[Rhodes22-list] POLITICS - When The Levy Breaks

[brad haslett]

I've been nursing a nasty sinus infection here in
China that I haven't been able to will or drug away,
and have been entertaining myself with $1.20 bootleg
DVD's and the net.  It was wish full thinking on my
part to think that we might wait until the waters
receded and the dead were buried before the "Bush
Bashing" and finger pointing started, but no.  My copy
of "Rising Tide", the account of the great flood of
1926-27, was loaned out several years ago, never to
return, but it would be 6000 miles away now anyway so
I'll quote from memory.  New Orleans has always been
subject to the ravages of the Mississippi.  The New
Orleans city fathers convinced the Federal government
to allow them to blow-up the levies south of the city
in 1927 because they were afraid that "Old Man River"
would permanently alter its course through the tens of
thousands  year old natural flood relief course, and
leave 'Orleans an inland city.  They promised to
compensate the citizens of the two parishes wiped out
as a result.  When it turned out that the fur trade
they eliminated for the next two years generated far
more revenue than they imagined, they reneged on their
promise by offering 5 cents on the dollar and paid
that only if you settled immediately. New Orleans has
had a long time to plan for the inevitable, but now
that it has happened, is it ALL W's fault?  The
Mississippi IS a national resource and we all have a
vested interest in Delta project funding.  But where
does responsibility lie with the city of New Orleans
and the state of Louisiana?  Have they not every run
simulations or training for this type of event?  I'm
quite certain that New Orleans, like most Southern,
predominantly black cities, has a massive school bus
fleet.  Did anyone give thought to using them to
evacuate the city?  Did anyone in Louisiana read the
Army think-tank study from Ft. Riley, Kansas
(extensively covered by the Atlantic) that if a major
earthquake hit Memphis, TN (which lies on the New
Madrid fault, largest in North America), civil anarchy
would soon follow?  Is it surprising that New Orleans
would follow a similar pattern after a major
hurricane?  There are a lot of people to blame,
including W.  But the President is hardly at fault for
several centuries of bad civil engineering, social
engineering, and lax attitudes by local officials. 
How long HAVE they been serving "hurricane" drinks at
Pat O'Brians?  OK, a third of the Louisiana Guard is
in Iraq, doesn't that leave about 8000 behind?  Are
they not at the governor's disposal?  What shall we
have them do first?  Shoot looters?  Will they then be
accused of over-reacting as they were guilty of at
Kent State?  No one was prepared for this, not the
local officials, the state, or the Federal government.
 There are plenty of people to blame and a lot of
self-examination to be done, by people from the last
several decades.  Right now, let's bury the dead and
heal the living.

Here is an article regarding the levy system there. 
If half the Federal budget had been dedicated to lower
Mississippi levy projects in 2000, we wouldn't have
prevented this from happening.

Brad

--------------------------


Levees not designed for Katrina-strength storm,
official says By Pete Carey, Knight Ridder Newspapers
2 hours, 11 minutes ago
 


The levee system that protected New Orleans from
hurricane-caused surges along Lake Pontchartrain was
never designed to survive a storm the size of
Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers said
Thursday.

The levees were built to withstand only a Category 3
storm, something projections suggested would strike
New Orleans only once every two or three centuries,
the commander of the corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock,
told reporters in a conference call. Katrina was a
Category 4 storm.

"Unfortunately, that occurred in this case," Strock
said.

Strock said that the levee system's design was settled
on a quarter of a century ago, before the current
numerical system of classifying storms was in
widespread use. He said that studies had begun
recently on strengthening the system to protect
against Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, but hadn't
progressed very far.

Strock added that despite a May report by the Corps'
Louisiana district that a lack of federal funding had
slowed construction of hurricane protection, nothing
the Corps could have done recently would have
prevented Katrina from flooding New Orleans.

"The levee projects that failed were at full project
design and were not really going to be improved,"
Strock said.

Strock's comments drew immediate criticism from
flood-protection advocates, who said that the Corps'
May report was a call for action and a complaint about
insufficient funding, and that no action took place.

"The Corps knew, everybody knew, that the levees had
limited capability," said Joseph N. Suhayda, a retired
director of the Louisiana State University's Water
Resources and Research Institute. "Because of
exercises and simulations, we knew that the
consequences of overtopping (water coming over the
levees) would be disastrous. People were playing with
matches in the fireworks factory and it went off."

Suhayda, an expert in coastal oceanography, said, "the
fact the levee failed is not according to design. If
it was overtopped, it's because it was lower in that
spot than other spots. The fact that it was only
designed for a Category 3 meant it was going to get
overtopped. I knew that. They knew that. There were
limits."

Some critics Thursday questioned the usefulness of
levees, saying that all of them fail eventually.

"There are lots of ways for levees to fail.
Overtopping is just one of them," said Michael K.
Lindell, of Texas A&M University's Hazard Reduction
and Recovery Center. "There's a lot of smokescreen
about `low probabilities.' Low probabilities just
means `Takes a long time."'

Strock said that stopping the flow of water over the
levees has proved to be "a very challenging effort."

Engineers have been unable to reach the levees
themselves and have had to draw up plans based only on
observations from the air, he said. "We, too, are
victims in this situation," he said.

In Louisiana, Army Corps officials said they hoped
that one break, in what's known as the 17th Street
Canal, might be closed by the end of Thursday, but
that a second break in the London Avenue canal is
proving more intractable.

Short sections of the walls that protected the city
from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain caved in under
storm surges, including an area that recently had been
strengthened.

A fact sheet issued by the Corps in May said that
seven construction projects in New Orleans had been
stalled for lack of funding. It noted that the budget
proposed by President Bush for 2005 was $3 million and
termed that amount insufficient to fund new
construction contracts.

"We could spend $20 million if the funds were
provided," the fact sheet said. Two major pump
stations needed to be protected against hurricane
storm surges, the fact sheet said, but the budgets for
2005 and 2006 "will prevent the corps from addressing
these pressing needs."

Acknowledging delays in construction, Corps officials
in Louisiana said that those projects weren't where
the failures occurred. "They did not contribute to the
flooding of the city," said Al Naomi, a senior project
manager. 

"The design was not adequate to protect against a
storm of this nature," he said. "We were not
authorized to provide protection to Category 4 or 5
design." 



Copyright ?2005 KnightRidder.com


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