Even being a Bush supporter, I wish that I could just blame on one man, even him. Basically, though, the levees were a bad idea as constructed, they were not nearly strong enough because of widespread lack of foresight, and needed years of work. Plus, Louisiana was spending vast amounts of money which should have gone to levies on crap makework to bring home the pork. The problem here has little to do with Bush (or any national agency). It’s mostly a problem with the kind of pork spending in COngress, a lack of realistic thinking at the state level, and bureaucratic incompetence.
Note that overtopping was expected and not really a problem. This is distinct from the breach, which occured at the worst possible time.
The major tourist-loved part of NO is intact. Mostly the neighborhoods which grew up around it got flooded. If nothing elkse, we may as well allow the river to move as it wishes (IIRC, to the west) and rebuild there. And no more of this levee stuff. Use public planning offices to force the residences to stay well back from the docks. Let the river flood as it needs, depositing silt all over to replenish the landscape.
Abdication of responsibility for/interest in the levee situation in New Orleans by citizens of California, or Texas, or damn near everywhere but New Orleans(where they knew and cared about it) is not only to be expected, it is damn near required by the socio-political system we live under in the US. Responsibility for tracking and dealing with these sorts of issues is exactly why we have vested so much power in our governments(local, state, federal). I, or you, didn’t NEED to care PERSONALLY, we had paid our taxes and elected our officials to provide those services on our behalf.
Americans pay billions of dollars a year to the government and maintain a bureacracy of thousands upon thousands of full-time government employees so we don’t have to worry about the levees in New Orleans, the parks in Yellowstone, the storm sewers running under our driveways. I see nothing out of the ordinary in this aspect of the situation. The sheer amount of stuff, sometimes even important stuff like the levees which keep us alive when it floods, we have turned over to the government is mind-boggling. Rational Ignorance rules the day, as is almost necessary.
Not exactly. When I was studying civil engineering, not surprisingly the topic of failure of complex systems comes up extensively. By your books logic, a 747 with it’s complexity should be much more dangerous than a Cesna or WWI biplane. They are, in fact, much safer. What matters is “factor of safety”. Basically it is how close we push the envelope with any type of structure or system. The difference between a 747 and a space shuttle is not in it’s complexity but in how forgiving the environment is that each operates in. A 747 can tolerate a lot more going wrong than a space shuttle.
Redundant systems increase our factor of safety and reduce the probability of a catastrophic failure (everythings about probability) PROVIDED the systems are independent enough that the failure of system doesn’t create a cascade effect (like the entire computer crashes if one sensor fails). Usually when something complex fails, it is usually due to either a failure in a manner not expected or multiple systems failing simultaneously, the failure of any one or several not enough to cause a total catastrophic failure.
A levee is not a particularly complex system. It is essentially just a big wall. But big enough waves crashing against it could cause one to fail in any number of ways - impacting some heavy object like a barge against it, eroding the foundation, or simply just knocking it over.
Well, this prescient description from a [url=]National Geographic article from October 2004, describing an imaginary scenario very similar to what occurred except with overtopping rather than breaching, makes it sound otherwise:
Does that strike you as a logical argument, John Mace? Really? I would just follow up on Mtgman’s point and ask you, did you worry about the Three Mile Island nuclear facility* today? If there was a core breach there today, and someone told you, “Hey, nobody anticipated that the core could melt down,” and you found out that funding for upkeep of the containment system had been cut, wouldn’t you have questions about how wise that was?
Or would such criticism be unfair since you haven’t really been giving any particular thought to Three Mile Island recently?
*Feel free to substitute in any place or signficant safety risk in the US for the sake of argument.
Much as I think Bush is incompetent I don’t agree that the levee’s broke because his administration cut funding for upkeep. The funding was cut because that’s the way people do things. Routine maintainance and modernization of the public infrastructure is always cut, delayed or posponed indefinitely. Plenty of past federal executives had ample opportunity to upgrade the levee system to withstand bigger storms and also didn’t do it.
No politician who wants to be reelected is going to spend the money of today’s taxpayers on things that might only benefit that taxpayers grandchildren, if then.
I’m guessing that now, after the shock of Katrina, money will be allocated for a heavier duty levee system…maybe even one that will go up to CAT 5. Its always in hindsight that we do these kinds of things.
I guess we dodged a bullet here though, at least from a human deaths perspective. If it COULD have been 50,000 deaths then we were damn lucky that it wasn’t. Maybe the government at all levels didn’t screw the pooch quite as bad as we thought…or maybe we WERE just lucky.
Probably so because of the drama of the event. But we tolerate that number of deaths in autos every couple of years while driving recklessly and the industry digs in its heels against vehicle safety improvements.
Let’s wait until we see what the bill (in $$) will be to do so, first. And keep in mind that it’s more complicated than just builildng bigger levees. The bigger they are, the heavier they are, and the levees themselves are sinking (like the rest of the city). And guess which sinks faster-- bigger leveees or smaller one. Today’s “Cat 5” levees could be “Cat 4” within a decade or so. Add to that the uncertainty of knowing what a Cat 5 levee is in the first place, and how long it will take to reach that point (I’ve heard estimates of up to 20 years) and there’s plenty of room for politics to take over again.
I agree. I’m not advocating (necessarily…certainly not without study) that this is what we SHOULD do…I’m stating that this is most likely what we WILL attempt to do. Simply pour money at the problem and build ‘bigger levees’ as you say. Its the normal hindsight reaction to an event like this…attempting to close the barn door after the horse got away.
It might be interesting to learn a bit about who decides what projects the Army Corp of Engineers should work on, i.e., where to spend the money. This article in the Washington Posts suggests that Louisiana itself did not choose to spend all Army Corps resources on the levees. Also see ‘Senators in Deep Shit,’ and ‘Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.)’ for more information.
In Katrina’s wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush’s administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.
Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state’s congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana’s representatives have kept bringing home the bacon…
In fact, more than any other federal agency, the Corps is controlled by Congress; its $4.7 billion civil works budget consists almost entirely of “earmarks” inserted by individual legislators. The Corps must determine that the economic benefits of its projects exceed the costs, but marginal projects such as the Port of Iberia deepening – which squeaked by with a 1.03 benefit-cost ratio – are as eligible for funding as the New Orleans levees
I was struck by the Army Corps apparent passivity in actually defending the levees of New Orleans (see post#9). The Chief of Engineers now suggests that this was an error:
The conference transcript isn’t up at the pentagon yet.
It wouldn’t matter if they made the levees out of stainless steel. A cat-5 storm would go over the top of them. Storm surges create a forward moving body of water that will move up a hill. In the case of NO, the passing hurricane would dump water North of the city which would then run back into Lake Ponchetrain. Thus hitting the city again with a gravity fed storm surge.
What I have been curious about from day one is what type of control structures (if any) exist at the ends of each canal. I can’t tell from looking at satellite photo’s what the structure is (at the head of the 17th St Canal) but it doesn’t look substantial. A good floodgate would seal off the canal from the lake. Any damage from a canal levee breech would be limited to the water in the canal. The city pumps could easily handle this.
FYI - there are a number of good before/after images at the site link and you can click on the magnifying glass in the upper left of the picture and download a larger version.
I’m really wondering how long it acually will take to build up the levees to be capable of withstanding a Cat 5 storm. If it’s 20 years (as one “expert” I head say), I would be concerned that the city might get rebuilt, and another Cat 5 storm hits before the levees are finished. Do we then rebuild the city once again (assuming similar floods would ensue)?
I guess its a matter for probability statistics then. What are the actual odds of a CAT 5 storm hitting the right zone to effect NO the way Katrina did? How often do such things happen. Anyone have any idea?
I think you missed my point. It doesn’t matter. Even if the levee’s hold, the water will physically move up and over them. Unless they raise them substantially higher nothing will help.
BTW - I started going through the site I posted and found a closeup of the breech area on the 17th St canal
I was just expounding in general, not responding to your post. But of course I meant that they would be raised higher-- or any other thing that must be done to have them withstand a Cat 5 storm (assuming we even know for sure how to do that).
