Mississippi floods highlight decay of US infrastructure

As floodwaters swell past record levels in the Mississippi River and its tributaries, the US Army Corps of Engineers is preparing to throw open a floodway north of Baton Rouge...The action is a bid to prevent catastrophic flooding of the capital Baton Rouge and the state’s largest city, New Orleans. Some levees, particularly in New Orleans, are at risk of collapsing if the water pressure is not relieved upriver... Entire parishes in the below-sea-level city, especially those devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, would again be submerged.

While the Army Corps has repeatedly asserted that the flood management system is sound, disaster response has been chaotic and borne primarily by state and local agencies. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has dispatched a regiment of the state’s National Guard to hastily construct a flood barrier at the confluence of the Atchafalaya and Mississippi rivers. The regiment has been ordered to work around the clock. Impoverished municipalities in the Delta region have struggled to sandbag against newly developed sand boils, or seepages at the bases of levees, along the Yazoo River.

The historic flooding in the Mississippi watershed casts a spotlight on the crumbling and patchwork state of America’s physical infrastructure. An aged and unsound levee system is the only defense against disaster for hundreds of thousands of people. The Army Corps of Engineers has reported that nine percent of the levees it maintains are expected to fail in a flood event...In a recent report on the state of US infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) found that “there is no definitive record of how many levees there are in the US, nor is there an assessment of the current conditions and performance of those levees.” Grading the nation’s levee system a “D-,” or on the brink of total failure, the ASCE warned that “43 percent of the US population lives in counties with levees.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/infr-m14.shtml

just act like they cared more about people than their money bags and sound bites.

And Republicans might say mean things if someone were to propose spending money on something other than war and tax breaks for the rich.

I'm one of many who noticed the work to raise and reinforce levees and floodwalls (particularly the 17th street canal) came to a halt in 2002. My friends and I used to cross the bridge to Lakeview and the West End frquently.

Then we noticed the long trains of tanks and Humvees which were being transported on trains. We saw those trains all the time in 2002 through 2005.

Maybe that wasn't the best use after all.

They weren't shovel ready. In many cases, even if the money was allocated local authorities are responsible for contracting out the work--look at how NOLA managed to do it, going after politically connected contractors with a record of shoddy work or simply failing to grant the contracts because nobody offered enough of a kickback. NOLA is hardly unique, although it was exceptional. Of course, that's after all the EIS are completed, commented on, revised, re-commented on, accepted, and the project is redesigned to accommodate the EIS' findings. Want quick action? Look elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the OP cites the ASCE as an independent source when they're quoting the ACoE (and even cite it as the source). Not that the ACoE is all that biased, but the report's from January '09 and says the results are incomplete, preliminary, and very likely to change. It's been 29 months. The real number could be higher, could be lower.

The OP also fails to cite the ACoE when it defines the deficiencies in the levees that it surveyed. They run from burrows to serious defects to subsidence to not having the brush cleared to 15' on either side, with no breakdown as to the frequency of any one deficiency. Of course, the ACoE doesn't and can't discuss the levees that are owned/built by landowners, local government, or state government. They're part of the system but not part of the federal infrastructure. Even worse are the joint projects, where both sides insist that only the other side bears any responsibility for maintaining it; or projects that were governmental but involved upgrading private levees.

The ASCE and ACoE fault, implicitly, governments for not maintaining complete and extensive lists of levees. Often levees are all but hidden. They look like berms near a river--or not so near a river, in the case of a levee that was built long ago and rendered obsolete by a larger levee built closer to the river or stream.

And both are disengenuous in pointing out the percentage of the population that lives in a county with one or more levees. I lived in a county with levees. I think the closest was about 45 miles away and 150 feet below me in elevation. In other words, before I'd be directly affected by a levee failure the wall of water would have to be 150 feet high at the river and the water would have to fill not only the 45 miles between me and the levee to that height.

Minnesota Bridge Collapse

Katrina, BP gulf oil spill, and now the great Mississippi flood? How's that no regulation and no taxes for infrastructure working out for ya?

The land near the Mississippi and it's tributaries were flood plains before europeans came to north america. Instead of forcing nature to conform to man's desires, why not let the rivers flow and flood naturally? Does this mean homes will be wiped out? Not necessarily. People will adapt. There will be more floating homes like in parts of the world where native people have chosen to live with nature and enjoy it's bounty. Will allowing the rivers to naturally flow damage agriculture? Maybe not. Crops that thrive in wet environments, like rice can be grown. Crops that need less water can be grown in receded flood plains or nearby dry land. The USA is spending enormous sums working to control the rivers when it would be less expensive and more beneficial to the environment and man to clear out flood plains and allow rivers to flow naturally.