Political, maybe, sort of

[rgraham666]

I was reading in my morning paper that there were major cuts, $71.2 million is the figure I saw, to the funding of the New Orleans branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Apparently these are the people responsible for the construction and maintenance of the levees and dams that protected New Orleans.

The same article stated the the overall Army engineers budget has been cut 44% since 2001.

I'm not trying to make a political point. And I hope people don't think I'm taking advantage of a horror for my own ends.

I just really am curious. I know there are people here more knowledgeable than me and are better at research. I'd like to find out the truth of the matter.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

From what I understand, as far as any blame can be handed out, it goes to the people and planners of New Orleans itself. The city sits between the Mississippi river on one side, and Lake Pontchartrain on the other, and is lower than both. It actually sits in a bowl-like depression between them, and is kept dry by the massive levees (sea walls) and a system of huge pumps. The ground in NO is so wet that graves can't even be dug. Bodies are buried above ground.

Katrina was an absolute Worst-case Scenario come to life. I'm not sure if they know exactly why the levees failed, but I don't think it was because of poor maintenance or shoddy construction. As I recall, they said the levees were designed to contain a 15 foot storm surge. Katrina was 30 feet.

Although the Army Corp of Engineers has done some incredible work, they also have a reputation as overcealous and heavy-handed dammers of rivers and drainers of wetlands, and some of the things they've done - straighteneing the banks of the Mississippi and building dikes to contain upstream flooding, for example - have turned out to make things worse for those living downstream. Those kinds of huge public works projects have fallen out of fashion as the environmental impact has become clear, and I imagine that's why their budget's been cut.

There was a guy on TV who just had a book come out warning about New Orlean's vulnerability to a hurricane, so people knew about the problem. They just never imagined it would happen.

 

[Hooper_X]

The city is in a bowl, below sea level, in the perpetual path of hurricanes, with a lake on one side and an ocean on the other. Even if the levees are subsequently shored up or even improved upon, eventually a category 5 hurricane is going to bring a storm surge right over them and into the bowl that is New Orleans. Where the water will go when that happens is anyone's guess.

I don't think Katrina is as bad as it can, and will eventually, get. Katrina weakened significantly as it approached land. I believe that I read that the winds were around 100mph. Had this been another Camille, it would be much worse.

 

[Matadore]

We can laugh and ignore global warming as much as we like, but it is real.

Until hurricanes hit DC two or three times per year at a catagory 3 or higher, I anticipate little serious action on the part of the US government to stop pollouting the Earth.

New Orleans is a doomed town. With in ten years, two or more cat 3 or higher storms will hit and recobvery will be impossible.

 

[Alex756]

The city is in a bowl, below sea level, in the perpetual path of hurricanes, with a lake on one side and an ocean on the other. Even if the levees are subsequently shored up or even improved upon, eventually a category 5 hurricane is going to bring a storm surge right over them and into the bowl that is New Orleans. Where the water will go when that happens is anyone's guess.

I don't think Katrina is as bad as it can, and will eventually, get. Katrina weakened significantly as it approached land. I believe that I read that the winds were around 100mph. Had this been another Camille, it would be much worse.

Try 150+ mph. She didn't weaken significantly she barely lowered to a cat4 before the eyewall hit land, not befor nearly all the front storm bands hit land, just before the eye wall. She didn't drop to a Cat 1 (95mph) until LATE in the day somewhere in NORTHERN Alabama. She was still a 4 when she went over NO which was after she caused alot of damage to some parishes. She was bigger than Camille.

This was not a common storm, this was a storm who will be in all thebooks for a very long time. A storm that big with that defined of an eye wall

-Alex

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Speaking of the Army Corp of Engineers, I didn't mean to make them sound like a bunch of blackguards. The mistakes they made in the past were the same mistakes everyone was making, and though they often did the wrong thing, they did it extremely well.

But watch them now. This is their chance to shine, and I think you'll see them rise to the occasion as they face the unimaginable engineering tasks involved in the post-Katrina clean-up.

One of the things America does well is armies, and the ACE is the best.

--Zoot

As far as global warming and climate change goes: from what I understand global warming is an established fact. The causes are still in some dispute though, and there's some legitimate disagreement whether man-made gases are a significat contributor. Still, I think a cost-benefits analysis would suggest that it's in our own interest to err on the side of caution and do what we can to reduce emissions.

In any case, should we suddenly stop all greenhouse-gas emissions tomorrow, it's too late to reverse the changes that are already occurring, and no one knows how long it would take for things to stablize.

 

[rgraham666]

Thanks zoot.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I was reading in my morning paper that there were major cuts, $71.2 million is the figure I saw, to the funding of the New Orleans branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Apparently these are the people responsible for the construction and maintenance of the levees and dams that protected New Orleans.

The same article stated the the overall Army engineers budget has been cut 44% since 2001.

I'm not trying to make a political point. And I hope people don't think I'm taking advantage of a horror for my own ends.

I just really am curious. I know there are people here more knowledgeable than me and are better at research. I'd like to find out the truth of the matter.

One problem with the levee system rob is that most are earthen dams. Heavy rains will saturate the material they are made of and if the ewater rises sufficently, it will eventually soak through. What they believe happened is the storm surge brought hiigh enough waves to lap over the top. Nothing major there, but the surge probably carried away juse enough earth to weaken it and once a breach was formed, it just gets wider as the water rushes through.

IIRC the leveee system is "rated" to stop a cat three storm. This one was cat four. The levee system just isn't capable of holding back the kind of surge you get with 140 plus mph winds. Few man made structures are.

The Coprs of engineers will now have to fill the breches, then strengthen them again. Once done, they will have tu use the pumps to clear the water from the city. rebuilding may take months or even years. With all the rain the storm dumped upstream, it's a good bet pnchutrain stays full for a while and the misissippi is up, which both will complicate matters.

 

[LadyJeanne]

Rob, while it's possible that budget cuts may have compromised some of the efforts to shore up hurricane defenses, the bottom line is that the city was built in a precarious location. Even with all the money in the world, there is no way to protect everyone from Mother Nature in that location.

The Hayward Fault runs from goal post to goal post under the Berkeley Stadium. One little earthquake there during a game could kill thousands. No amount of money and retrofitting of bridges and buildings will really protect the residents of the Bay Area in a major earthquake. Yet, we remain...

 

[TxRad]

Rob, while it's possible that budget cuts may have compromised some of the efforts to shore up hurricane defenses, the bottom line is that the city was built in a precarious location. Even with all the money in the world, there is no way to protect everyone from Mother Nature in that location.

The Hayward Fault runs from goal post to goal post under the Berkeley Stadium. One little earthquake there during a game could kill thousands. No amount of money and retrofitting of bridges and buildings will really protect the residents of the Bay Area in a major earthquake. Yet, we remain...

Speaking of Faults....

There is a fault running along the Louisiana/Texas border, known as the Sabine Uplift. Texas is tilted down 600 ft lower than the same stratus in Louisiana. The problem is that the Toledo Bend Damn sits astraddle of this fault. The Corp of Engineers designed and built it.

OK, so you say there are no earthquakes in Louisiana or Texas. Well, ask the Caddo Indians about that. Oh wait, you can't, they all drowned in the earthquake of 1835 when Caddo Lake moved 35 miles south east over night and flooded their tribal camp grounds....

 

[rgraham666]

Thanks folks.

Mother Nature's a real bitch, ain't she?

 

[Hooper_X]

Try 150+ mph. She didn't weaken significantly she barely lowered to a cat4 before the eyewall hit land... She was bigger than Camille.

This was not a common storm, this was a storm who will be in all thebooks for a very long time. A storm that big with that defined of an eye wall

-Alex

Katrina was geographically larger than Camille but the wind speeds weren't as intense. Camille had sustained winds of +190mph prior to landfall in Mississippi. On Sunday when Katrina reached Cat 5 status out over the gulf, it had maximum sustained wind speeds of 160mph. A news report I heard late last night stated that Katrina's winds had lessened to the 100mph range as it approached land. If that information was erroneous, then I stand corrected.

I think storms like Katrina, and even more deadly full Cat 5 ones, will become increasingly more common. The world is warming up, and that provides energy for tropical storms. The hurricanes that strike the U.S. Atlantic coast are born in the tropical north Atlantic. For the past 10 years sea surface temperatures in this region have been the highest on record. Additionally, there has been a complimentary increase in water vapor over the world's oceans. Overly warm oceanic surface combined with increased moisture is a recipe for large hurricanes, and it's getting hotter still.

Have you ever seen a Godzilla movie? In the context of those films, Godzilla is the personification, or rather monsterification, of nature's retribution against the ecological folly of man. Humans fuck up the air and seas, then Godzilla comes up out of the depths of the ocean and stomps Tokyo flat, and there's nothing the ant-like humans, their governments or their militaries can do about it. I imagine those movies will seem increasingly prophetic over the course of this burgeoning century.

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

Here is a clipping from a wrap-up story of International Responses to Hurricane Katrina.

. . . As U.S. military engineers struggled to shore up breached levees, experts in the Netherlands expressed surprise that New Orleans' flood systems failed to restrain the raging waters.

With half of the country's population of 16 million living below sea level, the Netherlands prepared for a "perfect storm" soon after floods in 1953 killed 2,000 people. The nation installed massive hydraulic sea walls.

"I don't want to sound overly critical, but it's hard to imagine that (the damage caused by Katrina) could happen in a western country," said Ted Sluijter, spokesman for the park where the sea walls are exhibited. "It seemed like plans for protection and evacuation weren't really in place, and once it happened, the co-ordination was on loose hinges."

I'm willing to bet that New Orleans will have those state-of-the-art "hydraulic sea walls," or better, next time, whatever the cost!

All too often, it takes catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina to generate the will to impliment such large expenditures.

 

[thebullet]

I heard a radio report today. The story goes that FEMA (Federal Emergency Mangement Agency) did a study early in 2001. The report picked the 3 most likely disasters to occur in the near future. 1) a major California earthquake; 2) terrorist attack in New York City; 3) Major hurricane hits New Orleans.

Apparantly, this scenario has been pretty much expected. Not to allocate blame for doing nothing about this report, but according to the same report, the federal government released only 20% of the money that had been allocated for preparing New Orleans for disaster. The reason apparantly was a) Iraq was sucking all the available monies from the budget and b) the tax cut decreased revenues.

The problems were compounded by the fact that the national guards of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were seriously depleated by the # of men deployed in Iraq. Both men and equipment that were needed to fight the disaster are sitting in Iraq.

 

[Wildcard Ky]

A big part of the problems in NO are planning problems.

The whole pump system had one serious flaw....There was no back up. The pumps were wired straight into the power grid. No one thought of what would happen if the whole grid went down. There was no back up generator, or diesel engines to operate the pumps. Once the grid went, the pumps were out.

The wind of the storm isn't what did in NO. It was the storm surge. The levees weren't built to handle such a massive storm surge. The catastrophic problems didn't start until the next day, once the deluge of water set in. Poor planning once again.

The cold, analytical side of me wonders about the wisdom of building a city below sea level in a hurricane prone area. It also wonders about the wisdom of spending umpteen billions of dollars to do it again.

 

[Weird Harold]

The cold, analytical side of me wonders about the wisdom of building a city below sea level in a hurricane prone area. It also wonders about the wisdom of spending umpteen billions of dollars to do it again.

Since NO is one of the oldest european cities in North America and wasn't under sea level when founded, I can't find fault with where it is located.

Since NO is over 200 years old, I can understand the desire to rebuild it.

A big part of the problems in NO are planning problems.

I can find a lot to complain about in the history of how NO came to be below sea level and how the levee and pumping system were designed and built with more concern over cost than over reliability.

Most especially, I can find a lot of fault in the evacuation plans and execution -- that part of NO's preparedness was almost criminally inept, especially since almost exactly this scenario has been predicted for at least ten years. (Discovery Channel has occasionally run a "documentary" over the last few years that predicts almost everything that has happened due to Kristina. IIRC, it was made in 1995.)

NO has (or at least HAD) the Railroad infrastructure to evacuate even the most indigent of it's population by using the thousands of freight cars normally sitting on sidings waiting for cargo from the port.

NO has (or at least HAD the port facilities) to evacuate a large part of the population simply by requiring every ship in the port to load up whatever refugees they could accomodate and put to sea ahead of an approaching hurricane.

A couple of anecdotal examples indicate that some airlines offloaded incoming passengers after canceling all outgoing connecting flights, but I seriously doubt they left those arriving airplanes to the mercy of Katrina. There is no reason the arriving passengers shouldn't have been evacuated on the same plane they arrived on and/or anyone seeking to leave been taken on every airplane being evacuated ahead of the storm -- there is no reason any airplane should have left any of the gulf coast airports with less than a full load of refugees.

When a mandatory evacuation was ordered, the police and national guard should have gone house to house after the deadline for voluntary compliance and loaded every person they found on military trucks and hauled them out of town by the scruff of their necks.

Perhaps NO and the other affected areas should designate Aug 29th Evacuation day and hold an annual evacuation in the future so that everyone knows what to do and where to go.

 

[Weird Harold]

I was reading in my morning paper that there were major cuts, $71.2 million is the figure I saw, to the funding of the New Orleans branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Apparently these are the people responsible for the construction and maintenance of the levees and dams that protected New Orleans.

The same article stated the the overall Army engineers budget has been cut 44% since 2001.

The article is probably a bit misleading because the overall mission and manning of the Corps of Engineers has been steadily reduced as well.

There has been a lot of debate over the last couple of decades about the advisability of maintaining the Missisippi levee system in it's current form or allowing the Mississipi to take back some of it's natural functions -- like letting it flood more of the delta and depositing silt to maintain it above sea level.

Ther are also newer, cheaper technologies being put into place along the entire levee system as part of the routine maintenance that reduce the need for large chunks of the CE budget.

The budget has been reduced more than it should have been but those reductions started long before 2001 -- Major elements of the CE budget are five and ten year plans so many changes since 2001 were programmed into the budget in the period 1990-2000 or even earlier.

Finally, the New Orleans District of the Corps of Engineers is responsible for more than just the levees around New Orleans -- IIRC, the NO District extends as far north as St Louis and is reponsible for all Mississipi river levees and navigational channels as well as any dams or levees on tributaries for about the same distance east and west of New Orleans. As far as I know, the New Orleans District covers about one half of the the Mississippi basin and about one sixth of the entire US.

 

[Huckleman2000]

From "Editor & Publisher"

Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending IssuesDid New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues


By Will Bunch

Published: August 31, 2005 9:00 PM ET

PHILADELPHIA Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."

The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.

There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said."

The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late.

One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."
Will Bunch (letters@editorandpublisher.com) is senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 when he reported for Newsday. Much of this article also appears on his blog, Attytood, at the Daily News.