Four years post-Katrina, levee protection still elusive
By Matthew Cardinale | Last updated: Aug 10, 2009 - 11:02:11 PM
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NEW ORLEANS (IPS/GIN) - Four years after Hurricane Katrina, there have been some significant improvements to the levees of New Orleans. However, even with work scheduled to be completed in 2011, advocates say the U.S. government has left the standard of protection at dangerously low levels.The importance of levee protection in allowing Katrina victims to feel secure after the disastrous flooding of 2005 has led one former aerobics instructor, Sandy Rosenthal, to venture into politics and form an organization called Levees.org, which has been fighting for a higher standard of protection.
“I just got back from Holland and I saw this with my own eyes. It comes from a government decision to protect their people. Now, so why don't we have it in New Orleans?” Ms. Rosenthal said.
When Katrina struck land on Aug. 29, there were over 50 failures of the levees and floodwalls protecting New Orleans and nearby St. Bernard Parish, allowing millions of gallons of water to inundate vast areas of the city with 10 feet or more of water. Some 1,500 people were killed in New Orleans alone.
Five separate investigations followed into the levee and floodwall failures.
“By federal mandate, only the federal government can decide what we can and cannot have,” Ms. Rosenthal told IPS. “We believe directly after Katrina there was widespread misinformation and disinformation that the levee failures were a local responsibility. That damage to public perception was significant... and is hard to undo.”
“The people of Louisiana need a new model, and I believe we can incorporate some of the state-of-the-art technologies the Dutch have developed to protect their communities,” Sen. Mary Landrieu said in a statement following the trip to the Netherlands. “I am working to ensure we continue sharing ideas and best practices.”
Currently, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is on track to get the levee system of the Lake Ponchartrain Basin Vicinity, which includes New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish, up to the federal standard of 99 percent protection by the end of 2011.
“The Corps of Engineers since Katrina has operated with a sense of urgency and they appear to be using much better engineering, as far as we can tell. We won't know until it's tested by a storm,” Ms. Rosenthal said.
“The two most spectacular, most famous failures were done with engineering calculations so bad, an engineering student in 101 would've failed,” Ms. Rosenthal said.
The USACE referred IPS to Ed Link, a faculty member at the University of Maryland in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and director of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, which reviewed the levee failures.
Mr. Link agreed there were at least four engineering failures made apparent in Katrina.
“The four flood walls that failed prior to water overtopping them certainly did not meet the criteria they were designed to. They were designs that failed, that didn't work the way they intended to work,” Link said.
Out of 50 total levee breaches, the other 46 were due to “overtopping,” or the levees not being high enough.
“I think for the most part (besides the four engineering failures), they met the criteria for design in 1965. But that criteria evolved over a period of time, and the design was not changed when some of the criteria changed,” Mr. Link said.
Mr. Link explained that Katrina was initially a Category 5 storm, and was then downgraded to Category 3 when it hit land—still the largest surge ever recorded in North America, due to both its size and intensity.
“Katrina was actually a 1 in 400 year event, when you look at that probability of pressure and size on that path,” Mr. Link said.
“Back in 1965 ... they did design something called the standard project hurricane, a storm configured to represent what the scientists at the time felt would be the most severe event that would be reasonably possible. At that time, it was viewed to be about a 100 year storm,” Link said.
“Right now, the 100 year storm of 1965 would not be a 100 year storm today. I don't know what it would be, somewhere between 50 and 100, 50 and 75,” Mr. Link said.
When asked whether Sen. Landrieu or others have fought in Congress for an even higher standard of protection for New Orleans such as the one used by the Dutch, Aaron Saunders, a spokesman for Sen. Landrieu's office said the senator focused on “what parts of the Dutch model we can apply.”
“But the severity of the storm events (in the Netherlands), when they refer to one in 1,000, it doesn't necessarily match up. We can't just pick up the exact Dutch terminology and modeling,” he said.
Sen. Landrieu's office also pointed to the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Rehabilitation Final Technical report, currently in draft form, that the senator called for, “to lay out alternative plans for increased protection to a higher level, all the way from doing nothing, to 1 in 400 or 500 year protection. That report is under public review and they've had public meetings,” Mr. Saunders said.