Yep, it's very good news, here's a quote from the nola.com site:
In eastern New Orleans, 24 pumps were draining 700 cubic feet of water per second. In St. Bernard Parish, water was being drained through breaches in the levee. In Plaquemines Parish, the Corps was “notching” levees with gaps up to 100-feet wide so that water could flow back into the gulf. The notches will be plugged with rocks after the area is drained.
I hate passing on third-party e-mail, but this one comes to me from a friend of Roger Long, one of the world's leading marine architects. The forward is from the friend who sent it to me. The body of the e-mail follows the line. He gives his opinions on the New Orleans levees.
In addition to FEMA Director saying on CNN - that some of FEMA's younger employees can have life-long careers dealing with Katrina aftermath, now this:
I thought you'd be interested in the pasted email from a pal who's a very sharp marine architect. He just finished a new analysis of the Titanic sinking for the National Geographic Society. He recently rode to the bottom and spent hours examining the wreckage with the original discovery team. His interesting findings will appear on TV soon. In response to my asking why New Orleans ground water is pumped into the lake via a series of risky canals vs. pumping it over the much sturdier levees of the Mississippi River, he wrote the following:
Subject: New Orleans levees
If there is a breech in a levee, pumping is irrelevant. No feasible pumping system could keep up with even a small breech. First sensible thing to do as soon as there is a break is to shut off the pumps to be sure you don't wear them out before the leak is repaired.
With the levees intact, it is irrelevant where you pump the water to.
The big question on pumps is why they didn't put them on towers or platforms above river and lake level or at least in cofferdams of the appropriate height so they wouldn't be flooded out when you really need them. Most of the pumps are ELECTRIC POWERED! Duh!
There was never any design intention of the pumps coping with this kind of event or a levee break.
You wait, once they get the levee breaks plugged up they are going to discover that, oh yeah, by the way, we don't have the pumping capacity to do anything useful. The pumps will get about 10% of the water out when they wear out and break down. Then they will have to let a no-bid contract to Haliburton to build pumps to do the job.
Sections of Florida are still awaiting reconstruction from Andrew. It's going to be a long, long, time before New Orleans is the Big Easy again. In that climate, most of the wooden structures will be toast before they get dried out.
Here's some perspective:
When I did this job at
http://home.maine.rr.com/rlma/Dimillo.htm
The drydock was pumped down to put the ferry in at night because electric rates were cheaper. The drydock was the largest connected electric load in Maine and it still cost $150,000 to pump it 15 feet down and 15 feet up at night.
The drydock was about 900 x 120 feet = 108,000 square feet. New Orleans, now flooded to about the same depth is 5,000,000,000 square feet or 46,464 times as large. At the energy prices of Maine a decade ago, it would therefore cost $6,969,600,000 to pump the city out. (That's a 7 Billion dollar electrical bill at electric rates 10 years ago !) The discharges on the drydock pumps were only about 100 feet long but the city pumps in New Orleans have the head losses of many hundreds of feet in some cases. Energy prices are going to be way higher by the time they get this system running. It probably would be cheaper to just leave it as a lake and rebuild somewhere else.