New Orleans Still in Danger of Massive Flooding According to NOAA

[Purveyor]

Source: TransWorldNews

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the city of New Orleans is still in danger of massive flooding if it is hit by a Category 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.





Read more: http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=50874&cat=11

[Purveyor]

1. The Associated Press is also reporting on this story with more detail. Link here...

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hPf8C_dptsjzUb4H8Vb5t-FdXrLQD91BE8EG1

[asteroid2003QQ47]

2. Alert Barbara Bush and...

she'll sandbag those levees up to an unbreachable height herself
in order to protect the right of the underpriviliged remaining in
New Orleans to remain underprivileged!

--------------------------------------
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you
know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--(she chuckled slightly) is working very well for them."
--former First Lady, Barbara Bush
September 5, 2005: Barbara Bushes's infamous remarks about Katrina Evacuees

[CatholicEdHead]

3. The city is still sinking, nothing you can do about that

It is still only a matter of time before the city needs to relocate to higher ground due to mother nature.

[jobycom]

5. Could be several hundred years from now.

Parts are sinking faster than others. Some of the sinking is caused by poor drainage planning, and poor building habits. Some is caused by the destruction of surrounding wetlands. There are arguments about whether it is caused by seismic shifting or whether it's all caused by human use.

Any way it goes, parts of the city are dangerous to build on, parts are reasonably safe. They say about 10% is sinking faster than they thought, at about an inch a year. Other parts less than a fifth of an inch a year. And some parts are above sea level already, and would have a long way to sink.

It all needs to be taken into account, and some areas probably will be abandoned or at least turned into low-use districts, like power or industrial plants. There are things you can do about it. Venice has been sinking for centuries.

[jobycom]

4. They are closing off MR-GO, so that will help when they do it, but

the levees were designed decades ago, when there were more wetlands between NOLA and the Gulf. Even then, they weren't built to spec, and the specs themselves were bad. There were three causes of levee failure in NOLA. Some along the east side of the Lake were simply topped by the massive surge. Those along the MR-GO were topped, too, as water was channeled along it, increasing the height of the surge. Those levees were just too low, and MR-GO, as it has in the past, made things worse.

Second, the Industrial Canal levee just collapsed. I'm not sure they know why, but since it is right at the end of the MR-GO, it seems likely that the water channeled into the Industrial Seaway was just too high, and maybe too fierce, for the levee to fight off. Plus, the water may have hit it from the other side, as water was topping the smaller levees up the MR-GO (Hard to explain this without a diagram or a very long post!). That's what flooded the Lower 9th Ward so catastrophically, and caused the most deaths.

Third, the levees along the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal (and I think one more, I've forgotten) failed because they were poorly designed, poorly built, and undermined by dredging over the years. Those are the canals that caused downtown NOLA to flood in the days after the hurricane, as the Lake slowly drained through the holes into the city. Those levees were hit by, essentially, a Category 1 or less hurricane, as they got the extreme west side of the storm. They could have broken after a really strong thunderstorm. This was made worse as the prehistoric pumps failed.

All of which means, it seems to me, that there has to be more than one layer of solution to the levee problem, since there was more than one type of problem. Better levees, newer pumps, state-of-the-art flood control systems involving flood gates, revitalization of the wetlands, secure storm shelters built for the purpose, an evacuation system that takes into account that not everyone can afford to drive away and stay away for days or longer, and most of all, an emergency management system that does what it was created to do, not just for NOLA, but for Iowa and other places where disasters strike, too. And other stuff thought of by smarter people than me.

Just my amateur thoughts. Probably wrong, as always.

[ben_meyers]

7. I thought that Farrakhan, Spike Lee and others

had proof that the levees where blown up on orders from Bush/Cheney to kill the poor people.

[jobycom]

8. Spike Lee didn't say that. Not sure on Farrakhan.

Not sure what level of sarcasm you mean, so I might take it too seriously...

Spike Lee's brilliant documentary, When the Levees Broke, lets people voice their opinions without comment, but even so, he follows up the claims that the levees were blown with others saying that those were urban legends dating back decades. See it if you haven't. The scariest part was the Army Corp of Engineers spokesperson. After a long explanation of why the 17th and London Ave levees broke due to bad design that the Corp has admitted blame for, he says "We are working to restore the levees to pre-Katrina conditions..." It's heart-stopping, and even the spokesperson seems to hate having to say it.

Farrakhan may have claimed to have proof of it.

The main levee the rumors say was blown was the Industrial Canal levee that flooded the Lower Ninth Ward, and that's the one that's not really examinable, since so much of it washed away. But many people claim they heard a loud explosion about the time it broke (that may be Farrakhan's proof). The counter argument, which Spike Lee seems to believe in his documentary (again, one of the best I've ever seen!), is that the water crashing through the levee made the boom, the way a wave crashing on the beach does. There was also an extremely large barge that crashed through the levee breach and into several houses, and some thing that was the sound people heard.

I don't believe anyone blew it up, but then again, I'm not completely sure. Just mostly sure. Didn't have to be the government, either.

[spinbaby]

6. Isn't all that water in the mid-west going there?

New Orleans is on the Mississippi--won't it soon be massively swollen from mid-western flooding?

[localroger]

9. If it becomes a problem they'll just open the spillway

NOLA is pretty well protected from river floods, which are a lot more predictable than hurricanes.

[tavalon]

10. Well now, that's a duh statement

Nothing has changed.

[Feron]

11. Not surprising.

And especially since one of the Corps's contractors filled the gaps in one floodwall with ,I shit you not, http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/wwl042408tpleveepaper.98095b74.html">newspaper .

The Corps says now that the newspaper will be replaced ,but only after Lee Zurik's story created a public outcry. Of course we'll have to make sure it actually gets replaced.

It makes you wonder about the integrity of the levee and floodwall system if blatantly shoddy work is considered to be acceptable. Hell levee/floodwall heights are irrelevant if the flood protection system has no structural integrity.