[Rhodes22-list] POLITICS - When The Levy Breaks

Sun Sep 4 23:12:56 EDT 2005

Brad,
        Sorry about my quip about W.  As usual your communications are well
thought out and well supported.
Chris G
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "brad haslett" <flybrad at yahoo.com>
To: <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2005 8:07 PM
Subject: [Rhodes22-list] POLITICS - When The Levy Breaks


> 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."
>
>
>
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