NEW ORLEANS (CN) - "There was 10, 11 feet of water in that house, and it destroyed everything I had," an elderly man testified Wednesday as trial began to determine the cause of flooding during Hurricane Katrina.
"When I seen that house, the whole dream I had, it was like it went up in smoke," 72-year-old Alvin Livers said of seeing his flooded Lower Ninth Ward home for the first time after Katrina.
Livers and his wife evacuated to Baton Rouge before Katrina made landfall. He said that after the storm, before residents were permitted back into the city, they saw their flooded house on CNN, amid footage of the inundated city.
Fred Holmes Jr., a former resident of Arabi, in St. Bernard Parish, recalled returning to his "dream home," where he and his wife planned to spend their next 30 years.
"It looked like a bomb went off," Holmes said. "What was on the ceiling was on the ground, what was on the ground was on the ceiling."
Holmes cried as he recalled the lost contents of their flooded house, including his wife's wedding dress.
Holmes and Livers are among plaintiffs who say the Army Corps of Engineers and Washington Group International, which contracted with the Corps of Engineers, left levees vulnerable to flooding by failing to adequately fill holes after removing buildings in a project to improve a shipping lock.
Plaintiffs say the poorly filled-in holes allowed water to seep underneath the 14-foot-high flood walls.
In addition to seepage, the walls broke in two places during the storm.
Surveyor Chad Morris testified for the plaintiffs that the Corps of Engineers and Washington Group International had removed hundreds of deep pilings from the area and used only loosely packed sand to refill the holes.
Morris testified that his investigation found extensive construction, excavation and pile removal activities in the vicinity of the breaches to the flood wall.
Although Morris' testimony did not directly address whether water could have seeped through the loosely packed soil, he said holes in the ground of a landfill or industrial site - where there would be concerns of toxic chemicals seeping into the soil - would be filled in using a different method and a material with more density than sand.
Evidence on seepage will be a key element in the trial. If the flooding was in fact from seepage, the Corps of Engineers and Washington Group could be held liable.
Attorneys for the Corps of Engineers and Washington Group say it is not possible that water seeped through the walls. They say the storm surge overtopped the walls. The companies would be immune from liability if the flooding was caused by the storm surge overtopping levees, according to a previous ruling.
U.S. Judge Stanwood Duval Jr., who is overseeing this case, previously ruled that the 1928 Flood Control Act gives the Corps of Engineers immunity from flooding caused by the failure of its flood-protection projects, even if the failure is the result of the Corps' negligence.
In this case, because the project that allegedly compromised the levees involved lock expansion, which is not related to the flood protection system, the Corps and Washington Group could be found liable for damages if the massive flooding was caused from seepage.
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