Posted on 09/17/2005 1:02:44 PM PDT by Mike Darancette
"I was looking at the levee, and water was just splashing over it a little - and then, BOOM! The barge hit, and it filled up in less than five minutes."
This was a statement from a man rescued from near the Levee break. Has there been any definitive confirmation of barge damage?
If the flooding was caused by an act of man not nature I would think that individual policy holders might have recourse to their carriers flood insurance or no.
Paging Minister Farrakhan.
This has been considered and ruled out, the levee broke a long way up the canal, and any barge that broke the levee would have washed up and over the break, or still be in the canal. No barge. But they do still have to come up with a plausable reason for the newly upgraded levee to break where it did. Where are the concrete specimens, the engineers and the workers who did the upgrade?
Scanned some scandal G2 on the net several days ago regarding mistaken discovery of UDT odrnance residue by salvage crews and heard urban-legend style scuttle from rescued evacuees about deliberate bombing of levees.( That is supposed to be the buzz among former residents.) The woods are full of this kind of thing almost anytime.
No, it was a horse shoe nail that did it.
President Bush and Karl Rove were seen in a tug boat pushing the barge into the levee. Paging Minister Farrakhan!
Well we got the Barge, but, hey, just a co-incidence?
"I think I saw that guy on the news a few days ago. Personally I thought he seemed believable enough. He didn't appear to have any reason to lie about it."
I saw him too. He and another guy describing what happened, sounded credible to me. They were talking about the big boom, and then how the water started rising much faster. I read somewhere that the barge sunk near the breach.
The older man said he was standing on his roof and saw the barge hit the levee.
Well again, show me the pictures, We had enough aerial coverage to find a barge if someone thought a barge had done some damage. Remember the levee broke after the storm, in the morning. No place for the barge to go but into the flood zone. Now, there are many levee breas, I was referring to the main one that broke on the Lake side. I guess of the many breaks a barge could have done one of them. I believe a full recap will be forthcoming one day. No need to worry too much just now.
Even if the barge did cause the break, it could still have been an act of God that broke the barge from it's moorings and flung it into the levee. Only thing that surprises me is that a barge could get enough sideways (relative to the length of the canal) momentum , even pushed by the storm surge and winds, to do that kind of damage to the concrete levee. (or more properly the concrete top to an otherwise earthen fill levee, as you can see fairly well in both pictures in post 15. I've seen other pictures taken from the levee itself, of the barge and the concrete top barrier. The earthen fill forms most of the levee and the canal itself which is elevated above the level of the surrounding terrain, with the concrete slabs just forming th e last several feet of the barrier.
Not that such a thing wouldn't be possible, nor would it take a large amount of explosives. The charges would be set to just weaken the structure, and maybe cause a few cracks, the water would do the rest.
As I understand it, the levee's along the Lake itself did not fail, rather containment structures (levees) along several canals leading to the lake, and at the same water level as the Lake, are what failed. Which when you think about it, seems a bit odd. Although I guess the canal structure could have acted as a funnel to raise the level of water in the canal higher than that in the Lake, or a reflection of the initial wave from the River end of the canal (Where there's a lock) could have reinforced the trailing part of the surge causing the water to be higher in the canal than in the lake, at least for a short period of time. Long enough to over top and then undermine the levee. Maybe, perhaps. Be nice to have a video of the affair wouldn't it?
The barge does not need to punch through the levee, just crack the cement and the water working on the earthen fill will do the rest.
Doesn't it look like the water is flowing into the levee in the bottom two pictures?
The barge slipping it mooring is an act of God only if He is the one who tied it up.
Folks are mixing up barges, levee breaches, and witnesses.
The grain barge shown in the images in this thread punched a hole in the east side of the Industrial Canal and flooded the lower 9th Ward, not downtown.
However, the surge of water that pushed the barge into that levee also topped (not breached) the western side of the Industrial canal and put maybe 5 to 6 feet of water in to a limited (call it 20 blocks by 20 blocks) area just northeast of downtown, in New Orleans proper. This either came from the Intercoastal Waterway or Lake Pontchartrain or both, probably both, also probably more so from the Industrial Waterway.
The levee breaches that flooded downtown New Orleans were near the north end of two canals, one east of the City Park (London Canal breach) and one west of the City Park (17th Street Canal).
The pictures from London Canal indicate that the concrete wall was undermined and didn't really fail so much as its foundation was scoured loose. (If you look at it, you'll probably see a "failed" wall, but an engineer or construction guy will see a scoured foundation as the root cause...most likely.)
Several sections of the 17th street canal breach failed as a unit and appear to have been pushed over from the top. There are no visible barges anywhere near there, and it would be very difficult to get a barge anywhere near there because there is a very low bridge between the breach and Lake Pontchartrain. Also that canal is very narrow for any barges to get into it and have much lateral velocity, if they can get in at all.
Odds are this failure came from one of three causes. Much earlier, around 3 AM, the Kenner police reported that the canal NNW of there was full up and that they had some minor water problems. (Probably water coming up out of storm drains.) Since the winds pushing water west and southwest and then south would have caused similar buildup at the canal easts of that one (including the 17th st canal and the London Canal in succession), and since they both have the same height walls, it is likely that the 17th Street Canal was full too.
It is possible that some water came over the top and undermined the foundation from the inside. I rate this as being unlikely because the remaining sections of the wall do not show evidence of having been topped. No green stuff on top of the wall, no piles of the same kind of debris inside the wall as inside the canal.
That leaves two possibilities. One, the hydrostatic pressure of the deepening water in the canal, and the hydrodynamic pressure of the southward moving crest of water, may have forced water under the wall (percolation and then scouring) and caused it to fail like the London breach, but if so, the end result was very different than the London breach because the whole section of the 17th street canal wall toppled completely flat in the hole. Underwater and invisible flat. At the London breach however, the wall sections were still in place and standing vertically with holes under them and gaps between sections.
Therefore, I believe that the ties between sections of the 17th canal wall were not as sturdy as those used elsewhere, that they failed, and at that point, with nothing pinning the top of the wall in place, the water simply pushed it over.
I find it more than curious that the 17th street failure and the London Canal failure both involved new sections of wall, that other than barge damage, no old walls failed anywhere (be careful to distiguish between a wall and a levee), and that both the 17th street and the London breach were possibly both a result of under wall percolation, scouring and subsequent failure.
However, it is very risky to point fingers on that basis because of the different failure modes (at least in final appearance) but slightly less risky is noting that both were new construction.
Before you run too far with this, if you are looking for culprits, give it a day or so. I have this feeling that some.....revelations....are inbound.
While I'm here, two other points, regarding the Industrial Canal Breach caused by the barge.
One, the barge is south of the hole, and the most likely surge came from the north, whether the Lake, the Intercoastal Waterway or both.
Two, the debris piles, in the second image in this thread, are lodged at chokepoints oriented radially away from the breach caused by the barge. That tells me that the great majority of the water in this area initially came from the breach that the barge caused. However, the picture clearly shows that the water is in fact flowing in the opposite direction, out of the breach and back into the hole.
Since water doesn't flow uphill, this may seem like a contradiction, but there is an explanation and I expect it to arrive with the revelations noted in my previous post. Probably late Monday or early Tuesday.
Do you mean into the canal? If so, yes it does. And it it did. The Lake level, and thus that in the canal went down after the storm surge had passed, leaving the water in the city higher than the water in the Lake/Canal. So the water in the city naturally flowed back through the breeches in the levees and into the canals and the Lake, until they were at the same level.
The barge slipping it mooring is an act of God only if He is the one who tied it up.
Something for the lawyers to argue about.
Before you run too far with this, if you are looking for culprits, give it a day or so. I have this feeling that some.....revelations....are inbound.
But you're such a tease too. :)
"Probably water coming up out of storm drains.) "
Water from storm drains in the city could not possibly fill these canals. Only a pump can raise water to a higher level. Water simply cannot flow from a lower to a higher and back to a lower topo region.
I'm not teasing ayone, scouts honor. After a storm like this, it takes several days for enough anecdotal evidence to build up to even begin asking the right questions. Then you start searching (meanwhile more data is coming in, so you have to keep up with that too), and the search process starts with viewing and discarding a great deal of chaff before you ever start getting to the meatier issues.
Then comes the point in time when you find the motherlode, a database, raw information, no spin included. It takes a little bit of time to spool up, to understand and organize what you've been given, and then begins the long process of hauling it in, plugging it into the big picture, and working your way around the...perimeter...of the problem.
At some point you have gained enough of the big picture to realize that you are on the downhill side of the slope, that more of the project has been completed than what remains. Then you can take a chance on predicting when you might be able to disseminate the collated data, and the conclusions drawn from it.
However, even once on the downhill slope, certain things have become obvious, and if, at that point in time, you see misconceptions being bandied around....well, you let it be known that this or that POV probably doesn't fit the data at hand, without jumping the gun and spreading false information based on a partial assessment yourself.
Given that...
The water in Lake Pontchartrain dropped very slowly. On Flood Monday, the Lake was around 5 feet above normal, which put it at 6 feet above sea level. By the time the water equalized, achieved the same levels inside the breaches as outside, the Lake had only dropped to 3 feet above normal, 4 feet above sea level.
Even though I pointedly haven't mentioned the Industrial Canal levels in this post, I will say that the description of why the water was flowing out of the 9th ward breach would greatly benefit from the inclusion of an additional body of data which hasn't really made the mainstream media yet.
For starters, take a look at post 40 from this thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1482715/posts?page=40#40
and then scan this one start to finish:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1484668/posts
The first link includes an anecdotal timeline, and the broad picture of the dynamics of the storm's hydraulics, what water moved from where to where, when. The second begins to ask the questions I'm working on answering definitively now. Since both will need to have been assimilated to utilize what is coming, and since you asked for more info, this kills two birds with one stone and gets you a jump on what is yet to come.
Having stood at the foot of a nearly topped levee, augmented by about five feet of sandbags, maybe 25 feet below water level, on a mostly dry street, watching the entire wall "breath" with the flow of the water on the other side, I can tell you for a certainty that water does somehow find a way to rocket out of the storm drains down on your level, to the extent that the folks in charge had erected a three foot wall of sandbags around the "fountain", not to stop the water coming from the drains (if you tried the pipes would simply rupture elsewhere in an uncontrollable manner) but to allow it to trickle down the street instead of making a surge which would wreck most everything it came in contact with.
In fact, the top of the "fountain" is almost certainly equal to the water level on the "canal" side of the levee, minus "pipe friction".
This is consistent with the 0300 anecdotal language in the reports. Water problems, but not quite general flooding, not yet, not at that point in time.
Oh yes, almost forgot. This whole topic is sort of like an elephant in the living room. There are a lot of people with a lot more schooling in the subject, with a lot more hands on experience with this set of levees and this flood, or with much better access to data than I have, or various combinations of the above.
I'd guess that they mostly fall into one or more of three categories.
1. People who know what went wrong but choose not to distribute this information.
2. People who have a gut feel for what happened but choose not to distribute this information.
3. People who either know or have a gut feel for what happened but who are prohibited from distributing the information.
The first two groups may have valid or less valid reasons for choosing not to distribute the info. They might be busy unwatering the city. They might not feel qualified to offer an opinion. They might be in the middle of the same process I am, not wanting to spread false information until an overall assessment has been completed.
There is at least one circumstance where the third group is...defensible, primarily reporters who know what happened but who do not have enough hard data to satisfy their managing editors, who in turn have to keep the lawyers happy.
Fortunately, I am under no such restrictions, and have no compunctions about discussing my opinions and letting the chips fall where they may. Which brings me to the critical point.
I have not claimed any "truth" yet, and I probably will not. I have presented data, and have tied that data together with my OPINION of what it means. Opinions can be wrong, and I make no guarantees, express or implied, to any person living or dead, yada, yada, yada...
I don't post raw speculation though. I know how to classify information, bit by bit as it comes in, as to relevence and credibility, and I put my logical process out where they can be examined, assessed, discussed, and then either accepted or rejected by the individual viewer.
Two conclusions then, one I may be wrong, and two, I am far from the center of those who are "in the know" on this subject. They just aren't talking for the record yet.
"In fact, the top of the "fountain" is almost certainly equal to the water level on the "canal" side of the levee, minus "pipe friction". "
Apparently I misunderstood your original post. I understood it to say that your "fountains" were reversed. That is, storm drains 15 feet below sea level dumping water over a levee 15 feet above sea level for a total rise of 30 feet.
If that is the case all of the writings of Stokes, Navier and Bernoulli concerning fluid dynamics will have to be altered due to Katrina.
Being an E.E. makes me as far from an M.E. or C.E. as a fisherman, but 35 years ago all engineers were exposed to fluid dynamics.
Thanks, good pictures. I have to admit that a bardge is there.
Ok, I've got you. No, the leaking drains were letting water "through" the levee with the water coming up on the inside. Yes, we would have significant revision at hand if the reverse were true.
I'm not sure what the mechanism for the storm sewer leaks is, because they are below the level of the water outside the levee all the time but only leaked when the river ( in the case I cited) was at flood stage. Some sort of flowcock failure but I don't have any details there.
OT but memorable, for some reason standing under the levee was not nearly as intimidating as standing atop the levee and feeling it sway underneath me. It might have been being able to see the water, lapping near my feet on the river side, less than a foot from the top of the emergency sandbags, and looking down on the rooftops on the other.
Interesting story there. They let the kids out of high school because the city was "doomed" and the kids saved the city, moving something like more than three quarters of the necessary sandbags.
A friend and I, left with nothing to do after the pubs closed locally, made the three hour roadtrip for a visual inspection. Our engineering criteria were met, and we managed to escape with both our lives and a commemorative sandbag.
You are quite right, it takes a lot of time and energy to research and prove/disprove the many theories.
But I was.
I doubt it. New Orleans is no Kingdom! ;-)
Yes, we were, in addition to statics, dynamics, and thermodynamics. Strangely the only EE course the ME's, and I think CE's had to take was a two semester "intro to EE", whereas we were taking the same fundamental engineering mechanics, fluids and thermo as they were. But of course we got better grades in their courses than they did. :)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.