Posted on 06/05/2007 8:05:42 AM PDT by Sax
Google the NOLA levee commission and get back to us.
thanks. i found it
Also, it's not as if Holland has a lot of land to spare.
BGW, the world didn’t track weather events there from the sky.
Corps chief admits to ‘design failure’
Thursday, April 06, 2006
By Bill Walsh
Washington bureau
WASHINGTON — In the closest thing yet to a mea culpa, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged Wednesday that a “design failure” led to the breach of the 17th Street Canal levee that flooded much of the city during Hurricane Katrina.
Lt. Gen. Carl Strock told a Senate committee that the corps neglected to consider the possibility that floodwalls atop the 17th Street Canal levee would lurch away from their footings under significant water pressure and eat away at the earthen barriers below.
“We did not account for that occurring,” Strock said after the Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing. “It could be called a design failure.”
A botched design has long been suspected by independent forensic engineers probing the levee failures. A panel of engineering experts confirmed it last month in a report saying the “I-wall” design could not withstand the force of the rising water in the canal and triggered the breach.
But until Wednesday the corps, which designed and oversaw construction of the levees, had not explicitly taken responsibility for the mistake.
“We have now concluded we had problems with the design of the structure,” Strock told members of the subcommittee that finances corps operations. “We had hoped that wasn’t the case, but we recognize it is the reality.”
Experts from the National Science Foundation, the external review panel for the corps, said potential problems have been known for some time. They cited a 1986 corps study that warned of just such separations in the floodwalls.
But Strock told the panel that the corps was unaware of the potential hazard before Aug. 29, when Hurricane Katrina drove a massive surge of water against New Orleans’ storm-protection system. He said the corps is evaluating all the levees to see whether they, too, could fail in the same way.
“There may be other elements in the system designed that way that may have to be addressed,” Strock said.
A lawyer who has filed a class-action lawsuit over the levee failures said Strock’s statement may mean little for his case because the corps is generally immune from legal liability by virtue of a 1928 law that put the agency in the levee-building business.
“The words are heavy and important,” Joseph Bruno said. “The problem is legal impediment called immunity. It was tort reform that began in 1928.”
However, lawyer Mitchell Hoffman, who also has filed a lawsuit against the corps, said it could help his case, which seeks to sidestep the corps’ immunity by alleging the levee failure amounted to a massive government seizure of peoples’ homes and land.
“It simplifies the case significantly because we don’t have to have a battle of experts,” Hoffman said. “Now the judge can say because of the enormity, it was a taking and the government needs to pay these people for their property.”
Under questioning from Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., Strock also told the committee that the stunning $6 billion increase in the price of levee protection announced last week was prompted by a request from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to certify the levees to national flood insurance standards.
Strock said FEMA asked the corps what it would take to make the levees strong enough to withstand a 100-year flood, the standard government level for protection.
“Six billion dollars was our preliminary estimate,” Strock said. “That number should come down somewhat.”
However, Strock could not say when he might be able to fine-tune the estimate. Timing is critical because the Bush administration is evaluating how much money to request from Congress for more levee repairs. Without a White House request, FEMA says it can’t release flood maps that tell property owners whether it is safe to rebuild.
Landrieu has threatened to hold up all presidential appointments to executive branch agencies until the White House issues such a request. Louisiana lawmakers hope to include any new levee financing in the pending emergency supplemental spending bill for hurricane recovery and the war on terrorism. The bill passed a Senate panel Tuesday and is expected to reach the floor by the end of April.
. . . . . . .
Bill Walsh can be reached at bill.walsh@newhouse.com or (202) 383-7817.
I still chuckle remembering some of their weatherbabes saying "Typhoon Longwang".
Prayers for those on the coast: the photos in your link show places that make New Orleans look well prepared.
Cheers!
I had hundreds of helicopters flying over my house (I returned a week after the storm). My house never flooded, and I never needed to be rescued. Maybe that's why my house was never on TV. TV news is very selective about what runs. Imagine that.
It was a worst-case hit for surge into NOLA.
Um, no. A cat. 5 surge would have overtopped our levees. That never happened. You REALLY REALLY seem to be in denial about this.
The worst North Sea storm is NOTHING like Katrina.
And yet the Dutch structures on the North Sea are higher and more masive than anything we have here. Maybe the Dutch just like piling up dirt.
And what exactly does that have to do with your statement about not all of the city being below sea level? My point was, many of those who DID live below sea level did not evacuate.
Um, no. A cat. 5 surge would have overtopped our levees. That never happened. You REALLY REALLY seem to be in denial about this.
Uh, dude, your levees WERE overtopped.
And yet the Dutch structures on the North Sea are higher and more masive than anything we have here. Maybe the Dutch just like piling up dirt.
You are spinning like the wheels of a pickup stuck in gumbo clay.
During the window to evacuate, Katrina was a Cat 5. It did not drop to Cat 3 until it was too late to evacuate. So anyone who chose to stay did not stay expecting Cat 3 levees to protect against a Cat 3 hurricane. They were hoping a Cat 5 missed them. So you're full of it.
Not sure if I’m the jane you’re referring to in “jane” but Quint and I live about 25 miles from the shores of Lake Michigan. Don’t know if we’ve ever had a hurricane hit our shores.
And by the grace of God, middle of next month we’ll be moving to central Illinois which is more red to our liking.
Or was the “jane” you’re writing to someone else. Didn’t see any other posts from any other janes. And I don’t use any “handle” but my real name which is Jane Reinheimer.
We hunker down from tornadoes here in Illinois, not hurricanes.
Fine. And MY point is that if the Army Corps had done its job right, they could've walked to the bus stop, ridden to Baton Rouge or wherever, and been back inside their own homes a month later.
Uh, dude, your levees WERE overtopped
Only in outlying , semi-developed areas, and even there, the water that came in was negligible compared to what entered from failed structures. All those folks you saw being helicoptered from their roofs were victims of failed federal flood structures.
And once again, those who failed to evacuate were dicing with death. The state of the levees should have been of NO REGARD to them - for all they knew on Sunday when they had a chance to evacuate, a monster Cat 5 was to hit within 24 hours.
Only in outlying , semi-developed areas, and even there, the water that came in was negligible compared to what entered from failed structures. All those folks you saw being helicoptered from their roofs were victims of failed federal flood structures.
No, they FAILED TO EVACUATE. PERIOD. They should never have been there in the first place.
Sorry Romulus, but I’ve got to agree with dirtboy on this one.
I couldn’t evacuate from N.O. until 6pm on Sunday, and although I briefly considered staying just because of how late it was, one look at that satellite picture reminded me that it would be STUPID to stay.
I can guarantee you that the majority of people who stayed in N.O. did not consider the strength of the levies or the competence of the federal government in their decision to stay. They stayed because no one came and got them and brought them out. They stayed with not even one day’s supply of food, water, or baby formula because no one gave it to them. They drowned in their attics because no one came by the house and brought them a hatchet. New Orleans during Katrina was the ultimate portrait of how people behave when they have been born and raised in a socialist system where someone else is always responsible for supporting them and solving their problems.
Anybody who depended on ANY levee system to save them from the monster that Katrina was, was stupid. It only takes one tiny weak spot to bring the whole system down no matter who was responsible. A lot of people who stayed in the area were lucky in that they got no water, but it was really only luck. Staying anywhere in that area for any reason other than being “essential personnel” was stupid. Not having any plan for evacuating a city where you’ve lived all your life even if you didn’t have a car, was stupid. There were some tourists whose flights were cancelled who couldn’t find other ways out— they’re about the only ones I’ll give a pass to.
Regardless of who was responsible for the levees, there is no system that will ever be 100% reliable in a catagory 5 storm, and as dirtboy said, Katrina was still a Catagory 5 when evacuation decisions had to be made. If the federal government and the local levee districts and anybody else ever built a levee and guaranteed Level 5 protection, it would still be STUPID not to go in the face of what we all saw coming with Katrina.
Just my 2 cents added to this hijacking,
O2
These words may seem especially inappropriate after the breaking of the levee that caused the tragic events in New Orleans last week. But “wet and wild” has a larger significance in light of those events, and so does the group using the phrase. The national Sierra Club was one of several environmental groups who sued the Army Corps of Engineers to stop a 1996 plan to raise and fortify Mississippi River levees.
The Army Corps was planning to upgrade 303 miles of levees along the river in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. This was needed, a Corps spokesman told the Baton Rouge, La., newspaper The Advocate, because “a failure could wreak catastrophic consequences on Louisiana and Mississippi which the states would be decades in overcoming, if they overcame them at all.”
But a suit filed by environmental groups at the U.S. District Court in New Orleans claimed the Corps had not looked at “the impact on bottomland hardwood wetlands.” The lawsuit stated, “Bottomland hardwood forests must be protected and restored if the Louisiana black bear is to survive as a species, and if we are to ensure continued support for source population of all birds breeding in the lower Mississippi River valley.” In addition to the Sierra Club, other parties to the suit were the group American Rivers, the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, and the Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi Wildlife Federations.
The lawsuit was settled in 1997 with the Corps agreeing to hold off on some work while doing an additional two-year environmental impact study. Whether this delay directly affected the levees that broke in New Orleans is difficult to ascertain.
from this web site: http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/man/3.html
So it was other environmental groups, not Greenpeace. I’m corrected.
Truth is, hindsight is 20-20 and there’s plenty of blame to go around for everybody.
We could start though by asking some politicians to take some of the responsibility. Just a thought.
The jane I was referring to was the jane I quoted in the post above that one.
In post #77, I had collected and printed some posts from a BBC blog and she was number 8 in that list.
The disconnect from the possible threat in those posts reminded me of Gulf Coast posting we all followed pre-Katrina and the other storms of that year.
The area involved has never had a significant cyclone of this order and the infastructure is not designed for what will hit them in a few hours. This poor jane is saying she is meters from the beach in Oman and doesn't seem to see the potential danger.
If you’ll review the thread you’ll see that I too made the prudent decision to evacuate. Under the same circumstances, I’d make the same decision again.
That is not the bone of contention. Nor do I disagree that a great many of those who remained were feckless and improvident. My point is that the Federal government needs to own its responsibility for what happened.
Anyway, effective evacuation is a poor long-term policy for this city. It is not workable, not here or anyplace else.
Ah - so you would elevate dependence upon the federal government to a higher level of necessity than the effectiveness of state and local governments and individual responsibility.
The Ray Nagin school of emergency preparadness.
As the water shallows, there’s going to be some serious waves and flood conditions in the Gulf of Hormuz!
I know the Corps has taken the bulk of the responibility and I admire the staff for doing that. However, when the levees were breaking down and did the web investigation to find our who was responsible for which levees and where the lines of responsibility lay and the local levees that had the failures were all Levee District levees.
The amount of tax, how it was funded, how a design team was hired and the like were all determined by the Levee District. When the plans were done the Corps became involved only as field construction oversight.
I remember a parish south of NOL that had no damage because they had a local levee district that bit the bullet and funded good new levees in the 90s when the issue was understood.
The political climate of NOL wouldn’t permit such simple forethought.
In the 93 floods in the Missouri River basin we learned the hard way who was at what level of responsibility.
When your community has been devestated, it is a bitter thing to bear and there is plenty of blame to go around, IMHO. That was the case in the 93 floods.
Thank you. I feel better now.
Jane
Amazing this hasn’t hit the MSM.
I don’t think the petroleum interests in the region are going to fare well through this given their lack of experience weathering a storm like this.
At the least it must shut down all shipping in the Gulf of Oman?
Watch the oil prices soar over the next few days!
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