Carl Strock Resigning as Chief Of Army Corps Of Engineers

From the “Early Bird”

New York Times
August 11, 2006

Chief Of Army Corps Of Engineers Is Quitting
By John Schwartz

The head of the Army Corps of Engineers will resign, the Army announced last night.

Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the chief of engineers and commander of the corps since July 1, 2004, asked Francis J. Harvey, the secretary of the Army, that he be allowed to resign “based on family and personal reasons, which the secretary of the Army honors and supports,” according to the Army announcement.

The chief of engineers runs a huge array of engineering and construction projects around the world, including work in the Iraq war and responding to natural disasters, including the recovery after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, as well as on flood control and environmental projects.

The corps has come under fire for the progress of Iraq reconstruction and for the failures of the New Orleans levee system. In June, the corps report on the disaster called the levee system “a system in name only,” and Gen. Strock admitted that the corps had missed a flaw in the design that led to some of the most destructive breaches.

“We’re not ducking our accountability and responsibility in this,” he said in June.

The coordinator of Gulf Coast rebuilding for the Bush administration, Donald Powell, said he had “come to admire” General Strock “not just for his vast engineering knowledge, but also for his character.”

Raymond B. Seed, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of a harsh report on the New Orleans levee failures, praised General Strock as “the right guy in the right place for everybody except himself” and said the general had worked hard to improve the corps and to confront its problems honestly.

“I feel very sad for the corps and the nation, because a good man has stepped down,” Professor Seed said.

A spokeswoman for the corps, Suzanne M. Fournier, announced the resignation at a conference in San Diego. “He said he always put the Army first for 35 years,” Ms. Fournier said of the general, but had made “a personal decision.” He expressed “great faith in the leadership of the organization,” she said.