Monday, May 07, 2007

Louisiana 1927 1965 2005 2007


If the definition of insanity, as some contend, is doing the same idiotic thing over and over again, each time expecting different results, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is nuts. Not to mention incompetent.

And New Orleans and much of the surrounding area is doomed. Sooner or later.

Now, maybe you don't care that New Orleans is doomed. Maybe you figure anyone who lives in a place below sea level near the Gulf of Mexico ought to drown when the hurricane blows -- or at least lose everything and get no help from nobody -- for being that damned stupid.

Personally, I feel the same way -- kind of -- about Oklahoma (or Kansas) and tornadoes. On the other hand, I live in Omaha, which has had sizable chunks leveled by past twisters. Call me a stupid hypocrite.

BUT IF YOU CAN'T MUSTER any sympathy for the poor people of New Orleans, at least get angry that the Corps of Engineers is being crazy-dumb with your tax dollars. And be furious -- and ashamed -- that the government of the United States of America can't seem to protect one lousy city from the surge when the Netherlands has managed to do just that for an entire country for decades.

Note, also, that some of those still-dry Dutch regions lie farther below sea level than New Orleans. The New York Times is on the story, which also gets the full multimedia treatment from National Geographic Magazine.

Here's some of the NYT account:

Some of the most celebrated levee repairs by the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina are already showing signs of serious flaws, a leading critic of the corps says.

The critic, Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said he encountered several areas of concern on a tour in March.

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 was 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 ngm.com/levees.

Corps officials argue that Dr. Bea is overstating the risk and say that they will reinspect elements of the levee system he has identified and fix problems they find. The disagreement underscores the difficulty of evaluating risk in hurricane protection here, where even dirt is a contentious issue. And discussing safety in a region still struggling with a 2005 disaster requires delicacy.

Hurricane season begins again next month.

The most revealing of the photographs, taken from a helicopter, looks out from the levee across the navigation canal and a skinny strip of land to the expanses of Lake Borgne. From the grassy crown of the levee, small, wormy patterns of rills carved by rain make their way down the landward side, widening at the base into broad fissures that extend beyond the border of the grass.

Dr. Bea, who was recently appointed to an expert committee for plaintiffs’ lawyers in federal suits against the government and private contractors over Hurricane Katrina losses, said that he could not be certain the situation was dangerous without further inspection and that he wanted to avoid what he called “cry wolf syndrome.” But, he added, he does not want to ignore “potentially important early warning signs.”

He praised the corps for much of the work it had done since the storm, but he added that the levee should be armored with rock or concrete against overtopping, a move the corps has rejected in the short term.

Another expert who has viewed the photographs, J. David Rogers, called the images “troubling.” Dr. Rogers, who holds the Karl F. Hasselmann chair in geological engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, said it would take more work, including an analysis of the levee soils, to determine whether there was a possibility of catastrophic failure.

But he said his first thought upon viewing the images was, “That won’t survive another Katrina.” Dr. Rogers worked on the 2006 report on levee failures with Dr. Bea.

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