Dredging May Have Doomed New Orleans

Dredging led to deep trouble, experts say
Levee 'blowout' was a concern before project began in 1980s

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1134113373319820.xml

When the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board developed a plan in 1981 to improve street drainage by dredging the 17th Street Canal to increase capacity for Pump Station No. 6, residents across the city applauded. Increasingly heavy rains were not only flooding streets, but also pushing water into homes. Action was needed. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Today, forensic engineers investigating the levee breach that flooded much of city during Hurricane Katrina aren't so sure. The search for the cause of the failure keeps returning to that dredging project as the probable starting point for a series of mistakes engineers think ultimately led to the breach.

Among other problems, they say, the dredging sharply reduced the distance water had to travel to reach the canal wall, left the canal too deep for sheet pilings that were suppose to cut off seepage, may have removed some layers of clay that sealed the canal bottom, and reduced support for the wall on the New Orleans side.

The corruption to let things be unsafe, not just in NO but in many places. Immediate financial gain outweighs longterm safety considerations. And the aftermath of the flooding of NO and the destruction of the MS coast is PITIFUL!!!! Mr.Stevens of AK and his brazillion dollar bridge to the airport island is criminal graft, and I am glad he visited NO and got to see what it is like. I hope to hell that, if they hold the DNC (or whatever that is) in NO this spring, or even if people go there for Mardi Gras, that they take the time to tour the coast and see how bad it is. The aftermath response has been pitiful and this, along with the corruption, is what gets me. God is Money.:rant:

peace

Although he has encouraged city residents to return home and declared "we will do whatever it takes" to save the city, President Bush last month refused the one thing New Orleans simply cannot live without: a restored network of barrier islands and coastal wetlands.

Katrina destroyed the Big Easy — and future Katrinas will do the same — because 1 million acres of coastal islands and marshland vanished in Louisiana in the last century because of human interference. These land forms served as natural "speed bumps," reducing the lethal surge tide of past hurricanes and making New Orleans habitable in the first place.

A $14 billion plan to fix this problem — widely viewed as technically sound and supported by environmentalists, oil companies and fishermen alike — has been on the table for years and was pushed forward with greater urgency after Katrina hit. But the Bush administration has turned its back on this plan.

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/3512880.html

Has the Bush regime ever done anything good?

in other words, sections, if not all, of New Orleans were coastal wetlands. so to restore the wetlands would mean to eliminate the city.

also, assuming that the barrier islands were healthy and that there was a say 1 mile buffer of wetlands between NO and the sea would have prevented damage by storm surge not damage from flooding due to the levies bursting.

The grand plan to change all this, commonly known as the Coast 2050 plan, would use massive pipelines and pumps along with surgically designed canals to guide a portion of the river's sediment-thick water back toward the coastal buffer zone without destroying existing infrastructure or communities. This would rebuild hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands over time and reconstruct entire barrier islands in as little as 12 months. The National Academy of Sciences recently confirmed the soundness of the approach and urged quick action.

Yet the White House in effect killed the plan by authorizing a shockingly small $250 million out of the $14 billion requested in the spending package sent to Congress. Tens of billions of dollars have been authorized to treat the symptoms — broken levees, insufficient emergency resources, destroyed roads and bridges. But next to nothing for the disappearing land that ushered the ocean into the city to begin with.

Again--this would be done "without destroying existing infrastructure or communities." Please try to read the article. If the Chronicle asks you to sign up, Bugmenot should help.

The whole system--wetlands, levees, etc.--could be fixed. But Bush would rather have his war & his tax cuts.

have cut off a lot of the natural sediment flow that replenishes the barrier islands.

They're having the same problem in the Nile Delta too. The heavy, wet sediments in the delta want to sink, and it's only fresh material that keeps the area from vanishing.

If Bush had not cut (twice) the funding to rebuild the levees & ignored warnings coming from all sides, this would not be an issue. But he did.
Once again: Bush Destroyed New Orleans

The N.O. levee failure is not one of them. The levees in N.O. have been in a state of disrepair for some time. This isn't a problem that popped up overnight. As the article says:

"When the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board developed a plan in 1981..."

"Among other problems, they say, the dredging sharply reduced the distance water had to travel to reach the canal wall, left the canal too deep for sheet pilings that were suppose to cut off seepage, may have removed some layers of clay that sealed the canal bottom, and reduced support for the wall on the New Orleans side."

Everyone in the city has known since Hurricane Betsy (in 1965) that the levees were woefully inadequate for a Category 4 or 5 storm, yet nobody did anything about it. Couple this with the enormous loss of wetlands in southern LA over the past couple of decades due to Corps of Engineers work on the MS River and it becomes more clear that nothing short of a complete overhaul costing billions of dollars would have kept N.O. dry.

The Bush administration has failed in many areas, and we rightfully expose those failures. However, I think it detracts from the message by saying every single thing that goes wrong in the US is Bush's fault because people then view it as partisan finger pointing rather than legitimate criticism.

The Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for overseeing the construction on the levees. The 17th St. Canal was not built to specifications. It was the responsibility of the Corps to make sure that the contractors they used met these guidlines and they did NOT. THIS is why my home flooded and I expect the federal government to make it right since it was their MAN MADE problem.

Maybe they can get it right this time. But with them blaming everything on Louisiana and it's bad political history, it seems obvious that they are searching for reasons not to protect us.

The people of New Orleans will NOT stand for this. We're going to flood THEM, with emails, letters, and phone calls.

Also, if we were given the money that's due us (us being Lousiana) from our oil revenue, then we could take care of the problem OURSELVES! TX gets 100% of theirs, other states get 50%...we get almost NOTHING (something around 2%). Yet our resources provide fuel for 30% of the country. I'll except nothing less than 50%. It's not a hand out...it's OUR RESOURCES!

June 7, 2001
Bush signed his massive $1.3 trillion income tax cut into law—a tax cut that severely depleted the government of revenues it needed to address critical priorities. Bush’s first budget introduced in February 2001 proposed more than half a billion dollars worth of cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers for the 2002 fiscal year. Bush proposed providing only half of what his own administration officials said was necessary to sustain 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. Similarly, less than two weeks after Bush signed his tax cut on June 7, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that “despite warnings that it could slow emergency response to future flood and hurricane victims, House Republicans stripped $389 million in disaster relief money from the budget.”
Mike Parker, 1999 Republican nominee for Mississippi governor, was rewarded for his Republican service by President Bush, who appointed him to head the Army Corps of Engineers on June 7, 2001.

June 23-37, 2001
Times–Picayune publishes series on effects on hurricane hitting S. Louisiana
http://www.nola.com/hurricane/?/washingaway/

February 2002
The president unveiled his new budget, this one with a $390 million cut to the Army Corps. The cuts came during the same year the richest 5 percent (those who make an average of $300,000 or more) were slated to receive $24 billion in new tax cuts. The cuts were devastating. The administration 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. Likewise, the administration had been informed that SELA needed $80 million to keep its work moving at full speed, but the White House only proposed providing a quarter of that. These cuts came even though the potential cost of not improving infrastructure was known to be astronomical. A widely-circulated 1998 report on Louisiana’s insurance risks said a serious storm could inflict $27 billion worth of damage just to homes and cars—and that didn’t include industrial or commercial property. Local insurance executives estimated in 2002 that the total damage would be closer to $100 billion to $150 billion—estimates that now look frighteningly accurate.
When Mike Parker headed to Capitol Hill for annual budget hearings in February 2002, he couldn’t hide the truth. Under questioning, he admitted that “there will be a negative impact” if the President’s budget cuts were allowed to go forward. The White House fired Parker within a matter of days.

February 2, 2004
White House on February 2 released a budget with another massive cut to infrastructure and public works projects—this time to the tune of $460 million. As the Denver Post later reported, “the Southeast Louisiana Flood Control project sought $100 million in U.S. aid to strengthen the levees holding back the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, but the Bush administration offered a paltry $16.5 million.” The Chicago Tribune noted that the Army Corps of Engineers had also requested $27 million to pay for hurricane protection upgrades around Lake Pontchartrain—but the White House pared that back to $3.9 million.
Gaps in levees around Lake Pontchartrain, which were supposed to be filled by 2004, would not be filled because of budget shortfalls. Corps officials told the Times-Picayune in April “that the lack of money will leave gaps in the structure, weakening its effectiveness and pushing back its completion date.” Worse, because budget cuts had been compounding for three years straight, “even after all the gaps are closed, the levee must settle for several more years until it reaches its final height.” By June, the newspaper reported that “for the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area’s east bank hurricane levees.”
“We are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us,” Jefferson Parish emergency manager Walter Maestri said at the time, desperately begging the Bush administration to reevaluate its budget decisions. As he noted, the budget cuts meant that levee gaps would accumulate and “we’ll end up so far behind that we can’t catch up. … And the further behind we get, the more critical the safety of the city becomes.” But almost no one in Washington was listening. Ten days after the Times-Picayune story, the U.S. House passed a $155 billion White House-backed bill to cut corporate taxes. The Senate had passed a similar bill the month before. Republican lawmakers from the Gulf Coast—who purported to be concerned about infrastructure budget cuts—all supported the new tax cut.

Would have been found in the rebuilding process. All levees on the Lake & river would have been rebuilt / reinforced / strengthened, if Bush had not cut the Corps of Engineers' levee budget.
One more time: Bush destroyed New Orleans

which make it mostly suspicion or belief.

The first is the prominent use of the word 'proposed'. * proposes a budget; but it's Congress that ultimately says how much there is to be spent. *'s numbers are a first draft. NOLA's levees failed based on what was in the final draft. Congress routinely added money for NOLA levees; it was less than projected to be needed, but more than * proposed. But Congress added the money on a project-by-project case.

The second is how the money's apportioned. There are around 900 miles (count them, 900 miles) of levees and floodwalls in the system. Some were worked on; some were not. Some work was more expensive and higher priority than other work. It's not the case that 80% funding meant all 900 miles had 80% of the needed work done on them. Somebody needs to match up the funding and work completed with levees. ACoE claims to have done so. Unless their claims are debunked, and that requires an actual reality-based fact--not belief or suspicion--there's no valid claim.

A third point is tangential: the project was multi-year, spanning not just the 2nd-4th years of *'s term, but also some Clinton years and *'s first year, where he had not much to say about most of the details of the budget. So having 2-3 years at 50% doesn't mean that only 50% of a 8 or 9 year (10 year?) project was funded.

Everyone knows the hurricane was a punishment sent by God because NOLA is a heathen city.

:sarcasm: