Fly Rod and Reel Magazine 2007 March - Reforming the Corps of Engineers

This article goes back a few years but lays waste to the Army Corps of Engineers by identifying all of the wasteful and harmful projects it has undertaken in the name of flood control and drainage. This comes from an outdoor sports magazine that is concerned about the preservation of wildlife habitats, especially fish that have been adversely affected by decisions of the Corps. It's a little on the long side, but definitely worth the read. Click title for link.

America called the destruction of New Orleans "an act of God," too. But it should have blamed the Corps and Congress (which funds and authorizes its wasteful, destructive and counterproductive projects). For the five millennia before the Army engineers "improved" the Mississippi, as they like to say, the river had built its own flood control--a rich mosaic of forests, ponds, swamps, sloughs, and five million acres of flood-absorbing, fish-and-wildlife-rich delta marsh. But with its levee system the Corps has converted the river into a sluiceway that shunts marsh-building sediments into the Gulf and over the lip of the continental shelf. Corps projects (along with oil-and-gas access canals) have destroyed 1,900 square miles of delta marsh, thereby bringing the sea 30 miles closer to New Orleans.
Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Corps brass and President Bush expressed astonishment that the levees had failed. But everyone who had been paying attention, including a few rank-and-file Army engineers, had been predicting that failure for years. In 1999 about 50 conservation leaders--later to gel into the "Corps Reform Network"--met in Louisiana to strategize about how best to encourage the Corps to protect instead of destroy natural resources. Their first action was to go to the district engineer and implore him to close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (aka "Mr. Go"), a dangerous and essentially useless 76-mile navigation channel connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of New Orleans' Inner Harbor Navigation Canal in eastern New Orleans.