When The Levee Breaks and Other Rebuilding Issues

You knew that one of these days I would trot out the Led Zeppelin song to use in my hurricane recovery coverage. That day is today.

Why?

Because the levees protecting New Orleans from the elements were fatally flawed. It was only a matter of time before they would have failed.

Once again, this goes against all of the initial reporting in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding. I covered this earlier when it first got raised as a possibility at the Washington Post, and it received only a small amount of attention in the Exempt Media. Now the Post reports again that the initial hypotheses by Louisiana State University researchers have been largely borne out by the physical evidence at the site of the collapses.

The bad news: the Corps of Engineers apparently knew better than to rely on the levees. They have had warnings over the years that the bases of river silt and peat could saturate under moderate conditions and weaken the levee structures, but have done little to address the situation. Since the newer levee systems simply got added to the top of older levees twenty years ago, some in the CoE have questioned whether their engineering models guaranteeing protection to Cat-3 hurrican strength actually applied. Eleven years ago, the question of soil composition and design flaws became the subject of a lawsuit -- one that was dismissed without ever addressing this issue.

Solomon's House has been covering the issue extensively. Just keep scrolling. And local reaction is justifiably pissed. They were told that they were supposed to be protected from this kind of storm, and the Corps knew that there were problems and did nothing.

Talk of rebuilding the Lower 9th Ward -- or not rebuilding it -- is pointless until the vexing flood-protection questions are answered and commitments made, said Arthur Theis, a former chief engineer for what was then called the state Department of Public Works. Theis was brought out of retirement to serve on the Department of Transportation and Development team.

"It doesn't do any good to replace all these houses if you don't have adequate flood protection," Theis said as he surveyed the demolished levee.

" 'Pre-Katrina levels' doesn't answer the question from the socio-economic and political perspective: Do you rebuild it and add (flood protection) infrastructure? Or do you turn it into a great big park, turn it into a wetland?" he asked.


Wall of water

Van Heerden's team didn't find anything that surprised them at the two Industrial Canal breaches, the most catastrophic of dozens of breaches in and around the city, they said. Looking down the length of the flood wall, a concrete barrier atop 14-foot sheet piling driven into an earthen levee, the engineers noted that the alignment of the concrete sections wavered.

Remaining sections of the wall had been pushed back several feet. Trenches lay in a few places at their base, signaling that water had started to seep through.

What toppled the wall, however, were the giant "scour trenches" behind it, dug several feet deep by the 16- or 17-foot-high surge that topped the levee, the engineers said. Deprived of much of its dirt foundation, the flood wall leaned into the trenches, then gave way, releasing a 20-foot wall of rushing water into the low-lying 9th Ward neighborhood, van Heerden said.

Oh, and problems were revealed more than a decade ago and nothing was done in the interim. A different administration in Washington, DC, and a different time. The whole issue of how to protect New Orleans from flooding must be sorted out before any widespread reconstruction of the most heavily flooded areas can proceed.

Some Louisiana residents are annoyed that FEMA is locating trailer parks for hurricane victims in their backyards. NIMBY rears its ugly head. Here's the latest on Katrina relief in Mississippi.

UPDATE:
MSNBC keeps trying to push the racial angle of distrust about rebuilding. How come we don't see similar articles of 'whites distrustful of officials rebuilding Biloxi or Gulfport or Waveland or Slidell?' That's because people in general are not trusting government to do the job. They've seen government fail them - at all levels - and some have decided to take the rebuilding on themselves while others wait for government to provide the answers. This isn't so much a news story as an op-ed with selective facts.

UPDATE:
ESPN reports that the Saints are a 50/50 proposition to remain in New Orleans. Nagin and Blanco both want the Saints to remain, which is probably the first time they've agreed on something in nearly two months. It may be the only thing they agree on though.

Technorati: flood aid; hurricane katrina; katrina aid; hurricane rita; slidell; biloxi; gulfport; pascagoula; nagin; blanco; barbour.