Project Katrina

Well this isn’t good news, but really something we’ve known for a while. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports the city of New Orleans is danger of massive flooding if it is hit by only a Cat 2 hurricane.

That assessment has been based on levee heights across New Orleans that indicated a strong storm surge could once again place the Crescent City underwater. New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, that Category 3 storm killed more than 1,800 people and caused more than $81 billion in damages.

Levee heights were to blame for much of the flooding associated with Hurricane Katrina and the Army Corps of Engineers were given over $7 billion to repair and construct levees capable of handling rising water yet the city is said to still be among the most vulnerable in the country when it comes to levees being breached.

Reuters reports:

Overflowing rivers in Iowa and other Midwest states forced evacuations and disrupted the region’s economy on Friday with fears of worse to come from fragile levees and more rain.

A Cedar Rapids hospital was flooded and evacuated its patients after a levee break on the Cedar River turned the downtown area into a shallow lake. Thousands were forced to leave their homes in the worst Midwest flooding in 15 years [....]

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver said the damage to his state could cost billions of dollars. Scores of bridges spanning nine overflowing rivers have been swept away or weakened.

In a report to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee last Thursday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) inspector general said they are more prepared for an emergency situation than it was after Hurricane Katrina, but nowhere near ready for another such catastrophe. So what are they waiting for?

Louisiana 1976 at Daily Kos has done an outstanding job of covering Katrina related issues. This post hits at the core of the issue based on an article via the weekly New Orleans Gambit.

But back to the levees themselves—every time federal culpability for their failure has been brought up, there have been those who’ve propagated the meme—a Big Lie first set into motion by a BushCo intent on discrediting Louisiana, Gov. Blanco, and her other Democratic leaders at the time—that Louisiana and New Orleans had been responsible for levee maintenance and upkeep.

This spin is counteracted by the following comment, which also contains detailed info on how previous presidents of both parties have more competently handled major disasters, and how Dubya himself dealt with 2004 hurricanes in an electoral vote-rich Florida led by his brother in that election year by azureblue:

…. here are a few tidbits about Bush’s string of failures, the first showing how Bush caused the flooding of new Orleans:It is simple: no money to repair, things (levees) fail. The ACOE gets blamed rightly, but the truth is the ACOE had been begging for money rom Bush & Bush kept cutting the fund to rebuild the levees and stopping work in progress:

February 2001

Bush proposed half of what his own officials said was necessary for the critical Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Project (SELA)—a project started after a 1995 rainstorm flooded 25,000 homes and caused a half billion dollars in damage

February 2002

Bush provided just $5 million for maintaining and upgrading critical hurricane protection levees in New Orleans—one fifth of what government experts and Republican elected officials in Louisiana told the administration was needed. Bush knew SELA needed $80 million to keep working, but the he only proposed providing a quarter of that.

February 2004

The SELA project sought $100 million to strengthen the levees holding back the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, including the industrial canal- which is where the levee gave way, but Bush offered only $16.5 million. The Army Corps of Engineers asked for $27 million to pay for hurricane protection upgrades around Lake Pontchartrain—but the White House cut that to $3.9 million. Levee repairs around Lake Pontchartrain and the IC, stopped because of budget shortfalls.

Comparing previous disaster responses:

President Nixon: August 1969 when Cat-5 Hurricane Camille hit the MS coast, President Nixon had already readied the National Guard and ordered all Gulf rescue vessels and equipment from Tampa and Houston to follow the Hurricane in. There were over 1,000 regular military with two dozen helicopters to assist the Coast Guard and National Guard within hours after the skies cleared.

President Clinton: September 1999, Hurricane Floyd—Cat-3, was bearing down on the Carolinas and Virginia. President Clinton was in New Zealand meeting with President Jiang of China. He declared the area a Federal Disaster so the National Guard and Military can begin to mobilize. Then he cut short his meetings overseas and flew home to coordinate the rescue efforts. All one day BEFORE a Cat-3 hit the coast.

President Bush (41): August 1992—was in the midst of a campaign for re-election. Yet he cut off his campaigning and went to Washington where he martialed the largest military operation on US soil in history. He sent in 7,000 National Guard and 22,000 regular military personnel, and all the gear to begin the clean up within hours after Andrew passed through Florida.

But look what Georgie does for FL:

Right after Hurricane Charley first made landfall on Aug. 13, 2004, Bush declared the state a federal disaster area to release federal relief funds. Less than two days after Charley ripped through southwestern Florida, he was on the ground touring hard-hit neighborhoods.

Illegitimus non carborundum

For the residents of Louisiana bad news just seems to pile on top of bad news. Of course Hurricane Katrina and Rita in recent times cause enormous problems, but now it appears that glacial ice from as far back as 750,000 years ago is one factor in New Orleans sinking at a rate of 0.17 inches a year. A comprehensive plan needs to be put in place yesterday to deal with all the issues (most interrelated) that is causing this problem to continue to occur.

Sediments deposited into the Mississippi River Delta thousands of years ago when North America’s glaciers retreated are contributing to the ongoing sinking of Louisiana’s coastline, finds new research by NASA and scientists at Louisiana State University.

The weight of these sediments is causing a large section of Earth’s crust to sag at a rate of 0.04 to 0.3 inches a year, the study determined.

The sediments pose a particular challenge for New Orleans, causing it to sink irreversibly at a rate of about 0.17 inches a year, according to data from a network of global positioning system stations and a model of sediment data collected from the northern Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Delta.

“When the effect of this sinking near New Orleans is combined with a potential 0.9 centimeter (0.35 inch) annual sea level rise that could result should ice sheet melting accelerate as projected by many climate models, it is possible New Orleans could see a relative sea level rise of roughly one meter (3.3 feet) in the next 90 years,” warned co-author Ron Blom of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

There is both good and bad news in the new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report: Known Performance Issues with New Orleans Drainage Canal Pumps Have Been Addressed, but
Guidance on Future Contracts Is Needed. The the one hand the GAO found the the US Army Corp of Engineers rushed to award a contract in early 2006 to Moving Water Industries that “resulted in deficiencies in key contract provisions.” The report also takes the Army Corp and MWI to task:

The report said the agency performed “limited market research,” used specifications for the pumps very similar to MWI’s and drafted a contract “not written as precisely as it should have been.”

The pumps were plagued by numerous problems, including undersized gear oil circulation motors, vibrations and suspect pipe welds, resulting in a lower pumping capacity than expected, the GAO said.

The bad news was related to the findings about the procurement process:

The Army Corps of Engineers followed federal rules when it awarded a contract to a politically connected manufacturer to provide pumps to this city after Hurricane Katrina, Congress’ investigative arm said Thursday.

The Government Accountability Office reaffirmed findings it made in May after the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal whistleblower agency, said in October that there was a “substantial likelihood” the Corps acted improperly in handling the contract.

The report was the latest look at the contract awarded in early 2006 to Moving Water Industries Corp. Corps officials in New Orleans installed the company’s 34 pumps before the 2006 hurricane season despite allegations by Maria Garzino, the engineer who oversaw their installation, that the pumps would fail during a hurricane.

Yesterday the Senate joined the House in an overwhelming majority to override the Bush veto of the The Water Resources Development Act [H.R.1495.RH]. The act will now authorize $23 billion in new water projects. authorizing projects to rebuild the Gulf Coast after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, restore the Everglades and Great Lakes fisheries and build flood-control projects nationwide.

Bush is truly a work of art. One of the reasons he cited for his veto despite its overwhelming bipartisan support, calling it too costly and complaining that the 900 projects it authorized would overtax the Army Corps of Engineers.

Some of the most celebrated levee repairs by the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina are already showing signs of serious flaws, says Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He warns that heavy storms may cause massive failures.

The most troubling, Dr. Bea said, was erosion on a levee by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation canal that helped channel water into New Orleans during the storm.

Breaches in that 13-mile levee devastated communities in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, and the rapid reconstruction of the barrier St. Bernard Parish hailed as one of the corps’ most significant rebuilding achievements in the months after the storm.

But Dr. Bea, an author of a blistering 2006 report on the levee failures paid for by the National Science Foundation, said erosion furrows, or rills, suggest that “the risks are still high.” Heavy storms, he said, may cause “tear-on-the-dotted-line levees.”

Dr. Bea examined the hurricane protection system at the request of National Geographic magazine, which is publishing photographs of the levee and an article on his concerns about the levee and other spots on its Web site.

At times you wonder if our government can do anything right.

I have lived on the Mississippi River (St. Louis and Baton Rouge) for much of my 36 years. For those of you that don’t live on the Mississippi or near swamps in Florida, you might not know that much about the Army Corps of Engineers. Well they have always be a fairly disfunctional organization. Case in point is this story in the Washington Post. Keep in mind this is the organization that is supposed to protect New Orleans.

In 2000, when I was writing a 50,000-word Washington Post series about dysfunction at the Army Corps of Engineers, I highlighted a $65 million flood-control project in Missouri as Exhibit A. Corps documents showed that the project would drain more acres of wetlands than all U.S. developers do in a typical year, but wouldn’t stop flooding in the town it was meant to protect. FEMA’s director called it “a crazy idea”; the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional director called it “absolutely ridiculous.”

Six years later, the project hasn’t changed — except for its cost, which has soared to $112 million. Larry Prather, chief of legislative management for the Corps, privately described it in a 2002 e-mail as an “economic dud with huge environmental consequences.” Another Corps official called it “a bad project. Period.” But the Corps still wants to build it.

The rest of the story is worth a read, but keep in mind that last month, the Corps commander acknowledged that his agency’s “design failure” led to the floodwall collapses that swamped New Orleans. So my question is, why isn’t everyone asking questions about the
Corps?

I guess the below story shouldn’t really surprise anybody following the aftermath of Katrina.

The cost of restoring levee protection in the New Orleans area to pre-Hurricane Katrina levels will be about $6 billion, twice as much as the Bush administration and Congress have appropriated to date, Donald Powell, the federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding, told members of the state’s congressional delegation Wednesday.

Powell also told the delegation that he would not commit to a financing source or whether the Bush administration would seek the traditional 35 percent local share for the work. He said that “will be part of the deliberations” in coming weeks. Can these people not do anything right?