I sort of paraphrased the title of this article in the NYT this morning. I have family of a sort that lives there, my son’s best friend Fernie and his wife and young baby. Their house survived the floods and for over a year was used as a Urgent Care Facility of sorts by the local hospital. He is a fine young man who started his own business which is thriving. I love him for what he did for the residents of NOLA. But, there comes a time when the people should be able to depend on the city, state and federal governments my dear reader. This is such a time. It’s been two years now since Katrina hit and the levees broke.

“Six Inches”, the first line in the NYT article screams. That number represents the water level reduction another flood of the city would produce since the Army Corp of Engineers spent a billion dollars on the levee rebuild. Let me be more specific..thats the number MOST of the city would see in flood protection. The rich part of town would see 5 and a half FEET of difference.

Funny how that worked out isn’t it? Not ha-ha funny..sick ironic funny to me. The following is a part of the beginning of the 2-page writeup:

New Orleans was swamped by Hurricane Katrina; now it is awash in data, studied obsessively in homes all over town. And the simple message conveyed by that data is that while parts of the city are substantially safer, others have changed little. New Orleans remains a very risky place to live.

The entire flood system still provides much less protection than New Orleans needs, and the pre-Katrina patchwork of levees, floodwalls and gates that a Corps of Engineers investigation called “a system in name only” is still just that.

The corps has strengthened miles of floodwalls, but not always in places where people live. It has built up breached walls on the east side of one major canal, but left the west side, which stood up to Hurricane Katrina, lower and thus more vulnerable. It has not closed the canals that have often been described as funnels for floodwaters into the city.

And its most successful work, building enormous floodgates to cut off the fingerlike canals that brought so much flooding into the city, had a divisive effect. The gates now protect prosperous neighborhoods like Lakeview, and though corps officials say there has been no favoritism, the effect has been to draw out old resentments and conspiracy theories in a city that never lacked for them.

Its still about the haves..and those hapless have-nots it seems. Ain’t right my dear reader..it just isn’t right. They patched the frayed, tired ‘patchwork quilt’ as professor Robert Bea from UC Berkley put it. They won’t spend the money to build a new system. But somehow they found the money to fund a fucking study. The Corp of Engineers found $20 million to study ways of providing even more protection, but it will not even be released until December-talk about a waste…thats out-friggin-rageous isn’t it?

Let me answer that for you..hell yeah its outrageous and a waste and fuckwitted at best.

Now, the NYT tries very hard to paint this picture with a rosy hue..that help IS on the way..but its going to take until 2011 for it to get to all the problems in the flood plain.. I call bullshit on that one right here and now. Because Professor Bea has done his own research on the floodwalls the Corp of Engineers put up and National Geographic wrote about. He says, and I quote, that its all ‘riddled with flaws’. I wrote about his report earlier in the year here. Let me give you a few of his thoughts on the Corp’s efforts:

The most serious flaws turned up in the rebuilt levees along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet ship channel.

The channel’s levees had failed in more than 20 places when Katrina’s storm surge pounded them, leading to devastating flooding in the Louisiana city’s Lower Ninth Ward and in St. Bernard Parish, which borders the city to the southeast.

Bea found several areas where rainstorms have already eroded the newly rebuilt levees, particularly where they consist of a core of sandy and muddy soils topped with a cap of Mississippi clay.

“It’s like icing on the top of angel food cake,” Bea said. “These levees will not be here if you put a Katrina surge against them.”

Bea also found that decade-old gaps remain in the floodwalls lining the Orleans Avenue Canal. And hurricane-damaged sections of the walls along the London Avenue and 17th Street Canals have not been repaired or replaced.

Even more troubling, water appears to be seeping under the stout new floodwall erected along the Industrial Canal to protect the Lower Ninth Ward.

The Dutch have the worlds safest levee system. They have to, or they would all drown. One of their own has said this about the bullshit patch job the Corp did in NOLA:

A Dutch engineer recently visited some of the new floodgates and pumps installed at the mouths of the city’s three main drainage canals. His verdict: They may be “doomed to fail” in the next big storm.

The engineer, who asked not to be named because he sometimes collaborates with the corps, noted that the gates have no mechanism to remove sediment and other debris that might keep them from closing as a storm approaches. Instead, the corps says it will rely on divers to check for obstructions and clear them away.

The Dutch engineer also pointed out that the pumps installed last year to pump rainwater out of the city when the gates are closed vibrated excessively and had to be repaired. The corps says the pumps are working well now, but some other experts say they have not been fully tested.

It boils down to who your going to believe..and believe me when I say it won’t be the friggin Army Corp of Engineers my dear reader.

Tags: NOLA, Levees, Katrina, Army Corp of Engineers

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