BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Military helicopters on Thursday dropped sandbags into the levee breach that sent floodwaters from Lake Pontchartrain pouring into New Orleans, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers general said.
The 150 sandbags, each weighing 3,000 pounds, were part of a temporary plan aimed at plugging the hole in the levee. The next step: Drop about 250 concrete road barriers into the area and seal the spot where swirling waters toppled the floodwall.
"We're dumping things into the hole, just to stem the tide," said Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, commander of the crew working to fix the floodwall.
The lake's levels have dropped about 2 1/2 feet over the past two days, about equal to the water level in flooded areas on the other side of the levee, said Johnny Bradberry, head of the state Department of Transportation and Development.
Contractors also had finished building a road that will make it easier to get heavy equipment to the levee.
In a separate project on the main canal breach, contractors tried to close the gap by building retaining walls, aiming to cut off the opening to the lake.
"In the next day, day and a half, it will be completely isolated from the lake," Bradberry said.
The pilings need to go down more than 30 feet to fully block the flow of water, according to Michael B. Rogers, another official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Normally, the canal's function is to allow rainwater to be pumped out of the bowl-shaped city and into the lake. Blocking the canal and using the sandbags and concrete to fill breaches is a temporary fix; engineers will eventually have to rebuild at least parts of the canal.
Once those projects are done, the Corps will move on to the most important safeguard against further flooding: repairing the city's huge pumping system, which can pump 690,000 gallons of water per minute.
The Corps also planned to punch breaches into other parts of the levee system along Lake Pontchartrain, allowing water to flow back out of New Orleans and into the lake, Rogers said.
Engineers have been unable to reach another levee break on the other side of the city, though water is not flowing into New Orleans from that hole.
I thought earlier reports said that they had been evacuated today? Sorry, it's hard to keep up.