Posted on 09/04/2005 1:24:35 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
One of the reports was of levee breaches in areas that had in fact been upgraded.
According to the Chicago Tribune, "Congress in 1999 authorized the corps to conduct a $12 million study to determine how much it would cost to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane, but the study isn't scheduled to get under way until 2006."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-050901corps,1,7189346.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
So, do we get our money back or what?
My take is that the article lays out good sugestions for what should have been done.
But its now clear that its time to start over, and move out of that bowl, move the port and the residential area out of that hole to higher ground.
Rebuilding in place requires twice the effort, because we will have to replace all the structures AS WELL AS all the proposed changes in this plan.
Had the city been 200 feet higher none of this would have happened. Why should we be stuck with the cost of rebuilding a city laid out by a drunk French engineer 200 years ago?
Great post, from what seems to be an objective source. It seemed recently that the fear over what could become of New Orleans took a more serious tone - with mainstream media stories about an impending tragedy, in CNN last year (for instance), culminating in a National Geographic eye-opener that pretty much described what we are seeing now. I think this was one wrinkle that neither local, state or federal officials knew exactly how to deal with in a practical manner. In time, they might have agreed upon a solution. Time ran out, unfortunately, on Monday night. It's really hard to think about sometimes, without getting sad/frustrated.
We've witnessed a natural disaster.
As most often happens, nothing was going to be done until there was a disaster.
Something more for the thread:
***.....And for the last 450 miles of the Mississippi's flow, the riverbed lies below sea level — 15% below sea level at Vicksburg, well over 170 feet below sea level at New Orleans. For this 450 miles the water on the bottom has no reason to flow at all. But the water above it does. This creates a tumbling effect as water spills over itself, like an enormous ever-breaking internal wave. The tumbling effect can attack a riverbank — or a flood control levee — like a buzz saw. But the final complexity of the lower Mississippi is its sediment load, and understanding it is the key not only to understanding how to control the River, but also to understanding how the soil of the Delta became to be so rich, which, without it, the blues could not have been born. Every day the River deposits between several hundred thousand and several million tons of earth in the Gulf of Mexico. At least some geologists put this figure even higher historically, at an average of more than 2 million tons a day.
By geological standards the lower Mississippi is a young, even infant stream, and runs through what is known as the Mississippi Embayment, a declivity covering approximately 35,000 square miles that begins 30 miles north of Cairo to Cape Giradeau, Missouri — geologically the true head of the Mississippi Delta — and extends to the Gulf of Mexico. At one time the Gulf itself reached to Cape Giradeau, then sea level fell. Over thousands of years the River and its tributaries have poured 1,280 cubic miles of sediment — the equivalent of 1,280 separate mountains of earth, each one mile high, one mile wide, and a mile long — into this declivity. Aided by the falling sea level, this sediment filled in the embayment and made land. Throughout the Mississippi's alluvial valley, this sedimentary deposit has an average thickness of 132 feet; in some areas the deposits reach down 350 feet. It's weight is great enough that some geologists believe its downward pressure pushed up surrounding land, thus creating hills.....***
http://www.deltabluesmuseum.org/index.cfm?page=AboutTheDelta&subID=25
$14 billion to try to protect 500,000 people in a poorly located city is a bit much.
That's $28,000 per person.
Perhaps the city isn't where it should be.
I get it, the city would be saved today if Katrina had waited until 2050.
This does not sound like a Comprehensive Hurricane Plan to me...
Coast 2050 Plan
In 1998, the State of Louisiana and its Federal partners approved a coastal restoration plan entitled Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana. That document presented strategies jointly developed by federal, state, and local interests to address Louisiana's massive coastal land loss problem.
For the first time, solutions were proposed to address fundamental ecosystem needs in order to prevent the loss of this natural treasure. By implementing the plan's regional strategies, it is envisioned that a sustainable ecosystem will be restored in coastal Louisiana, in large part by utilizing the same natural forces that initially built the landscape.
To learn more about the Coast 2050 Plan visit the Coast 2050 web site by clicking here: http://www.coast2050.gov
called
America's WETLAND
Campaign to Save Coastal Louisiana
bttt
Everyone has their priorities. Too bad extremists keep anything from happening. Look at drilling in Alaska and off the FL coast. We need to be doing that now.
Unfortunately this is true in many part of the world. Many always believes he is a better engineer than God.
How long before we see the first 'wrongful death' lawsuit?
I'm sure lawyers are on the scent.
Choices engineered city's vulnerability
***.......................It all comes down to the cost-benefit calculus that flood-prone communities have to wrestle with: The cost of heightening levees can be enormous because it also requires that their bases be widened, and that often demands the purchase of more land. Expanding New Orleans' levees to protect against a Category 5 storm would cost an estimated $2.5 billion.
Some societies decide that protecting lives and property justifies the expense of expanded levees. The Dutch provide protection on the Rhine River high enough to defend against a huge flood that occurs, on average, once in 1,250 years. In New Orleans, a different calculus was at work.
"The person who decided to build the levee at that height took a reasoned judgment that 'this is what we can afford, and [if it fails] we'll repair the damages,'" said Galloway, who spent seven years on the Mississippi River Commission overseeing the Army Corps work on the lower section of the river.
"When you are short of resources, you look at it and say, 'What's a reasonable compromise for the elevation [of water] you need to protect the community against?'"
After the return of violent storms in the mid-1990s, the Army Corps did give renewed attention to whether the city's protection was adequate, launching a decade-long, $700 million project to strengthen levees and pumps.
.......Staff members for Louisiana congressional representatives of both parties agreed in interviews last week that the Army Corps' budget in Louisiana had been underfunded in recent years.
"We've always gotten money - not in the requested amounts - and in recent years it's been because of budget constraints. The budget's been stretched in many ways," said Melanie Roussell, a spokeswoman for Rep. William J. Jefferson, a Democrat whose district includes New Orleans.
Chris Paolino, a spokesman for Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Republican whose district lies just north of New Orleans, said underfunding of Army Corps projects stretched back several decades. "There's been a sense that this is a Louisiana problem, when of course there are national implications," he said. "It hasn't been the national priority it should have been."
Army Corps commander Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock said last week that the uncompleted levee-improvement projects could not be linked to the levee failures. The areas that were breached were at "full project design and were not going to be improved," Strock told reporters in a conference call. "We were just caught by a storm of an intensity which exceeded the design of the [flood protection] project we have in place." .......................***
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.how04sep04,1,4303548,print.story?coll=bal-home-headlines
how long before we read Nagins obits?
they still were not up to protecting against a cat. 5 hurricane surge. the protection should exceed, or at least meet the threat...
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