Posted on 09/02/2005 11:25:08 AM PDT by johnmecainrino
HURRICANE RESPONSE
Corps Officials Say New Orleans' Flood Walls Were in Good Condition
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 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 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.
The levee cuts were nothing unordinary. Cuts are made in the budget all the time and then the state delagations put them back in.
In the future the loss of marshes from development has to be fixed because that loss takes away the buffer zone of protection from a storm from the west.
They misread the specifications. The CAT5 here refers to Ethernet cable! (Oops! Better add the \sarcasm symbol, someone might take it seriously!)
I've posted it before, but it's worth repeating..in 2003, Isobel, a Cat 1 or 2...went up the east coast, and pushed a storm surge into Chesapeake Bay, that sent 9 feet of water into Annapolis..
The city knew this but each successive mayor and governor sat on their hands for decades and did nothing about except beg for help from the rest of the nation.
Thank you.
Whats this elephant doing in the room?
Exactly. Don't forget, too, that New Orleans has been a cesspool (no pun intended) of graft and corruption for decades! Successive 'Rat administrations have lined their pockets and their cronies' pockets with BILLIONS that could have been used to upgrade the levees.
So who WAS NO Mayor and La Governer 30 to 25 years ago?
"This just in... New information about the levee breaks has just become available. Turns out we have been very wrong in trying to blame this on President Bush. We hope he will accept our sincerest apologies."
It is not like the media will let the facts get in the way of a story.
This mantra is being chanted by the Louisiana politicos daily on the MSM.
The reason Louisiana is losing wetlands is because they built on a river delta. The river delta is not being built up as fast as it is being reclaimed by the sea.
Why? Because those stinkin lousy Red States have managed largely stop farmland erosion and control flooding on the upper Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Without that erosion, there is no silt to build up the delta.
Those massive expendatures for Mississippi Flood control dams are working to protect Red States. And those stingy Iowa farmers are hording all the silt, leaving the poor Blue States to sink into the sea.
/sarcasm off
Hmm...that would be the Honorable Maurice (Moon) Landrieu. Yes, Sen. Mary Landrieu's daddy, who was also involved in the scandal involving the "newer better pumps" that were not installed. They were being "stored" at great cost to the federal government. Who owned the storage facility? Oh, just some relative of the mayor.
Well, President Bush increased global warming by a hundred fold in just 4.5 years, surely he could've accelerated levee-building in that time...
SHOCK! Say it ain't so!
The Wall Street Journal did a story on the levees yesterday. Apparently local and private companies have built and repaired the levees over the years along with the Army Corps of Engineers. But the levees built by the ACOE has by far the lowest failure rate.
bookmark
ping
Don't forget Mitch's daddy too.
I was telling someone about this. I've been looking for my links but I lost them... you have? Especially when the costs for install weren't included and they couldn't install the newer pumps.
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