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Dr. Ed Link, Senior Research Engineer in CEE is leading a major research project sponsored by the Army Corps of Engineers on “hurricane flood protection and flood damage reduction in New Orleans. This University of Maryland project is in support of the Federal Interagency Task Force for Hurricane Katrina Performance Evaluation.

This project supports an intense performance evaluation of the New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana hurricane protection system during Hurricane Katrina undertaken by the USACE and other federal agencies. It was conducted by the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, a distinguished group of government, academic, and private sector scientists and engineers who dedicated themselves to this task from shortly after Katrina struck through the next hurricane season. Created by the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and peer reviewed on a weekly basis by an equally distinguished external review panel of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the group applied some of the most sophisticated capabilities available in civil engineering to understand what happened during Katrina and why. Their purpose is not just new knowledge, but application of that knowledge to the repair and reconstitution of protection in New Orleans as well as improvement to engineering practice and policies. The bulk of the information and documents used or generated by the Task Force has been placed on a public website as they became available. At the time of this draft final report, there were well over 4300 documents on this site.