more on Levees down after funding cuts

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Sashikumar N <sashikumar.n () gmail com>
Date: August 31, 2005 6:44:46 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Levees down after funding cuts


Prof Dave
 Levees itself may be cause for destruction of natural processes that
could have protected the low lying areas as the following article says
regards
sashi

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/national/30coast.html? 
ex=1125547200&en=25f5bcd1a43ebe11&ei=5070

After Centuries of 'Controlling' Land, Gulf Learns Who's the Boss

By CORNELIA DEAN
and ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: August 30, 2005

The Gulf Coast has always been vulnerable to coastal storms, but over
the years people have made things worse, particularly in Louisiana,
where Hurricane Katrina struck yesterday. Since the 18th century, when
French colonial administrators required land claimants to establish
ownership by building levees along bayous, streams and rivers, people
have been trying to dominate the region's landscape and the forces of
its nature.

As long as people could control floods, they could do business. But,
as people learned too late, the landscape of South Louisiana depends
on floods: it is made of loose Mississippi River silt, and the ground
subsides as this silt consolidates. Only regular floods of muddy water
can replenish the sediment and keep the landscape above water. But
flood control projects channel the river's nourishing sediment to the
end of the birdfoot delta and out into the deep water of the Gulf of
Mexico.

Although early travelers realized the irrationality of building a port
on shifting mud in an area regularly ravaged by storms and disease,
the opportunities to make money overrode all objections.

When most transport was by water, people would of course settle along
the Mississippi River, and of course they would build a port city near
its mouth. In the 20th century, when oil and gas fields were developed
in the gulf, of course people added petrochemical refineries and
factories to the river mix, convenient to both drillers and shippers.
To protect it all, they built an elaborate system of levees, dams,
spillways and other installations.

As one 19th-century traveler put it, according to Ari Kelman, an
environmental historian at the University of California, Davis, "New
Orleans is surprising evidence of what men will endure, when cheered
by the hopes of an ever-flowing tide of dollars and cents."

In the last few decades, more and more people have realized what a
terrible bargain the region made when it embraced - unwittingly,
perhaps - environmental degradation in exchange for economic gains.

Abby Sallenger, a scientist with the United States Geological Survey
who has studied the Louisiana landscape for years, sees the results of
this bargain when he makes his regular flights over the Gulf Coast or
goes by boat to one of the string of sandy barrier islands that line
the state's coast.

The islands are the region's first line of defense against hurricane
waves and storm surges. Marshes, which can normally absorb storm
water, are its second.

But, starved of sediment, the islands have shrunk significantly in
recent decades. And though the rate of the marshes' loss has slowed
somewhat, they are still disappearing, "almost changing before your
eyes," as Dr. Sallenger put it in a telephone interview from his
office in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Grassland turns into open water, ponds
turn into lakes."

Without the fine sediment that nourishes marshes and the coarser
sediment that feeds eroding barrier islands, "the entire delta region
is sinking," he said. In effect, he said, it is suffering a rise in
sea level of about a centimeter - about a third of an inch - a year,
10 times the average rate globally.

"Some of the future projections of sea level rise elsewhere in the
country due to global warming would approach what we presently see in
Louisiana," Dr. Sallenger said.

Hurricane Katrina was a strong storm, Category 4, when it came ashore
east of New Orleans, near a string of barriers called the Chandeleur
Islands. "They were already vulnerable, extremely so," Dr. Sallenger
said.

He said he and his colleagues were reviewing photos, radar images and
other measurements made of the islands after Hurricane Lili, a
Category 2 hurricane that passed over them in 2002.

"The degree of change in that storm was extreme," he said. "So we had
a discussion this morning: O.K., if Lili can do this, who knows what
Katrina is going to do?" The scientists expect to fly over the coast
on Wednesday and find out.

Of course, New Orleans is vulnerable to flooding from the Mississippi
River as well as from coastal storms. North of the city, the Army
Corps of Engineers has marked out several places where the levees
would be deliberately breached in the event of a potentially
disastrous river flood threat, sending water instead into uninhabited
"spillways."

But there is no way to stop a hurricane storm surge from thundering
over a degraded landscape - except, perhaps, by restoring the
landscape to let the Mississippi flow over it more often.

Some small efforts are being made. For example, at the Old River
Control Structure, an installation of dams, turbines and other
facilities just north of Baton Rouge that keeps the Mississippi on its
established path, workers collect sediment that piles along the dams
and cart it by truck into the marshes.

But truly letting the river run would exact unacceptably heavy costs -
costs that would be paid immediately by people in the region and in
particular by any politician rash enough to endorse such a plan.

Instead, there continue to be efforts to build more capacity into New
Orleans flood control efforts, said Craig E. Colten, a geographer at
Louisiana State University and the author of a new book, "An Unnatural
Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature" (Louisiana State
University Press, 2005). That will mean ever more costs, Mr. Colten
said, given that the city, which is below sea level, must run pumps
simply to keep from being flooded in an ordinary rainstorm.

Roy K. Dokka, a geologist at Louisiana State, said flooding would be
even worse for decades to come, not just in New Orleans but in the
entire Gulf Coast region.

The consequences were clear yesterday, Dr. Dokka said, around Port
Fourchon, La., where the single road that is the commuting route for
oil workers heading to offshore rigs lay under water. "That road that
all the roughnecks and oil workers drive down every day has sunk a
foot in 20 years," he said. "It's now under water every time there's a
significant south wind blowing."

But as Dr. Kelman said: "Once you've invested enough in urban
infrastructure, you have to keep on buying in. And that doesn't even
count the cultural dimension." The reference was to the region's
cuisine, culture and mystique.

"With billions of dollars sunk into the soil in southern Louisiana and
the Gulf Coast," Dr. Kelman said, "it's kind of too late. We're there,
and we're staying there."



On 8/31/05, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dave Burstein <daveb () dslprime com>
> Date: August 31, 2005 4:15:49 AM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: For IP? Levees down after funding cuts
>
>
> Dave
> This Editor & Publisher article probably oversimplifies how the Iraq
> war cut spending on New Orleans levees, but that budget cuts may
> backfire is worth remembering.
>
> Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had
> Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues
> By Will Bunch
> Published: August 30, 2005 9:00 PM ET
> PHILADELPHIA Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of
> the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans late on
> Tuesday. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through
> a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street
> Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level,
> the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.
>
> New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a
> direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been
> working with state and local officials in the region since the late
> 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from
> a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress
> authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or  
> SELA.
>
> Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with
> carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and
> building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at
> least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane
> activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees
> surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
>
> Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a
> trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending
> pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming
> at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the
> strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and
> 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of
> hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
>
> Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The
> Times-Picayune web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it
> coming....Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious
> questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
>
> In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President
> Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said
> was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004,
> article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
>
> On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for
> Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears
> that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle
> homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price
> we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished,
> and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a
> security issue for us."
>
> Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps'
> project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East
> Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for
> urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June
> 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
>
> "The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything
> is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them,
> then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem
> that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds
> have dried up so that we can't raise them."
>
> The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony
> up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in
> Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work
> with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004
> that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million
> project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
>
> The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that,
> the federal government came back this spring with the steepest
> reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in
> history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed
> a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA
> project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough
> to start any new jobs.
>
> ...
> One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer:
> a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the
> main breach on Monday.
>
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