UPDATED BELOW
CAIN BURDEAU, an Associated Press Writer, did a story that is getting lots of play. Good. But as my friend
Loki at Humid City points out,
This section in the AP story is the "the money quote"
It answers the question: Who made these defective water pumps?
Moving Water Industries Corp. of Deerfield Beach, Fla. or
MWI.
Who is MWI?
MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps. And Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians, the vast majority of it to the Republican Party, since 1996, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
MWI has run into trouble before. The U.S. Justice Department sued the company in 2002, accusing it of fraudulently helping Nigeria obtain $74 million in taxpayer-backed loans for overpriced and unnecessary water-pump equipment. The case has yet to be resolved. [Spocko. Note Maybe they were trying to get some money back after they fell for one of those email scams.]
Because of the trouble with the New Orleans pumps, the Corps has withheld 20 percent of the MWI contract, including an incentive of up to $4 million that the company could have collected if it delivered the equipment in time for the 2006 hurricane season.
Misgivings about the pumps were chronicled in a May 2006 memo provided to the AP by Matt McBride, a mechanical engineer and flooded-out Katrina victim who, like many in New Orleans, has been closely watching the rebuilding of the city's flood defenses.
The memo was written by Maria Garzino, a Corps mechanical engineer overseeing quality assurance at an MWI test site in Florida. The Corps confirmed the authenticity of the 72-page memo, which details many of the mechanical problems and criticizes the testing procedures used.
Loki also pointed out that Matt McBride at
Fix the Pumps is the blogger that worked with the AP reporter to get this story out to a wider audience.
Check this out from the memo Matt McBride dug up. It's not "required reading at the academy" but maybe it should be (
link)
1) Cause of the voluminous failures of the hydraulic pumps on the drive units is still unknown at this time - the manufacturer of the hydraulic pumps (Denison) has not yet provided any official input as to the failures being caused by a plethora of "bad" pumps, or, point to an as yet unknown design deficiency with the hydraulic system. This situation would provide for the possibility of future failures of the drive units at 100% until a design deficiency can be ruled out - in addition, there is the very likely possibility, more probable actually, that damaged hydraulic pumps starting the failure process have "passed" testing and are currently slated to be, or have been, installed.
2) The original contract specifications required 100% load testing of all pump assemblies - this requirement has subsequently been eliminated, and to date, less than 25% of all pump assemblies have been load tested (leaving potentially 75% not load tested), and, of the eight (8) pump assemblies that have been load tested, one has only been run for a few minutes at best and one other was run at 1/3 operating pressure (the hydraulic oil barely got warm enough to register). Of the remaining six (6) pump assemblies actually undergoing load testing (actually pumping water), three (3) - 50% - have experienced catastrophic failure. Of note, these three failed pump assemblies have also been the pump assemblies that have the most run time on them - leading me to the logical conclusion that, barring some extraordinary anomaly, the more you run them, the more likely catastrophic failures will occur.
For these reasons, and because I am fully aware the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers intends to proceed with the utmost care and diligence in all tasks associated with Task Force Guardian, I am writing this memorandum for record to ensure this situation is communicated as best as I can to the ultimate responsible authority.
Respectfully submitted,
Maria GarzinoUSACE, Mechanical EngineerTask Force Guardian And Matt McBride points out some important info that is missing
Calling BS
Now that the news about Maria Garzino's
memo has broken all over the place, I thought a few points needed to be made.
Yesterday, the Corps flew Colonel Bedey, the head of the Hurricane Protection Office, back from Washington so he could be there when two local TV affiliates (Fox 8 and ABC 26) filmed four of the 17th Street pumps being run. The Corps pointed to this demonstration as proof that everything's just A-OK.
1) The Corps already ran these pumps last Saturday. The Times-Picayune buried a tiny article about it on page B-3 in Sunday's local section. Here's the article:
Corps pump tests get thumbs upThis article (and possibly the Corps' alerting the media about the test) was also a bid by the Corps to get out ahead of the news that broke yesterday. They obviously failed in that bid.
2) Those four pumps were ordered long after Maria's memo and after the other 34 pumps started failing last summer. They were part of an order of six extra pumps to MWI (total charge, about $4 million for all six). These four were actually the last pumps installed - they went just a couple of months ago (they weren't fully hooked up as of
January 26, 2007) and are not the subject of Ms. Garzino's memo. That is, they were
not in the original order of 34.
Using these pumps as a demonstration to show that the other 34 are working is pure lying. The Corps is probably going to turn on those pumps again tomorrow for the Mayor. They represent about 800 cubic feet per second of capacity (theoretically). Pre-Katrina, over 10,000 cfs flowed down the 17th Street canal.
3)
The test last Saturday, like the one last night, only went for about an hour. That was not mentioned in the Times-Picayune article. But ALL the floodgate pumps (there are no spares in case one or more fails during a storm) will have to run for 12 or maybe 24 hours during a tropical storm or hurricane.
Why isn't the Corps running tests for the media that last that long? Because they know the pumps and their drive units probably can't hold out for that long. Don't buy what the Corps is selling.
(Spocko Note: Bold mine)
[Snip]
So to make this as clear as possible... Not only did the Corps install pumps they knew wouldn't work, not only did they simply give up throughout the entire year of 2006 on repairing the canal walls, they also recommended doubling the order of the known-to-them-to-be-defective pumps and drive units, assumedly with the same manufacturer - MWI.
Matt McBride
More at Fix The Pumps
Labels: corps of engineers, defend new orleans, DefendNOLA, faulty pumps, flood control, HumidCity, jeb bush, LJ New Orleans, New Orleans, nola, Powers and Morrison, We Are NOT Okay