Hurricane preparedness for New Orleans
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There were many predictions of hurricane risk in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina in August, 2005.Wilson, Jim. "[New Orleans is Sinking]." Popular Mechanics. September 11, 2001.Fischetti, Mark. "[Drowning New Orleans]." Scientific American. October, 2001.Mooney, Chris. "[Thinking Big About Hurricanes]." The American Prospect. May 23, 2005. In 2001, the Houston Chronicle published a story which predicted that a severe hurricane striking New Orleans, "would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water. Thousands of refugees could land in Houston."Berger, Eric. "[Keeping its head above water: New Orleans faces doomsday scenario]." Houston Chronicle. December 1, 2001. In 2002, the Times Picayune published a feature covering various scenarios, including a Category 5 hurricane hitting the city from the south. The series also explored the various environmental changes that have increased the area's vulnerability. One article in the series concluded that hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable. But there wouldn't be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins.McQuaid, John; Schleifstein, Mark. "[Washing Away]." Times Picayune. June 23-27, 2002. Many concerns focus around the fact that the city lies below sea level with a levee system that was designed for hurricanes of no greater intensity than category 3.Westerink, J.J.; Luettich, R.A. "[The Creeping Storm]." Civil Engineering Magazine. June, 2003.Laska, Shirley. "[What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans?]" Natural Hazards Observer. November 2, 2004. Furthermore, its natural defenses, the surrounding marshland and the barrier islands, have been dwindling in recent years.Bourne, Joel K. "[Gone with the Water]." National Geographic. October, 2004. Just a few months before Katrina, the FX docudrama Oil Storm depicted a category 4 hurricane hitting New Orleans and forcing residents to evacuate and hide out in the Superdome, and speculated about a national economic meltdown caused by the decreased oil supply. There have been various plans to mitigate or prevent catastrophies, but none was implemented before the time of Katrina and the city, like many others, heavily relied on evacuation in case of a category 5 storm. The inadequacy of evacuation plans was shown up when no provision was made in time to evacuate the very many people who could not leave by their own means.
Blame for lack of preparedeness has been leveled at all levels of government. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has been criticized for not following the city's evacuation plan which called for the use of school buses to transport disadvantaged and elderly citizens out of the city. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco was also criticized for not deploying the Louisiana National Guard sooner. President George W. Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff were also criticized for failures on the federal level as well as with his leadership role.Glassner, Susan B.; White, Josh. "[Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top]." Washington Post. September 4, 2005.
Assessments
In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), named three major scenarios as being among the most serious threats to the nation: (1) a major hurricane hitting New Orleans, (2) a terrorist attack in New York City, and (3) a large earthquake hitting San Francisco. In 2004, an Army Corps of Engineers study was done on the costs and feasibility of protecting southeast Louisiana from a major category 5 hurricane, including construction of floodgate structures and raising existing levees. The report also suggested that the chances of a major category 5 hurricane directly striking New Orleans was a one-in-500 year event.Lincoln, Eric. "[Old plans revived for Category 5 hurricane protection]." Army Corps of Engineers. September-October, 2004.Hurricane Pam
Hurricane Pam was a hypothetical hurricane used as a disaster scenario to drive planning for a 13-parish area in Southeastern Louisiana, including the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2004.News Release. "[Hurricane Pam Exercise Concludes]." Federal Emergency Management Agency. July 23, 2004.News Release. "[IEM Team to Develop Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan for New Orleans & Southeast Louisiana]." [IEM]. June 3, 2004. Developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security, Emergency Preparedness, the National Weather Service, and Innovative Emergency Management, Inc., the mock hurricane scenario and its projected consequences were the focal point of an eight-day exercise held at the State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge in July, 2004. Hurricane Pam was a slow-moving Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 120 mph. It brought with it up to 20 inches of rain to some parts of Southeastern Louisiana and caused levee-topping storm surge. The consequence assessment for Hurricane Pam indicated that more than a million people would be displaced and that 600,000 buildings would be damaged, with some completely destroyed.Follow-on Hurricane Pam workshops were conducted in November/December 2004, July 2005, and August 2005.
The Hurricane Pam scenario and the level of attention that the federal government paid to it were discussed following the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in November and December, 2005.Beriwal, Madhu. "[Hurricanes Pam and Katrina: A Lesson in Disaster Planning]." Natural Hazards Observer. November 2, 2005.Beriwal, Madhu; Moore, Avagene. "[Hurricane Pam and Hurricane Katrina: Pre-event 'Lessons Learned']." EIIP Virtual Forum Presentation. December 14, 2005.
LSU studies
The Army Corps of Engineers, in conjunction with the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at Louisiana State University (LSU), and the authorities in Jefferson Parish, have modeled the effects and aftermath of a category 5 strike on New Orleans. The model predicted an unprecedented disaster, with extensive loss of life and property. The problem is that this area is like a bowl, surrounded by levees which are strongest along the outer Mississippi and primarily intended to contain river flooding. When a hurricane drives water into Lake Pontchartrain, the weaker levees bordering Pontchartrain and canals leading to it are overwhelmed. Water then flows into the below-sea-level city, accompanied by water overflowing the levees along the Mississippi on the south side of the city center."[Hurricane Risk for New Orleans]." American RadioWorks. September, 2002.On January 25, 2005, the Louisiana Sea Grant forum discussed additional results of several simulations of strong hurricanes hitting New Orleans."[Presidents' Forum on Meeting Coastal Challenges]." Louisiana Sea Grant. January 25, 2005.
Levee preparations and funding issues
2004:
- Army Corps request: $11 million
- Bush request: $3 million
- Approved by Congress: $5.5 million
2005:
- Army Corps request: $22.5 million
- Bush request: $3.9 million
- Approved by Congress: $5.7 million
2006:
Starting in 2003, federal spending on the Southeast Louisiana Project was substantially reduced. Lt. General Carl Strock, Chief of Engineers at the Army Corps of Engineers, said that, "at the time that these levees were designed and constructed, it was felt that that was an adequate level given the probability of an event like this occurring." Strock also said that he did not believed that funding levels contributed to the disaster, commenting that, "the intensity of this storm simply exceeded the design capacity of this levee." Strock also told reporters that the Corps of Engineers, "had a 200- or 300-year level of protection. That means that an event that we were protecting from might be exceeded every 200 or 300 years."News Transcript. "[Defense Department Special Briefing on Efforts to Mitigate Infrastructure Damage from Hurricane Katrina]." United States Department of Defense. September 2, 2005.
From 2001 through 2005, the Bush administration battled with Congress to cut a total of approximately 67% from the budgetary requests from the Army Corps of Engineers for levee augmentation projects in the New Orleans area, but ultimately settled with Congress on a 50% cut in these budgetary requests. In February 2004, Naomi stated that, "I've got at least six levee construction contracts (in the New Orleans area where funding has been cut) that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 Million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."Bunch, Will. "[Why the Levee Broke]." AlterNet. September 1, 2005.
Even as the Bush administration was cutting the Army Corps of Engineers budget, many were criticizing the administration for not cutting the budget more. The New York Times, in particular, published several editorials criticizing the large size of the $17 Billion Corps budget, and called for the Senate to cut, "pork," in S. 728, which would have provided $512 Million in funding for hurricane protection projects in southern Louisiana.Sheppard, Noel. "[The American Thinker]." The American Thinker. September 6, 2005.
Just after Hurricane Katrina hit, there was some concern expressed that government officials have placed an overemphasis on disaster recovery, while neglecting the process of pre-planning and preparation.Walsh, Bill; Alpert, Bruce; McQuaid, John. "[Feds' Disaster Planning Shifts Away from Preparedness]." Newhouse News Service. August 31, 2005.
In November 2005, an investigating team for the State of Louisiana found major defects in the construction of the 17th Street Canal levee. The sheet piling was not driven deep enough and a zone of weak soil layers beneath the levee weakened the structure. The investigators said that they were at a loss to explain how engineers could have missed such obvious and fatal weaknesses in the construction.Marshall, Bob. "[17th Street Canal levee was doomed]." Times Picayune. November 30, 2005.
Louisiana's sinking coast
When the Army Corps of Engineers started systematically leveeing the river in the 19th century, it cut off the region's main source of silt, the raw material of delta-building. The weight of large buildings and infrastructure and the leaching of water, oil and gas from beneath the surface across the region have also contributed to the problem. Following the great floods of 1927, the Mississippi River was surrounded by a series of levees meant to protect the city from such floods. In 1965, New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Betsy, which caused tremendous amount of flooding in the New Orleans area. The federal government began a levee-building program to protect New Orleans from a Category 3 hurricane (the same strength as Betsy). These series of levees were completed in recent years before Hurricane Katrina.However, an unintended consequence of the levees was that natural silt deposits from the Mississippi River were unable to replenish the delta, causing the coastal wetlands of Louisiana to wash away and the city of New Orleans to sink even deeper. The Mississippi River delta is subsiding faster than any other place in the nation. And while the land is sinking, sea level has been rising. In the past 100 years, land subsidence and sea-level rise have added several feet to all storm surges. That extra height puts affected areas under deeper water; it also means flooding from weaker storms and from the outer edges of powerful storms spreads over wider areas. The marshes that ring New Orleans have sunk the quickest.
The problem with the wetlands was further worsened by salt water intrusion caused by the canals dug by the oil companies and private individuals in this marshland. This erosion of the wetlands not only caused Louisiana to lose 24 square miles per year of land annually and 1,900 square miles of land since the 1930s, but it also destroyed Louisiana’s first line of defense against hurricanes.
Hurricanes draw their strength from the sea, so they quickly weaken and begin to dissipate when they make landfall. Hurricanes moving over fragmenting marshes toward the New Orleans area can retain more strength, and their winds and large waves pack more speed and destructive power. Scientists working for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources measured some of these effects during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Andrew's surge height dropped from 9.3 feet at Cocodrie to 3.3 feet at the Houma Navigation Canal 23 miles to the north. For every mile of the marsh-and-water landscape it traversed, it lost 3.1 inches of height, sparing some homes farther north from more flooding. Currently Louisiana has 30% of the total coastal marsh and accounts for 90% of the coastal marsh loss in the lower 48 states. The engineering of the river has basically brought the Gulf of Mexico right to the doorstep of New Orleans, making it more vulnerable to hurricanes.
The combination of sinking land and rising seas has place the Mississippi River delta as much as 3 feet lower relative to sea level than it was a century ago, and the process continues. That means hurricane floods driven inland from the Gulf have risen by corresponding amounts. Storms that once would not have had much impact can now be devastating events, and flooding penetrates to places where it rarely occurred before. The problem also is slowly eroding levee protection, cutting off evacuation routes sooner and putting dozens of communities and valuable infrastructure at risk of being wiped off the map.
State and federal officials have recently pushed a $14 Billion plan to rebuild wetlands over the next 30 years, to be funded by oil and gas royalties, called Coast 2050. "[Coast 2050]." Accessed April 2, 2006. Louisiana will receive $540 Million under the energy bill enacted in August 2005. More money for this program is likely to come with aid from Hurricane Katrina.
Wetlands have the capacity to absorb storm surges at the rate of 1 foot per 2.7 miles. However, due to the systemic, long-term nature of wetlands loss, and due to the fact that it will take decades to remediate wetlands loss,Schleifstein, Mark. "[Coastal Resuscitation]." Times Picayune. June 23-27, 2002. it is not possible to pinpoint blame on any specific Congress, legislature, president, or governor.
See also
- Hurricane Katrina
- Hurricane Katrina effects by region
- Effect of Hurricane Katrina on Mississippi
- Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans
- Damage to infrastructure by Hurricane Katrina
- Drainage in New Orleans
References
External links
- [State of Louisiana Emergency Operations Plan]
- [City of New Orleans Hurricane Preparedness Plan]
- [Nova Television Show on hurricane threat to New Orleans]
- [Independent Levee Investigation Team Draft Report]
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