Posted on 05/12/2006 5:57:52 PM PDT by blam
In a city haunted by Katrina, the question is: Will it happen again?
By Francis Harris in New Orleans
(Filed: 13/05/2006)
Hurricane season is approaching New Orleans like a recurring nightmare.
Very soon, the great storms which brew in the Gulf of Mexico's warm waters will once again race landwards and attack the city's protective levees. Meteorologists are predicting an "active" six month season. It is a frightening prospect for a city still punch-drunk from last year's flooding.
The authorities are making a huge effort to shore up the system. Across the semi-deserted metropolis, engineers are working day and night on the £1.9 billion ($3.5 billion) scheme.
But even the scientists are edgy. "If I lived in New Orleans, I'd get a second floor apartment and put my stuff in storage," said Prof Bob Bea, a senior civil engineer overseeing the levees' reconstruction.
Many of the returnees are also intensely suspicious of official assurances that this time the city will be safe.
"They're lying," said David Henry, a 53-year-old born in New Orleans. Working to repair homes just yards from the spot where the 17th Street canal collapsed, Mr Henry has no time for promises.
"You can tell they're lying the second their mouths start movin'," he adds with a wan smile.
Public anger is understandable. Levees built over a 40-year period were supposed to withstand a category three hurricane. But while the worst of Hurricane Katrina missed New Orleans, the city flooded anyway.
Although Katrina was not strong enough to send water over most levees, the storm found the weaknesses in poorly designed and badly constructed flood defences, then punched huge holes in it. At least 720 townspeople died.
Many blame the US army corps of engineers, which is responsible for the levees. Its pledges on the system's robustness were "at best a rough estimate and at worst simply inaccurate", congressional investigators found.
At least 28 levees failed in New Orleans, allowing 58 billion gallons of lakewater to flood all but a fifth of the city.
America's leading civil engineers have been investigating ever since and have reached some worrying conclusions.
The most critical reports say key levees were badly designed, badly built and badly maintained.
Because many of the city's defences are built on swampy soils, including a layer likened to black toothpaste, the steel pilings at the heart of many levees needed to penetrate far below the surface.
But they were too short, allowing flood waters to put huge pressure on the soft soil and so push back the flood defences until they broke.
Will it happen again? No one knows. The army corps of engineers has employed 3,000 men to repair 169 miles of damaged levees and says the system will be back to its pre-Katrina condition by June 1, the start of hurricane season.
It has been a huge effort and the corps has won plaudits for fast work. Engineers have also lauded the corps.
But serious worries remain. The corps acknowledges that it is planning for another Katrina-type category three storm. Faced with a storm packing higher winds or approaching from a different direction, the system might well fail again.
Corps official Duke Ducarpe, an amiable Louisianan who oversees repairs at the critical 17th Street canal, sees grounds for optimism in his area of the city at least.
The surrounding lakefront area, though, once an idyll of American middle class life, is still almost uninhabited.
"Those levees are going to be very, very secure," said the city's mayor Ray Nagin. "We should not have the flooding we had in the past."
But though he promises the levees will hold, he is asking all New Orlean's inhabitants, when the storms come, to leave town.
Do they mean besides every year?
Two guesses.
Of course it will.
While it doesn't seem to be in the news, the good nieghbor stuff that Texans and others in other states exhibited will not make a comeback appearance.
Heartland folks are absolutely disgusted with the crime and the blatant graft.
Hurricane Season starts real soon. The old welcome mat is conspicuosly absent.
As usual, liberal environmentalists and Democrats, who refused to allow the levee's to be rebuilt as the ASACE had requested, escape any blame whatsoever.
Alabama required a back-ground check before anyone could 'evacuate' here. 23,000 eventually qualified. My county (pop 472,000), Mobile, has increased by 60,000 since Katrina, mostly good, self-supporting folks.
And folks who have settled out in the sector, and people who I think would be predisposed to accomplishing what Dow never could. I am hopeful some of these people will try and settle in what is now in the city limits, and maybe save Moffett
The question is, "WHEN will it happen again?"
The answer to that question is -- it COULD. And if you still have dodo's in charge, it will look like chaos by the time they finish, just like it did last time. Life is tough, Chocolate City, and you have to DEAL WITH IT. Could even happen when Bush is NOT President.
The answer to that question is -- it COULD. And if you still have dodo's in charge, it will look like chaos by the time they finish, just like it did last time. Life is tough, Chocolate City, and you have to DEAL WITH IT. Could even happen when Bush is NOT President.
Americans? or Wannabees?
Lots of Mississipians, Americans. There's no where to live over there, still.
People who could, bought houses, etc over here.
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