Some critics are starting to praise the Army Corps of Engineers’ work in rebuilding the levees around New Orleans.

Coming from Professor Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been one of the most persistent critics of the Army Corps of Engineers’ work on the levees, it was an important turnabout. His praise of the levee work gives an important endorsement to the corps’s desperate struggle to improve flood control around New Orleans and its suburbs before the hurricane season begins on June 1.

Just two months ago, Professor Bea, who is investigating the levee failures around New Orleans with his colleague Raymond B. Seed, had a very different assessment of the corps’s work. The researchers, who receive financing from the National Science Foundation, said the corps and its contractors in St. Bernard were rebuilding parts of these levees with sandy soil that was likely to wash away under the next assault of a storm. Professor Seed referred to the material going into some parts of the levees as “sugar sands.”

[Read](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/12/us/nationalspecial/12levee.html?ex=1302494400&en=623f5e8b72af87a4&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) (New York Times)