Posted on 09/02/2005 9:38:27 AM PDT by finnman69
Leaders of the Army Corps of Engineers say the city's flood walls were in excellent shape before the storm but weren't designed to handle a hurricane of Katrina's magnitude.
In a phone briefing Sept. 1, the Army's Chief of Engineers, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, addressed some of the issues that have surfaced about Corps-built structures around New Orleans. Strock said that the project that resulted in the levees along Lake Pontchartrain was designed to protect against a 200-to-300-year storm, which equates to about a Category 3 hurricane, but Katrina was more severe.
Al Naomi, senior project manager in the Corps' New Orleans District, says, "The [project's] design was not adequate for a storm of this nature." He adds that to cover a Category 5 storm, work on storm protection improvements would have had to start 20 or 25 years ago.
The levee breaches occurred in areas that were "in excellent condition" before the storm and were inspected, said Naomi. He said there was nothing the Corps could have done involving the completed floodwalls that could have prevented the breaches.
Another question concerned the allocation of national resources during a war. The war in Iraq has not had an impact on the Corps budget, said Strock. According to his analysis, Corps funding "has been fairly stable" since the early 1990s and the Corps has spent more than $300 million since 2002 on storm protection in the New Orleans area. "We were just caught by a storm of an intensity which exceeded the design of the [flood protection] project we have in place," he said.
Some Corps contracts in the area had been delayed, but Naomi says those contracts were not in the sections of the levees that failed.
Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost more than 1.2 million acres of wetlands, which act as a natural buffer against storms. But Strock contends that wetlands losses "did not have a significant impact" in the case of Katrina. He says that most of the losses of wetlands and barrier islands were south and west of the city, and not in Katrina's path.
Asked about the cost of the initial repairs and the longer-term work, Strock said, "We're doing everything humanly possible to stop the flow of water and it's going to cost what it's going to cost."
Walter Baumy, chief of engineering in the New Orleans District, says that a contract is under way at the breached 17th Street Canal, where the Corps plans to drive sheet piles to close the canal where it meets Lake Pontchartrain. He says the first sheet pile has been driven and he hopes that the canal will be closed sometime Sept. 1.
At the London Ave. Canal, which parallels the 17th Street Canal, Baumy says the Corps is working with contractors to get material to the site to fill in the gap. "Once we seal those two places," he says, "we should stop water going into the city."
After that, the next task will be to pump out the remaining water that has covered large parts of New Orleans. Baumy says the Corps is working with the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board to identify pumping stations to get into service quickly, then to get those stations dry and ready to pump. "We need to give them a dry place to work, " Baumy said, but didn't estimate how long the de-watering would take.
Strock says that as Lake Pontchartrain's level recedes, the water flows should stabilize--and should be nearly at that point now--and then become reversed.
"Good condition" does NOT mean "adequate".
http://enr.ecnext.com/free-scripts/comsite2.pl?page=enr_document&article=neenar050905-1
"We think the water overtopped the floodwall and scoured out the foundation, leading to a structural failure," says Al Naomi, senior manager and head of the Corps’ Lake Pontchartrain and hurricane protection programs. The top of the concrete floodwall, which sits atop an earthen levee, was 14 or 15 ft above sea level at the point of failure, Naomi says. The city is 6 to 10 ft below sea level in that area.
excellent is better than adequate. But they were not designed to handle a Cat 5 hurricane period.
Has someone checked if the materials were supplied by the local version of the "Sopranos"?
What are these things? Facts? Oh. Let's just not worry about those right now.
The question is "why not". Has there never been a Cat 5 hurricane in the gulf? Someone decided the risk was worth it. What about defense in depth...full provisions for a complete evacuation if the wall did breach? Hell, at work here, we are required to have a detailed design AND evacuation plan in case a certain size earthquake hits, and we arent even near a fault! And we have to perform drills to ensure everything can be completed as planned. Risk Analysts and Politicians have an aweful lot of explaining to do.
Only the public sector can preside over a situation this precarious and display utter and complete inertia. What do these people have to lose? They are not real owners. There are no profits or losses at stake. They do not have to answer to risk-obsessed insurance companies who insist on premiums matching even the most remote contingencies. So long as it seems to work, they are glad to go about their business in the soporific style famous to all public sectors everywhere.
I once had a Yugo in "excellent condition", but I wouldn't wanna pull a trailer with it. These MSM types need to understand the difference between "degraded" and "underdesigned".
Um. We knew that, A.C.E. What's your point?
...In that short of a time.
However they've had forty years of complaints to make them bigger. (not blaming the A.C.E. for that).
The important point is that the levees were designed years ago, and not by W. The design was adequate for the worst storm expected in a 200-300 year period--a Category 3. Katerina was a strong Category 4. So the problem was the design, not the funding of the repairs, upgrades, and maintainence.
Thus, the 2001 funding issues raised by the rats yesterday had nothing to do with the disaster. The cause of the disaster was a cost-benefit analysis that dictated the DESIGN of the levees. That decision was made many years ago.
So the rat's argument is reduced to: In the four years since they got control of the White House and Congress, the R's should have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to completely redesign and rebuild the NO levees that were the results of poor design decisions approved under rat control and never redesigned and rebuilt by the rats despite their many decades controlling the US government in the 20th century.
The rat's argument is dishonest; but today, it is winning on the news wires. The first impression being set (and not countered by a strangely passive white house) is going to be difficult to undo, regardless how dishonest the argument is.
That's what the point is. It's an important one and needs to be shouted to the rooftops by conservatives. It's about whether the Louisiana rats go down as a party or whether the national Republicans go down as a party. The rats and their useful idiots in the Old Media understand that and are ruthlessly setting first impressions. The White House is still playing catchup--I don't think they believed that the rats would go so hard and furious when people were still dying. It's pure and simple a blame game and it's one we had better win.
The reality is that we control very little media that has pictures attached to it. The Old Media still has that monopoly. They are dutifully reporting each DNC press release. Our argument has to go out in a greatly weakened media that has no pictures and for an issue like this, the pictures are really important. Hopefully, this will not be the issue that lets the rats get the reins of power again and destroy what remains of our country.
Sounds like the sheets piled all over the place.
BTTT
Bump
New Orleans District Project List
http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/pd/projsasp/mainlist.asp
ping
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