Lt. Gen. fought to protect New Orleans

M.B. Miller and Howard Manly

The suffering of the victims of Hurricane Katrina is especially painful to Lt. Gen. Joe Ballard. As the first black named chief of engineers, he had the responsibility to maintain the levees in New Orleans.

“While the Army Corps of Engineers had the authority to maintain the levees, we were limited by our budget,” he said in an interview.

Ballard had asked for a substantial increase in the budget and was pilloried by the press. “The Washington Post attacked the budget request and made it politically impossible for the engineers to be adequately funded,” he claimed.

According to Ballard, every chief since the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 knew that New Orleans was in danger.

“In order to minimize later floods, the strategy was to dig the river channel deeper,” Ballard said. “This straightened the river for shipping and reduced the size of the flood plains.”

“While this solved the problem of flooding, the increased force of the river damaged the coastline and the barrier islands,” asserted Ballard. “This left New Orleans more exposed to hurricane damages.”

A native of Meeker, Louisiana, Ballard is dismayed to see New Orleans in ruins.

“Hundreds of blacks died in the 1927 flood because they were put at risk,” Ballard asserted. “And hundreds of blacks died or lost their property from Hurricane Katrina because adequate levees were not built.”

Ballard served as commander of the U.S. Corps of Engineers from 1996 until 2000. “I was appointed by President Clinton and I decided to retire when he left office,” Ballard said.

Ballard is now president and CEO of a business development company called the Ravens Group. In 2002, he started TRG Construction, a general contracting firm, where he also serves as president and CEO.

Ballard had a remarkable military career. The son of sharecropper parents, Ballard grew up in Oakdale, Louisiana where he attended the Allen Parish School for Colored Youth. When his mother told him that his father couldn’t read, Ballard read the Bible to his father until he left for college in 1960.

Ballard attended Southern University and majored in electrical engineering. He graduated in 1965 and joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. While in the army, he served two tours in the Vietnam War. Ballard would go on to earn two Distinguished Service Medals, three Legion of Merit Awards and two Bronze Stars.

During Ballard’s tenure at the Army Corp of Engineers, he managed roughly 500 military and 37,000 civilian employees and a $10 billion annual budget.

Ballard now muses that after the Washington Post attacked the budget increases in 2000 that would have provided funds to strengthen the levees, it now blames the engineers for not preventing the hurricane damage.