This image provided by NASA taken on May 17, shows a muddy plume in lake Pontchartrain. More trouble ahead for New Orleans?

Maria Garzino is somebody you’ve probably never heard of.

She hasn’t tweeted pictures of herself to amorous strangers. She hasn’t expounded comically on half-remembered episodes of U.S. history. She hasn’t even been the vessel for psychic messages about dead bodies in an empty house. There’s absolutely no reason she should be in the news, as it’s currently conceived.


Except that she knows why the new, expensive system to protect New Orleans from hurricane storm surge can’t work as advertised. She knows, because she’s been there, how the hydraulic pumps at the system’s heart have design defects that render them unable to perform under storm-surge conditions.

And she knows how the White House has responded – or not responded — to that information.

Garzino was, and still is, a civil and mechanical engineer in the Los Angeles office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Her job, in the chaotic weeks and months after 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, was to supervise the testing and installation of the pumps at the center of the “new, improved” system that the corps was building to replace the structures that catastrophically failed in 2005.

She was at the Florida testing facility when these pumps repeatedly failed their tests — even after the standards were lowered to enable them to pass. (Where was that system when I was in college?) Though she reported this to her supervisors, the pumps were ordered installed to meet the corps’ self-imposed deadline of June 1, 2006. They’re still there.

If you dig through the corps’ various presentations to Congress, you find that these pumps were originally supposed to have a 50-year lifespan, to be part of the “permanent” system for so-called 100-year protection. But after it was clear the pumps were defective, the corps began describing the hydraulic pumps as temporary, with a five-to-seven year lifespan.

They are now entering their sixth year of “service.”

Garzino reported all this up her chain of command and, eventually to the Office of Special Counsel — giving her whistleblower status.

After four years, and trips through the Defense Department inspector general and other investigations, the Office of Special Counsel asked an independent engineer to vet Garzino’s findings. He ultimately validated them.

In June, 2009, the OSC forwarded the findings and validation to the president and to the chairmen of the Armed Services Committees in both houses of Congress. Up until now, there’s been no public evidence any of the recipients so much as picked up the envelopes.

But in a new letter she sent to the president, set to be posted later this week on the Project on Government Oversight website, Garzino not only gives the most technically detailed public explication of her findings, she reveals that the White House did have a response.

In the letter, sent to the White House in February, Garzino details that former White House assistant press secretary Bill Burton, who is now running the independent PAC supporting President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, reached out to a lawyer then working with Garzino (on a date not specifically noted).

Burton’s reaction, as quoted by Garzino: He “asked point-blank what it would take to make [Garzino] be quiet and go away.” (Burton contacted POLITICO after this article posted to flatly deny that the conversation Garzino references ever took place).

In any case, she has no plans to be quiet or go away. In the letter she says: “The (Army Corps) is guilty of engaging in deceptive and fraudulent acts in order to hide the known inadequacies of the hydraulic pumping equipment and the (Corps’) own wrongdoing from the public and other responsible government agencies.”

The White House has communicated no response to Garzino’s letter in the intervening months.

For some Washington politicians, Burton’s question may reflect a normal way of trying to clear the decks for the agenda items that have political or policy priority.

But for New Orleanians — and other Americans now being protected by corps-built levee systems (see Sacramento and Dallas, for example) — Burton’s question may offer a view into an administration that perhaps might rather not engage the problem of a government agency where, thanks to the blanket-immunity created by the 1928 Flood Control Act, failure is never punished.

As it turns out, at least in terms of public-sector employment, Burton is the one who has gone away.

Harry Shearer is the director and writer of “The Big Uneasy,” a documentary about the cause of the 2005 flood in post-Katrina New Orleans. He is on “The Simpsons” and the creator and writer of the weekly radio show, “Le Show,” on public radio stations nationwide.

Clarification: In this piece, an alleged conversation involving former White House staffer Bill Burton was inadequately substantiated. Burton denies it ever took place.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Burgess Everett @ 06/15/2011 06:13 PM Clarification: In this piece, an alleged conversation involving former White House staffer Bill Burton was inadequately substantiated. Burton denies it ever took place.