Slashdot Mirror
Rebuilding New Orleans With Science
EccentricAnomaly writes "The New York Times has a discussion of flood control methods in use in Holland, England, and Bangladesh that could be used in the rebuilding of New Orleans. Of particular interest is the $8 billion Delta Works built by the Netherlands in response to the North Sea flood of 1953, which almost destroyed the city of Rotterdam, but for a heroic captain who plugged a breach in a dike with his ship." From the article: "While scientists hail the power of technology to thwart destructive forces, they note that flood control is a job for nature at least as much as for engineers. Long before anyone built levees and floodgates, barrier islands were serving to block dangerous storm surges. Of course, those islands often fall victim to coastal development."
You could never get that kind of money allocated towards a protective non-millitary venture, not in the US.
At least, not until something happens. Now that we've had our distaster, and once we've counted the casualty list, I'm sure congress will be more willing to talk dollars.
Then again, it's easier to allocate massive funding to protect your entire country from flooding (ie Holland, etc), than it is to allocate it to protect one relatively poor area. And admit it, that is one of the poorest areas of this country, and without more electoral votes they don't stand a chance.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
(1) I'm not so sure we want to be taking flood control advice from Bangladesh.
(2) I'm not sure that attempting to control nature is the best route here. Sure, there are significant historical and cultural aspects of NOLA that we don't want to lose, but wouldn't it be cheaper (and safer) to move them to a different location?
Flood plains, barrier islands, river paths: all of these are not static features. We have an abundance of land (as opposed to some of the examples cited). If we rebuild NOLA in the same location, aren't we just pissing into the wind?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
New Orleans sits on hundreds of feet of muck (about 600 ft) and lacks access to the bedrock. Combined this with the channelization of the Mississippi and the levees, the city will sink if water is continuously pumped out. Ultimately, if we do not address the issue that the above have caused the wetlands to decrease, New Orleans will be a coastal city that sits below sea level in 2040. Best solution: rebuild on higher groud. Moral of the story: man can attempt to thwart mother nature, but like all parents, punishment may be severe.
The best protection the New Orleans area used to have against storm surges was its wetlands *and* its barrier islands. As the city has expanded, not only has it increased the volume and depth of its below-sea-level "bowl", but it has at the same time cut down its buffer zone of places that the water can safely flood into in the immediate area. Thus, not only do you have a larger area to protect, but more buildup of the surge as it hits the coast near you. Around New Orleans, a single square mile of wetlands restoration would have reduced the storm surge by about a foot.
,dumping the sediment out into the gulf instead. Deposited in deeper water, it doesn't replace the eroding barrier islands as well, thus allowing the surge to approach unhindered.
Of course, the bowl problem itself is a side effect of development; almost all cities sink, but building on delta land you sink much faster. The river would normally lay the area over with sediment, but it's diverted
Wetlands and delta conservation has long been a favorite target of dittoheads and other conservative groups, who have viewed it as a liberal waste of money and barrier to economic development. I wonder if they'll start to change their tune after this.
Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator. They're six feet tall, 300 pounds... they make ice... umm...
New Orleans has been a disaster waiting to happen, as everyone now knows. And it is a city that lies in palpable danger during any hurricane season, now or in the future. Sure, we could learn from the Dutch and from others, but will we?
Our country has a history of trying to do things on the cheap, to pay as little as possible now and to postpone the inevitable for another generation. Now, New Orleans paid the price. We have bridges, highways, water systems and any number of infrastructure needs in the US that we quite effectively ignore on a daily basis.
Don't believe me? Think about how long it has taken California to replace the Bay Bridge after the '89 quake -- it was deemed unsafe then and it was decided to build a new one. This is comparable in scope to the levee system of New Orleans and the new Bay Bridge has taken over fifteen years to replace. Expect the same, Big Easy.
Blame is being passed around, something that politicians excel at. However, the Feds are not the only ones at fault. One must consider the city's priorities when they built a sports arena and did not work on their levees. One must also consider the refusal of the citizens to pay higher taxes to do both. The federal government cut funding, but if the city had REALLY wanted to fix their levees before Katrina, they could have made some hard choices. Instead, they chose to court the Charlotte Hornets and get them to move to the Big Easy. Just as a "for example."
Now, a massive rebuilding effort needs to take place, and one after the rescue and mitigation efforts are completed. The rebuilding will probably outpace the fortification of the levees, as people will want to rebuild their homes and that doing that on an indiovidual basis is smaller and easier than re-engineering levees.
However, before they do that they should consider that their new homes are in as much danger as the ones that they lost until they get their flood control issues resolved. This should be priority one for the city, the state of Louisiana and to a large degree the federal government. The cost will be in the billions, and I for one will be very surprised if the money is easily available.
Even if it is, it will take the better part of two decades -- or about twenty hurricane seasons -- for these new systems to be in place. In the meantime, NOLA better hope that another Katrina does not find their city.
What's the point in rebuilding? The city's already been destroyed and the increasing frequency and intensity of hurricanes in the central Atlantic & Gulf of Mexico means that we're just asking for another disaster. Whether or not you subscribe to global warming being human-induced is beside the point; the temperature of the Earth is increasing, as is the destructiveness of the weather.
The Netherlands argument just doesn't hold water (no pun intended) because that part of the world isn't subject to the same type of weather conditions - in other words, there ain't no hurricanes in the North Sea. There are also the economic factors to consider. The United States is in debt over its head and frankly doesn't have the financial resources to waste on rebuilding a city which would then require greater and greater expenditures of capital to keep from being inundated as the ocean level rises.
Rebuilding New Orleans shows stubbornness well beyond the border of idiocy and is a stunning example of the old axiom: "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." It also shows the tremendous amount of greed involved; whether or not New Orleans is rebuilt, the impoverished who have borne the brunt of this disaster will be left out of the process, except maybe as a disposable work force to exploit in the building of new condos and upscale developments that the real estate markets in New Orleans have been looking for an excuse to install -- especially since builders can use such low-wage exploitation as a tax write-off.
Then there's also the fact that developers were allowed to build in hazardous locations to begin with -- what with the Bush Administration doing away with the Federal land easements (wetlands) that existed as a storm surge buffer and turning it over to developers.
Sacramento, California is an example of just such short-sightedness. The Sacramento River flood plains are catastrophically inundated every ten to fifteen years or so. Despite this fact, developers have been allowed to build there because they've bought and/or sued the city & county into letting them do whatever in the hell they want. The developers have also stifled the environmental and news reports as well as done their best to obscure the historical record because such information conflicts with their immediate profit interests. The result? Houses get flooded, families are ruined and the taxpayers are left with the responsibility.
Frankly, developers don't give a shit whether five or ten years down the line those houses are flooded out and destroyed, incidentally sending into financial ruin the families gullible, desperate, uninformed and/or stupid enough to be living there. They've made their profits and get to hide comfortably behind the lawsuit protection laws established to prevent consumers from holding developers responsible for faulty and/or dangerous housing. Besides, the government will pay for disaster relief and subsidize the rebuilding efforts for a new generation of suckers -- because once those houses have been built, by God they've got to stay there.
With the the Bush Administration doing the best it can to aid unscrupulous businesspeople by circumventing legal measures set up to prevent people from putting themselves into harm's way, is it any wonder there's such a cry to rebuild New Orleans? You've got people who stand to make a killing by exploiting this very preventable disaster. But then again, I guess caveat emptor is the ultimate answer and anything else is heresy to the religion of the Free Market.
Let this also serve as a reminder those who believe overpopulation is a myth that not every square mile of the Earth's surface is inhabitable or arable.
The Dutch are facing some pretty severe long term issues with their system of flood control - the land behind the dikes is subsiding, and the global warming is causing sea levels to rise. To me the whole proposition that you can build for long term stability in a location like New Orleans is very questionable.
gee if the mayor would have used the city school buses they may have saved all those people, intsead they ruined a few hundred busses that they now expect the US taxpayer to replace. I'm sorry but they had 3 days notice it was coming and more than enuff resouces to EVACUATE like they had been told to do. Too many people belived it was someone elses job save everyone's lives. Than when they realized they had to do for themsleves they went overboard.
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
I say let people build there, but they're on their own if the place gets destroyed. No taxpayer assisted insurance, and it's likely that no private insurer will cover them. Somehow I think that pretty view won't be worth it anymore.
Actually, levee maintenance was fine, according to the Army Corps of Engineers and others. The Lake Ponchatrain levee was complete and well maintained, exactly as specified in the 1970s plan. It failed exactly as it was expected to!
City/State management chose to build a levee that was only designed for a category 3 hurricane. Sure enough, a category 4 hurricane broke the levee. This danger was understood when the levee was built, and considered an acceptable tradeoff for cost savings.
We seem to have a real problem building infrastructure in this country when it's not needed on an everyday basis. Does any major city have roads capable of evacuating it's populace in a hurry? Remember the recent East Coast blackout - has any building of redundant capacity begun? Will any other city that decided protection from some hurricanes, but not others, was "good enough" change their minds? I doubt it - such programs are regularly denounced as pork. We just don't appreciate infrastructure, to the point where many people actually believe that roads cause traffic!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The breach was not on the wetlands side but on the lake side. Even if the Delta was fully restored it wouldn't have made any difference this time.
If the storm had come in more to the west then it might have made a difference but I really doubt it. A category 4 or category 5 storm hitting a major city is going to cause a vast amount of destruction. Fixing the delta is valuable for many reasons including protecting New Orleans from floods it's just that in this case it wouldn't have made any difference.
We are in a natural cycle of more and stronger storms. It has happened before. As strong as Katrina was she was weaker than the Galveston Hurricane, the labor day Hurricane, and even Camile. Of course that is like saying an atomic bomb is smaller than the Ivy Mike test bomb.
The thing that cost lives in New Orleans where the actions of the Mayor of New Orleans, and the Governor of Louisiana.
No one that lives in New Orleans should have been bussed to the Superdome! The same buses that took people to the Superdome should have taken them out of the city to shelters outside the flood zone.
The lack of police, food, water, and medical care in the Superdome was the fault of the Mayor of the city and the Governor of the state.
FEMA's failure was in not realizing that the Governor and the Mayor cared more about the French Quarter than about people's lives. I get sickened every time I hear the Mayor say, "The good news is the French Quarter is is good shape. New Orleans will live again." Frankly I would have traded the French Quarter for the hospitals and peoples homes any day! What people that have never dealt with a Hurricane don't understand is FEMA is supposed to come in after the disaster and send supplies and help where the local authorities tell them. In this case the local authorities where criminally stupid or just criminals.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Long record? Two editorials in 15 years? Saying a bill that had God knows what else in it besides flood control was "bad legislation?" Oh and are they opt-ed or actual editorials? opt-ed are the opinions of the editorial writers not the paper. Two editorial writers do need the non-conflicting view points. In fact, one of the signs of an unbiased paper IS having editorial writers that disagree!
It will take more then a random quotes from the Fox news spin factory to make me believe that. NYT may be a bit biased but its way more objective then anything that ever came out of Fox news.
Then I searched for the similar section of your article ("Anyone who cares about sound budgeting and about the health") and got a different article dated August 19, 2002 titled Taming the Untouchable Corps.
So either the Times published two stories with very similar titles and eerily similar lines by coincidence, or someone felt lazy and just changed a few lines and republished the same article. If you have a subscription, feel free to read them and determine which is the case. Since the latter seems more likely, I'm not in the mood to pay them.
Congrats - you're propagating a newly created urban legend designed by left-wing groups to pretend that right-wing groups are misrepresenting the holy New York Times editorial page in a attempt to pretend that Bush really *was* on top, and it was the evil liberal's fault!
Wow, that was a mouthful.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.