...mama, you got to move. offered w/o comment: http://www.techcentralstation.com/090205F.html -- Breaks in the Levee Logic By Duane D. Freese The news and opinion spin cycle is moving faster than the winds of a category 4 hurricane. Barely have we had the opportunity to feel denial about the terrible tragedy, feel sympathy for victims and begin lending our support than we've leapt to the stage of recrimination: Who's to blame? And the rush to judgment is running ahead of appropriate investigation and facts. Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, raised the question "Did the New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen?" He quoted Louisiana officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the New Orleans area in old Tiimes-Picayune's stories complaining about cuts by the Bush administration in federal funding for levees and flood protection, particularly ACE's Alfred Naomi, stating in June 2004: "The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement. The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them." The New York Times, in its lead editorial Thursday titled "Waiting for a Leader," churlishly went after President Bush for his first speech which it called terrible. It went on to pretend it knew what New Orleans' problem was -- a lack of federal funding. Specifically it called for the House to restore $70 million in funds for the levees next year. The Washington Post, in an editorial that talked about not casting blame now, nonetheless couldn't resist casting some, saying the "president's most recent budgets have actually proposed reducing funding for flood prevention in the New Orleans area, and the administration has long ignored Louisiana politicians' request for more help in protecting their fragile coast." USA Today did a better job in a pair of edits -- one on the disaster response and one on the energy supply -- by recognizing that the state and local government had a roll in building Louisiana's infrastructure. On energy, it even went so far as to say some things some anti-oil groups hate to hear -- how obstructionists to development of new refineries, offshore and Alaskan energy supplies share the blame for the nation's reliance on Gulf Coast supplies. But it, too, got caught up in the drumbeat about the levees, arguing: "[P]eople living along the Gulf Coast have grown up hearing about what could happen if the 'big one' hit the region. Yet the levees weren't raised or strengthened sufficiently to prevent flooding. Initial plans for evacuating the city and ensuring civil order were haphazard at best." Indeed, if editorial writers had a comment to make it was to say something about the levees. And why not? The levees broke, didn't they? That's what helped mess up the rescue effort, didn't it? And there were cuts in federal help, weren't there? The answers to all these questions are yes. But, the fact is, they miss an important point, which The New York Times editorialists might have discovered had they read their own news story by Andrew Revkin and Christopher Drew. The reporters quoted Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, about how surprising it was that the break in the levee was "a section that was just upgraded." "It did not have an earthen levee," he told them. "It had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick." Worse for the editorial writers were statements by the chief engineer of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Lt. Gen Carl Strock: "I don't see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case. Had this project been fully complete, it is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm that the flooding of the business district and the French Quarter would have still taken place." The reason: the funding would only have completed an upgrade of the levees to a protect against a level 3 hurricane. Katrina was a level 4 plus. And the reasons for this goes back decades. Since the 1930s, when levee building began in earnest, Louisiana has lost a million acres of its coastal wetlands, and faces the loss of another 640,000 additional acres -- an area the size of Rhode Island -- by 2050. A new study based on satellite measurement released in May found that the wetlands area was sinking at a half-inch to two-inches a year as of 1995, or up to more than a 1.5 feet a decade. "If subsidence continues and/or sea level rises and human action fails to take place, the entire coast will be inundated," Roy Dokka of the Louisiana Spatial Reference Center at Louisiana State University and an author of the study noted in July. And he went on in a Times-Picayune piece that columnist Bunch apparently failed to examine: "The current plans to save the coast are focused on fixing wetlands, which is incredibly important, but the problem is that subsidence is affecting the entire coast. We need to combine those plans with regional hurricane levees and sand shoals. We have to find some way to protect the people and valuable infrastructure we have on the coast." This echoes a point that was raised by the White House Office of Management and Budget in a review of the Corps of Engineers levee and flood work back in 2003. It noted that while the Corps managed projects that reduced flood damage to specific areas, annual flood damages to the nation were increasing. As such, it wanted the Corps -- though well-managed -- to broaden its approach by coordinating with federal flood mitigation efforts -- to be "more pro-active in preventing flood risks rather than reacting to them." The regional Corps head so often quoted by the media himself said in 2003 that a project to protect the city from a category 4 or 5 storm would take 30 years to complete, with the feasibility study alone costing $8 million and taking six years to complete. At the time he opined, "Hopefully we won't have a major storm before then." As for the $14 billion plan called Coastal 2050 for wetlands restoration that Louisiana politicians have been pushing for the last two years for the federal government to provide a stream of funds -- up to 65% of the cost -- some experts say it was only a stop-gap. "We are not going to stop marsh loss. Subsidence is too dominant," James Coleman, a professor of coastal studies at Louisiana State University, told the Times Picayune a few years ago. Coastal restoration "is a temporary fix in terms of geological time. You will see results of massive coastal restorations in our lifetime, but in the long run they are also going to go." Indeed, those interested in getting a taste of the complexity of New Orleans situation, a good place to start is to read "The Creeping Storm" by Greg Brouer in the June 2003 Civil Engineering Magazine: "During the past 40 years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a barrier around the low-lying city of New Orleans to protect it from hurricanes. But is the system high enough? And can any defense ultimately protect a city that is perpetually sinking -- in some areas at a rate of half an inch (editor's note: Or up to 2 inches) per year?" We know the answer to the first question now -- obviously not. The answer to the second question will require more investigation. It would be nice if some editorial writers would perform a little more. Snap judgments in this situation are worse than no judgment at all.
The part about the city continually sinking.... that's the part that concerns me the most, in the long term. In an emotional response, I believe there will be a rebuilding of NOLA. I'm not sure that's the smartest thing. Not at that precise location, anyway. I don't know how you keep that city from sinking, ultimately. You can band-aid it over and over again. But it's going to take a serious out-of-the-box solution to stop that.
i agree, but if amsterdam and venice can survive, and flourish, then so can new orleans, albeit not w/o some fairly substantial infrastructure adjustments, of both the physical and the political variety.
the difference is that those cities aren't subject to hurricanes and storm surge the way NOLA is. NOLA is sinking...it's already below sea level..the water around it is higher than it is...and it sits on the gulf coast, where it gets slammed at least once every 30 or so years.
I am not familiar with NO, cann't they move the city back away from the coast and to higher elevation?
I agree only if both Amsterdam and Venice are also in hurricane strike zones like N.O is. BTW basso, any time a techcentralstation's article is quoted, god eats a kitten.
i'm thinking moving north of the lake would be a grand idea! but that's pretty far away from the french quarter and all of the other things that people consider to be New Orleans.
Basso -- excellent point. even the strengthening of the levees wasn't going to keep this city from flooding, apparently. the water literally just knocked over the concrete wall. remember, too...this wasn't the worst case. Katrina made landfall as a Cat 4. a super-storm like Glibert, for example, would be a worst case scenario, with an even higher storm surge.
Maybe they should consider leveling it, and moving the city inland.....maybe leaving the French quarter as a tourist attraction? Never happen, we will rebuild it, and we will have the same situation in 10 or 20 years. It is like living on the slopes of a volcano. DD
i think you're right. i think they'll rebuild right there all over again. and eventually this will happen again. maybe not to this extent...maybe to a greater extent.
The Netherlands and other countries, like Britain, that border the North Sea have had some absolutely hellacious storms. I've been taken on tours of the Dutch system, by my wife's relatives, that protect the low lying areas of the country, which is most of it. Here is an enlightening article: September 6, 2005 In Europe, High-Tech Flood Control, With Nature's Help By WILLIAM J. BROAD On a cold winter night in 1953, the Netherlands suffered a terrifying blow as old dikes and seawalls gave way during a violent storm. Flooding killed nearly 2,000 people and forced the evacuation of 70,000 others. Icy waters turned villages and farm districts into lakes dotted with dead cows. Ultimately, the waters destroyed more than 4,000 buildings. Afterward, the Dutch - realizing that the disaster could have been much worse, since half the country, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, lies below sea level - vowed never again. After all, as Tjalle de Haan, a Dutch public works official, put it in an interview last week, "Here, if something goes wrong, 10 million people can be threatened." So at a cost of some $8 billion over a quarter century, the nation erected a futuristic system of coastal defenses that is admired around the world today as one of the best barriers against the sea's fury - one that could withstand the kind of storm that happens only once in 10,000 years. The Dutch case is one of many in which low-lying cities and countries with long histories of flooding have turned science, technology and raw determination into ways of forestalling disaster. London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on the Adriatic. Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on stilts as emergency havens for flood victims. Experts in the United States say the foreign projects are worth studying for inspiration about how to rebuild New Orleans once the deadly waters of Hurricane Katrina recede into history. "They have something to teach us," said George Z. Voyiadjis, head of civil and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University. "We should capitalize on them for building the future here." Innovations are happening in the United States as well. California is experimenting with "smart" levees wired with nervous systems of electronic sensors that sound alarms if a weakening levee threatens to open a breach, giving crews time to make emergency repairs. "It's catching on," said William F. Kane, president of Kane GeoTech Inc., a company in Stockton, Calif., that wires levees and other large structures with failure sensors. "There's a lot of potential for this kind of thing." While scientists hail the power of technology to thwart destructive forces, they note that flood control is a job for nature at least as much as for engineers. Long before anyone built levees and floodgates, barrier islands were serving to block dangerous storm surges. Of course, those islands often fall victim to coastal development. "You'll never be able to control nature," said Rafael L. Bras, an environmental engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who consults on the Venetian project. "The best way is to understand how nature works and make it work in our favor." In humanity's long struggle against the sea, the Dutch experience in 1953 was a grim milestone. The North Sea flood produced the kind of havoc that became all too familiar on the Gulf Coast last week. When a crippled dike threatened to give way and let floodwaters spill into Rotterdam, a boat captain - like the brave little Dutch boy with the quick finger - steered his vessel into the breach, sinking his ship and saving the city. "We were all called upon to collect clothes and food for the disaster victims," recalled Jelle de Boer, a Dutch high school student at the time who is now an emeritus professor of geology at Wesleyan University. "Cows were swimming around. They'd stand when they could, shivering and dying. It was a terrible mess." The reaction was intense and manifold. Linking offshore islands with dams, seawalls and other structures, the Dutch erected a kind of forward defensive shield, drastically reducing the amount of vulnerable coastline. Mr. de Haan, director of the water branch of the Road and Hydraulic Engineering Institute of the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, said the project had the effect of shortening the coast by more than 400 miles. For New Orleans, experts say, a similar forward defense would seal off Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico. That step would eliminate a major conduit by which hurricanes drive storm surges to the city's edge - or, as in the case of Katrina, through the barriers. The Dutch also increased the height of their dikes, which now loom as much as 40 feet above the churning sea. (In New Orleans, the tallest flood walls are about half that size.) The government also erected vast complexes of floodgates that close when the weather turns violent but remain open at other times, so saltwater can flow into estuaries, preserving their ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on them. The Netherlands maintains large teams of inspectors and maintenance crews that safeguard the sprawling complex, which is known as Delta Works. The annual maintenance bill is about $500 million. "It's not cheap," Mr. de Haan said. "But it's not so much in relation to the gross national product. So it's a kind of insurance." The 1953 storm also pounded Britain. Along the Thames, flooding killed more than 300 people, ruined farmland and frightened Londoners, whose central city narrowly escaped disaster. The British responded with a plan to better regulate tidal surges sweeping up the Thames from the North Sea. Engineers designed an attractive barrier meant to minimize interference with the river's natural flow. It went into service in 1982 at Woolwich, about 10 miles east of central London. Normally, its semicircular gates lie flush to the riverbed in concrete supporting sills, creating no obstacle to river traffic. When the need arises, the gates pivot up, rising as high as a five-story building to block rising waters. The authorities have raised the Thames barrier more than 80 times. In Venice, the precipitating event was a 1966 flood that caused wide damage and economic loss. The upshot was an ambitious plan known as the Moses Project, named after the biblical parting of the Red Sea. Its 78 gargantuan gates would rest on the floor of the Adriatic Sea and rise when needed to block dangerous tidal surges. Long debate over the project's merits repeatedly delayed the start of construction until May 2003. Opponents claim that the $4.5 billion effort will prove ineffective while threatening to kill the fragile lagoon in which Venice sits. In theory, the gates are to be completed by 2010. "People fight doing things like this," said Dr. Bras, of M.I.T. "But when disaster strikes you realize how important it is to think ahead." Planners did just that in Bangladesh after a 1991 hurricane created huge storm surges that killed more than 130,000 people. World charities helped build hundreds of concrete shelters on stilts, which in recent storms have saved thousands of lives. In Japan, a continuous battle against flooding in dense urban areas has produced an effort to develop superlevees. Unlike the customary mounds of earth, sand and rock that hold back threatening waters, they are broad expanses of raised land meant to resist breaks and withstand overflows. The approach being tried in California relies on a technology known as time-domain reflectometry. It works on the same principle as radar: a pulse of energy fired down a coaxial cable bounces back when it reaches the end or a distortion, like a bend or crimp. Careful measurement of the echoes traveling back along the cable can disclose serious distortions and danger. Dr. Kane, of Kane GeoTech, has installed such a system in the Sacramento River delta, along a levee that is threatening to fail. Could such a system have saved New Orleans? "It would have given them more information," said Charles H. Dowding, a top expert on the technology at Northwestern University. "The failure of a levee would have been detected." But experts say it is still unclear whether such a warning would have been enough to prevent the catastrophic breaches. Dr. Bras says sensor technologies for detecting levee failure hold much promise. But he adds that less glamorous approaches, like regular maintenance, may be even more valuable, since prevention is always the best cure. "We have to learn that things have to be reviewed, revised, maintained and repaired as needed," he said. "To see a city like New Orleans suffer such devastation - some of that was preventable." He added that no matter how ambitious the coastal engineering, no matter how innovative and well maintained, the systems of levees, seawalls and floodgates were likely to suffer sporadic failures. "Nature will throw big things at us once in a while," he said. "There's always the possibility that nature will trump us." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/science/06tech.html The technology was there to protect New Orleans. The political will and leadership, on many levels, was not. It is still possible to save the New Orleans area, and much of the Gulf coast of LA, from disasters like this. We must have the will to take that on. Perhaps it is late, but better late than never. Keep D&D Civil!!
Deckard -- i hear ya. and i think we have to explore all options. but the city is still sinking. it continues to sink. and according to most i've read, there's not really anything you can do about that except literally "raise" the city as was done with Galveston. even then it's a stop-gap, because it will eventually sink further.
Just a comment on Venice. Technically Venice has already sunk several times the Venetians have just rebuilt ontop of the older buildings. The Italians are attempting to build giant movable barriers that will close off the Venetian lagoon during times of storms and exceptionally high tides. There are several potential problems with these movable barriers with the first being they are very expensive along with that they may prevent the flushing of the Venetian lagoon causing it to become a festering cess pool of industrial and biological waste. Another problem is that if sea levels rise faster and higher than the projections used to design they may become obsolete very quickly. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050316/news_1c16venice.html
I've been reading in the other threads that the 17th St. levee that broke had been recently been upgraded and I'm curious if anyone has any more information regarding that upgraded levee and what were the upgrades. From my limited understanding along the Industrial Canal it technically wasn't a levee which is a large berm witha low height to width ratio but instead a flood wall which has a higher height to width ratio. The reason why I bring this up is because a high concrete flood wall might not actually protect better than an earthen berm but wouldn't take up as much land so from a land use planning perspective could be considered an improvement over a levee. The problem with a floodwall vs a levee is that with a greater height to width ratio there would be a far greater overturning force on the floodwall if you consider as the water piles up against the wall the moment (overturning force) at the base of the barrier would be multiplied by the height. With a low wide berm the overturning force is countered by the mass of material at the base so a levee is likely not to fall over. OTOH a flood wall in relation to its height doesn't have so much material at the base to resist the moment. This form becomes greatly magnified as the water rises exerting more force farther from the base. So I'm not sure we can automatically assume that replacing an earthen levee with a concrete floodwall is an improvement in terms of flood protection.
you may be correct from an engineering perspective, and i don't know if it was a flood wall or levee, only that it was made of concrete (concrete levee?). in any case, the arguement's only important in that it mitigates the idea that cuts in funding caused the levee's collapse. the real cause is that the levee/floodwall was only designed for a cat3 storm.
I heard an interview on 60 minutes of the head honcho over NOLA flood control whose been in that position for over 20 years. Yes, the levee's that broke were NOT levee's. They were flood walls that seperate canals. All of the city's levee's held up just fine. The flood walls that failed did so because water initially poured over top and therefore compromised the foundation of the walls causing them to break. I know others here have said just the opposite. That the flood walls were in fact high enough but just faultered. So I guess time will tell. Note: The flood control guy said in order to save NOLA from this storm, we would have needed funds 20 years ago. $$$ cut from the budget since 2001 definately hurt their maintenance efforts and long term planning but it likely would not have made much of an impact for this particular storm. I don't have a link for you. Sorry. Just the opposite. All of the city's levee's held up. Its only the floodwalls that failed.
