray Carpenter, president of R.E. Staite Engineering Inc., a National City-based marine construction and engineering firm.

"It gets down to the problem of maintenance," says Carpenter. Moving water erodes the flood-control levees, which weakens them. "They have to be maintained carefully and managed properly."

Carpenter says he has visited New Orleans and walked along the levees and observed their condition. The Corps simply didn’t appropriate enough money to maintain the levees properly, allowing them to deteriorate over the past 20 years, he says. When the levees were breached by Katrina’s storm surges, most of New Orleans was flooded.

The maintenance problem was compounded by the Corps’ re-direction of the Mississippi River, says Carpenter.

"At the end of the day it’s no place for a city," he says.