Southwest Louisiana Joins Fight for Levees

Hurricane Katrina destroyed close to 30 miles of Louisiana's levees, and while the state and the nation debate over how to rebuild them, people in southwest Louisiana wonder why they've never had them.

As he sits through meeting after meeting about how to rebuild New Orleans, a state lawmaker from the other side of the state feels left out.

With Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, if you think about it, we're the middle child, Rita," says Senator Nick Gautreaux from Vermilion Parish. Rita's storm surge wreaked havoc on much of his district.

In New Orleans, much of the flooding happened because the levees were overcome. On the other side of the state, it happened because there are no levees. Gautreaux says there used to be a levee, 12 to 20 feet along the intracoastal canal. Problem is, the Corps of Engineers doesn't call it a levee, they call it a spoil bank, and therefore it doesn't require the same maintenance.

"I talked to a farmer who said he used to play cowboys and Indians on it, it was 20 feet high! Now you walk and you can see the intracoastal canal, it's maybe a foot, a half a foot, and in some places it's zero."

"Any amount of protection is better than none," agrees Representative Mickey Frith. Frith represents Vermilion and Cameron parishes. He says southwest Louisiana may not have as many people or as big of an economy as the southwest, but its just as important.

"We grow crawfish, we grow rice, we grow sugarcane," he says. All those crops were ruined by the influx of saltwater. Then there's industry, like the Henry Hub, near an underwater neighborhood.

"At least 45 percent of the heating fuel for the northeast United States moves through Vermilion Parish at the Henry Hub," says Frith. So why hasn't it been protected?

Wendell Curole heads the Association of Levee Boards. He says they build what they can afford, and it has to be justified.

"We're going to have to make decisions as to which communities go into the future and which don't," he says.

You can build a levee on poor soil, and it will hold. Regardless of how weak a given soil layer is, you test it, you determine what one square foot of it will hold, and you size your levee accordingly.

There's another varible though. How thick is your wallet? When you start exploring that equation, you might be tempted to take a chance. You might decide to build a levee for X dollars that will protect against every storm except a 200 year worst case storm. That's what happened in New Orleans.

Then after the storm when civil engineers with political agendas, people who ought to know better but who instead ignore math in order to score unearned political points claim the soil was at fault, you wait till the trial, haul out 500 tons of the CYA documents you were foresighted enough to procure and blow them out of the water.

Then, when it comes time to build a new levee, you tell them how much it will cost to pay for 100 year protection, 200 year protection, 500 year protection, and 1000 year protection, and stand clear while the chips hit the fan.

Make sure you are on the record telling them that you can provide a 3 to 1 cantilever support by driving your sheet piling 4 times as deep as the bottom of the weak soil layer, or 200 feet below existing grade, but that it will cost ten times what the present system cost, since those sheet piles were only driven to 20 feet.

Again, they aren't going to be happy hearing this, and will claim you are only trying to pork line your pocket. Eventually the politicians will hand you enough money for a 200 year protection system, along with orders to build a 500 year system, and contracts that they've already let to their brother in law, who shouldn't be trusted to build a doghouse, for half the work.

Finally, when the next storm comes along, the entire cycle will begin anew. Not sure what iteration of the levee cycle we are on right now, but the first one started more than 200 years ago, and the levees have been "improved" at least 5 times since then.

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