Environment
March 2, 2007
Submitting a claim for a staggering $77 billion, the city of New Orleans joined tens of thousands of would-be plaintiffs who rushed to beat a Thursday deadline to alert the Army Corps of Engineers that they may sue for losses resulting from the levee breaches after Hurricane Katrina. The Times-Picayune reports that also joining the queue were Entergy New Orleans, the city's bankrupt electrical utility, which is seeking $655 million, and the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board, which put in a claim of about $460 million, spokesmen for the agencies said.
Almost a year and a half after hurricanes Katrina and Rita blew through Louisiana's woodlands, less than 15 percent of the downed timber has been harvested. And while it remains to be seen how much of that can ultimately be saved, the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center has begun working on a plan to make sure the timber industry is better prepared to handle the aftermath of another devastating storm, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The plan, funded by $55,000 from the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, should be ready in a couple of years, said Richard Vlosky, a forest products specialist with the LSU Agricultural Center.
February 27, 2007
Tons of debris from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have been dumped into landfills created near minority communities in the New Orleans area and could pose a risk to surrounding land and waterways, a congressional committee was told on Monday. The Disaster News Network reports that the Rev. Vein The Nguyen of the Mary Queen of Viet Nam Church and a representative of Citizens for a Strong New Orleans East, urged the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to launch federal investigations into the debris removal activities, including the more than 200 illegal dump sites throughout the state that have been identified by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.
See Disaster News Network article
February 23, 2007
Four months after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the New Orleans area, Congress rushed a $224 million appropriation to the Army Corps of Engineers in hopes of finishing all the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control work that was on the drawing board. Corps analysts quickly concluded it was insufficient to award anywhere close to all the remaining 42 SELA contracts in Jefferson and Orleans parishes. But only now have they determined how much more money they need: $604 million, reports The Times-Picayune.
January 24, 2007
A bold plan put forward by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — and currently being discussed in the new Congress — would build a semipermeable "Great Wall of Louisiana" from the Mississippi River to Texas to block the advancing Gulf of Mexico and, at the same time, do the opposite of what a levee is supposed to do: Allow water through to keep marshlands from drowning in the kind of brackish backwaters that are killing off Louisiana's signature swamps at the rate of more than 30 acres a year. For some 120,000 people along Louisiana's blue-collar coast, the "Morganza-to-the-Gulf" levee is seen as salvation, especially since the 2005 storms, reports The Christian Science Monitor. But critics say that such a "leaky levee" is a false hope, a taxpayer-funded Louisiana hay wagon that is scientifically unproven and even detrimental to both the region's ecology and economy.
See Christian Science Monitor article
Within days, eight shrimp boats and a tugboat are expected to begin removing tons of debris that remain in shallow waters north of Dauphin Island, Ala., where Hurricane Katrina's storm surge left cars, air conditioners, pieces of shattered houses and more, reports The (Mobile) Press-Register. The wreckage has proved a dangerous obstacle for local boaters and poses a threat to swimmers, town officials said. Shortly after Katrina in August 2005, storm wreckage was removed from the deeper, more commercially important waters of the Mississippi Sound, Mobile Bay and other Alabama waterways, using funds from FEMA.
January 23, 2007
Newly minted commissioners of the regional levee board now controlling much of the hurricane protection system east of the Mississippi River say they will do whatever it takes to fortify flood defenses that were gradually eroded by years of neglect, then ravaged overnight by Hurricane Katrina. The Times-Picayune reports that only two weeks into the board's state mandate to manage historically balkanized levee districts, improve the battered levees and win the public's trust, Tom Jackson, president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, is leading the effort with what appears to be a take-no-prisoners style.
January 2, 2007
When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted in June that design flaws in the New Orleans levee system had caused most of the flooding during Hurricane Katrina, it seemingly left little to argue about. But the fight wasn't over. The corps is now engaged in an effort to predict how New Orleans would fare in the next big hurricane, and is once again being second-guessed by some of the nation's top civil engineers, reports the Los Angeles Times. The National Research Council complains that the corps' official investigation into the levee failures reaches premature conclusions, glosses over problems, and fails in its most important task: giving the public the information it needs to make informed decisions about living in New Orleans.
The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality is trying to partner with local governments to dispose of more than 10,000 flooded vehicles collected after the 2005 hurricane season. Still, the project will not be completed before Louisiana begins bearing at least part of the cost for storing the abandoned vehicles under an existing contract and then getting rid of them under a deal that's pending, according to The Associated Press.
December 12, 2006
Under the guiding hand and watchful eye of a state transition team, the commissioners of four local levee boards in the New Orleans region are preparing to conduct business a final time before their appointments expire Dec. 31, reports The Times-Picayune. The dissolution of local governing boards in favor of regional oversight fulfills a congressional mandate that the state consolidate levee operations in southeast Louisiana or forfeit millions of federal dollars earmarked to study how to best protect against catastrophic storms. Two new authorities will manage the maintenance of flood- and hurricane-protection systems on both sides of the Mississippi River, ending the balkanized system of management that some critics say contributed to the failed patchwork of levees and floodwalls during Hurricane Katrina.
December 4, 2006
With almost $6 billion in hand and work well under way to strengthen flood defenses throughout southeast Louisiana, the levee system protecting the New Orleans region still could be likened to a patient who no longer needs life support but remains in intensive care, according to The Times-Picayune. Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers expect New Orleans area levees to get higher and better every year, but they acknowledge four more hurricane seasons will pass before they can completely correct fundamental weaknesses responsible for much of the devastating flood — and that timetable may be optimistic for the largest structures.
November 16, 2006
New Orleans' City Park was once a lush Southern landscape of lazy lagoons, majestic ancient oaks draped with Spanish moss, and magnolias framing the fairways of three golf courses. That was before Hurricane Katrina swamped nearly all of it with up to 8 feet of water. Most of the grass in New Orleans' biggest park died, along with more than a thousand trees, reports The Associated Press. But the 1,300-acre park, one-third larger than New York's Central Park, is slowly coming back, with the help of volunteers, private donations from around the world and a major gift from New Orleans Saints star Reggie Bush. Still, the job ahead is huge, and park officials estimate complete restoration will cost $43 million.
October 31, 2006
Massive chunks of concrete debris are hardly a final solution to saving Mississippi's eroding coastline, but it's a good start, according to U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor. The Mississippi Democrat and officials from the state Department of Marine Resources boarded a boat Monday to check the status of several projects in which Katrina-related rubble is being used to protect the coast from future storms or angry seas, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. Since Katrina, Taylor's office has worked with local governments to store concrete refuse until it can be used for environmental projects, such as building a breakwater in Bayou Caddy and replenishing inshore fish and oyster reefs.
October 30, 2006
It's a lean year for Louisiana oysters, and that means holiday stuffing made from mollusks this Thanksgiving or Christmas won't be cheap, people in the business say. The Associated Press reports that Mike Voisin, owner of Motivatit Seafoods Inc. and chairman of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, estimated the likely cost of a pint of oysters at $9 to $10, up from about $8 a year ago. He said Louisiana provides 30 percent to 40 percent of the nation's annual oyster harvest, and its oyster reefs still are feeling the effects of last year's hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
October 17, 2006
Tens of millions of gallons of treated sewage from New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish would be pumped into severely eroded coastal marshes to the east of the city under a plan to revitalize 10,000 of acres of wetlands by giving them a nutrient-rich jolt of wastewater. The Times-Picayune reports that the $40 million project would create the largest "wetlands treatment" system of its kind in the world, according to New Orleans and St. Bernard officials and state scientists familiar with the plan. It is being pursued by the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board in conjunction with St. Bernard. As the board rebuilds sewer and water lines heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina, environmental affairs chief Gordon Austin said, the wetlands project offers "an opportunity to do the right thing."
October 16, 2006
In the year since Hurricane Katrina drove out many of the people of New Orleans, wild animals, such as alligators, foxes and coyotes have been moving in. The Associated Press reports that some were blown in by the winds or redistributed by the floodwaters. Others were drawn by the piles of rotting garbage and by the shelter afforded by all the abandoned homes and tall weeds.
A new Louisiana emergency rule hopes to give first responders more information about possible post-hurricane hazardous waste. Flooding resulting from Hurricane Katrina pushed railroad cars off the tracks and left them scattered across the area in and around New Orleans. State Department of Environmental Quality officials, who are charged with assessing the potential environmental threat these rail cars posed, did not immediately have information about what the cars contained, their location or their conditions, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. Under the new emergency rule, industries or companies in control of rail cars, barges and other temporary or mobile vehicles that contain hazardous material must report information to a state hotline within 12 hours of a parish-declared mandatory evacuation.
October 13, 2006
A federal judge has approved a $330 million preliminary settlement in the class-action lawsuit against Murphy Oil Corp. over an oil spill that contaminated thousands of homes during Hurricane Katrina, according to Arkansas Business. The judge set a Jan. 4 hearing to hear any objections to the proposal reached by Murphy Oil Corp. and plaintiffs' attorneys. Murphy Oil and the plaintiffs' attorneys agreed to the settlement in the case two weeks ago, but it has to be approved by the judge. The suit was filed after an oil storage tank at Murphy's Meraux refinery in St. Bernard Parish, outside New Orleans spilled about a million gallons of oil when storm surge from Hurricane Katrina hit and moved the tank from its base. The oil damaged some 10,000 homes and business over a 6-square-mile area.
October 6, 2006
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers must halt all work on widening the Industrial Canal lock in New Orleans until it reconsiders the project's environmental impact, a federal district judge has ruled. The Times-Picayune reports that the ruling was hailed as a victory by Pam Dashiell, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, which filed the lawsuit asking that the project be reviewed. The neighborhood group, concerned about disruptions from the $764 million construction project, had worked against it in tandem with environmental groups concerned about contamination of the waterway.
September 5, 2006
Fifty years ago the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, dubbed the world's longest bridge, opened as a 24-mile connection between a sparsely populated area just west of New Orleans and the pine belt of St. Tammany Parish on the lake's north shore. Bridge planners anticipated the baby boom-driven growth that spilled into the suburbs from New Orleans, but didn't foresee Hurricane Katrina when they cut a ceremonial ribbon on Aug. 30, 1956, reports The Associated Press. St. Tammany, which suffered less damage than parishes on the south shore, became a haven for evacuees, especially the more affluent, whose homes were destroyed by floodwaters. Before Katrina, St. Tammany had been fast-growing. Now it's exploiting perhaps its most important quality, one that New Orleans can't match: land. St. Tammany is 850 square miles, compared to New Orleans' 250 square miles — and, more importantly, is largely elevated out of the flood plain.
August 11, 2006
The head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who in June admitted that design flaws in the levees his agency built to protect New Orleans caused most of the flooding during Hurricane Katrina, has asked to retire, the Army said on Thursday. In an after-hours announcement, the Army issued a statement saying Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander and chief engineer of the corps, had requested his retirement from the military "based on family and personal reasons," Reuters reports. The announcement came a bit more than two months after the corps issued a 6,100-page report admitting to its blunders in the design of storm walls and earthen levees that were supposed to protect the New Orleans area.
August 1, 2006
Louisiana chemist Wilma Subra is continuing her crusade to warn Gulf Coast residents of the dangers in contaminated sediment and sludge washed up by Katrina. Subra, who is also a microbiologist, took tidal sediment samples along the Coast after the hurricane, according to The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. She said the showed high levels of bacteria, yeast, mold and the toxic metalloid arsenic, she said, adding that such a combination can cause skin infections, respiratory illness and poisoning. Officials at Mississippi's Department of Environmental Quality have said that South Mississippi soils naturally contain heavy metals like arsenic and that levels of the samples fall in that range. Doctors specializing in skin conditions and the respiratory system did not agree on whether her findings were confirmed by patient complaints.
July 20, 2006
A report from the nonprofit group Living Cities provides a blueprint for redeveloping Katrina-devastated East Biloxi, Miss. The question is, will city leaders and residents support the recommendations? The plan, which takes into account Federal Emergency Management Agency advisory flood elevations, suggests a central park with public space linked up from the Gulf to Back Bay in a flood-prone area where single family homes were destroyed. Multifamily housing designed to minimize flood damage would surround the park and building heights would increase gradually to blend with taller buildings at the city's east end, The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports.
July 11, 2006
Accompanied by a warning that protecting New Orleans and the Louisiana coast from major hurricanes would cost "double-digit billions of dollars" and take decades to accomplish, the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers on Monday submitted to Congress an interim protection report that includes no recommendations for specific projects. The decision to leave individual projects out of the interim Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration report in favor of language on how future projects would be chosen was immediately criticized by high-ranking officials from the state, reports The Times-Picayune. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana asked Sen. Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Energy and Water, for a hearing to investigate why the administration changed the report that was being agreed to by local corps officials and the state. Meanwhile, Gov. Kathleen Blanco demanded that the corps submit to Congress the five major projects recommended by the state for initial authorization. (Report link under Government Data)
June 30, 2006
The government will keep covering the full cost of clearing the bulk of Hurricane Katrina wreckage in the Gulf Coast for the rest of the year, the White House said Thursday. A program that reimburses states and cities for all their bills was to end June 30, reports The Associated Press. That would have shifted 10 percent of the cost away from Washington. An estimated 20 million cubic yards of wreckage still litters New Orleans and Mississippi waterways, according to the most recent Federal Emergency Management Agency data available.
As New Orleans rebuilds tens of thousands of homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina, FEMA has recommended rebuilding at levels below last year's floods, reigniting a debate about how the levee-ringed city can be rebuilt safely. If buildings are rebuilt too low, most of the money spent on construction could be wasted, while a level too high would be costly for the cash-strapped city, according to Reuters. FEMA, widely criticized for its response to Katrina last year, published preliminary rebuilding height guidelines earlier this month based on its model for a 100-year flood. Katrina and Rita led the agency to re-examine its previous flood maps, but researchers ruled out using either storm as the basis for the 100-year hurricane model.
June 8, 2006
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is telling local leaders June 30 will be the last day they will remove Hurricane Katrina-related debris in pummeled Hancock County, though officials say the job is far from over, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. John Martin, a corps debris specialist, told Bay St. Louis, Waveland and county officials to begin making plans to take over the job once the agency quits.
May 30, 2006
Most people believe that Katrina, a Category 3 hurricane devastated New Orleans on Aug. 29 of last year. But that’s not so. The flood protection system for the New Orleans area was designed to protect the city from a direct hit by a fast-moving Category 3 storm, reports The New York Times. Yet Hurricane Katrina, a Category 4 storm that did not strike the city directly, overwhelmed systems in dozens of places and cost more than 1,500 lives and billions of dollars in property damage. Why? In part, say experts who studied the disaster, because the hurricane was more like four storms — at least — that battered the area in different ways. They say the system in New Orleans was flawed from the start because the model storm it was designed to stop was simplistic, and led to an inadequate network of levees, floodwalls, storm gates and pumps.
The Army Corps of Engineers on Monday announced that a 400-foot section of earthen hurricane protection levee being rebuilt near Buras High School in Plaquemines Parish slumped by more than 6 feet overnight Saturday, and said repairs could take three to six weeks. Corps spokesman Jim Taylor said the levee section, just west of the main Mississippi River levee and about 60 miles south of downtown New Orleans, seemed to twist in place, losing 6.5 feet of height at its top. The levee had been raised to 15 feet by Saturday, and was scheduled to be raised to 17.5 feet by Thursday, the beginning of hurricane season, reports The Times-Picayune. Since Hurricane Katrina, the corps has spent more than $700 million to restore 169 miles of devastated hurricane levees, floodwalls and gates in the New Orleans area.
Mississippi is withholding nearly $17 million in federal reimbursement money from its most populous coastal county while authorities probe a "multitude of discrepancies" in bills that contractors submitted for Hurricane Katrina debris removal, according to officials and documents reviewed by The Associated Press. The state stopped making payments last month to Harrison County — which contains Biloxi and Gulfport — after the Federal Emergency Management Agency began auditing the work being done to clear away storm-damaged trees. An internal FEMA report faulted county officials for paying the contractors more than $10 million without checking the work's quality or accuracy. After FEMA officials inspected more than a dozen of the roads where work was performed, its debris specialists notified the county on three occasions that the contractors were "not performing their jobs properly resulting in ineligible limbs and trees being cut and billed."
May 25, 2006
In a breathless finale that has been called one of this generation's greatest adventures in civil engineering, the Army Corps of Engineers has all but completed its repairs to New Orleans' ruined levee system, The New York Times reports. With just days to go before the beginning of the hurricane season, the corps' $800 million effort has even improved the system in many ways, engineering experts say, with tougher concrete flood walls, brawny new canal gates and more than 150 miles of new or repaired levees. But even though all sides agree that the corps has largely achieved its goal, independent engineers say it is the goal that is the real problem. New Orleans is still very much at risk, they say, because the level of protection the corps has reached is still not as strong as the city needs.
May 24, 2006
Concerned that vital flood-control and hurricane protection work will be stalled because of failure to pass a water bill that includes the projects, all seven members of Louisiana’s House delegation introduced federal legislation Tuesday that would authorize what they describe as critical projects in Louisiana. Louisiana lawmakers complain that they are sometimes put in a Catch-22 situation, as colleagues in Congress tell them that their proposed projects have merit but can't move without authorization. Authorization, in many cases, has been delayed because Congress is now four years late in passing a new Water Resources Development Act, which authorizes key national Army Corps of Engineers projects, according to The Times-Picayune.
The race against the clock to restore the New Orleans area’s battered hurricane protection system to pre-Katrina levels by the start of a new hurricane season next week is 92 percent complete, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official, Col. Lewis Setliff III said Tuesday. Katrina flooded 80 percent of the Crescent City, and much of the flooding was blamed on lake surge that put too much stress on the 17th Street Canal and London Avenue Canal floodwalls, causing portions of them to collapse. Setliff, who is overseeing the rebuilding of 169 miles of levees and floodwalls breached by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in metropolitan New Orleans, said the damaged levees are being repaired to their pre-Katrina “authorized” heights. That is an important distinction, he said, because the levees were lower than their authorized heights at the time of the storm because of years of subsidence, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate.
May 23, 2006
The head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, Mike McDaniel said his agency will be better prepared for a hurricane this year than last year when Katrina and Rita destroyed the state’s coast. The department is working on better communication equipment and improving the ability to collect environmental samples, conduct tests and give results as soon as possible, he said. For example, before a storm hits the DEQ will require railroads to identify the location of hazardous rail cars, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. After Katrina and Rita, the railroads often did not know where hazardous cargoes were and that caused lots of problems, McDaniel said.
May 22, 2006
A wide range of design and construction defects in levees around New Orleans raise serious doubts that the system can withstand the pounding of another hurricane the size of Katrina, even after $3.1 billion in repairs are completed, a team of independent investigators led by the UC Berkeley civil engineering school said Sunday. The findings undermine assurances by the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers that the federal levee repair program due to be completed in June will provide a higher level of protection to New Orleans, the Los Angeles Times reports. The team's 600-page report disputed most of the corps' preliminary findings about what caused the levee breaches, saying the investigators had made critical errors in their analysis. The mistakes raise concerns about whether the corps is competent to oversee public safety projects, said Raymond Seed, a professor who led the investigation.
With the hurricane season starting June 1, flooding is on everyone's mind in New Orleans these days. Downtown last week, government officials, military men in desert gear and private suppliers ran a tabletop exercise against a fictional Category 4 hurricane named Oscar. Along Lake Pontchartrain, contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers are rushing to finish new floodgates on the city's perimeter, working even at night under klieg lights. New levees replacing those wiped out by the hurricane are nearly finished, reports Time magazine. Still, New Orleanians learned a valuable lesson from Katrina: Trust no one and nothing. They're not counting on the levees to hold or the government to rescue them this time. Neighborhoods like Broadmoor are recruiting block captains to canvass residents who have returned, noting which homes are occupied, who lives in flimsy trailers and which elderly residents might need help. In Gentilly, where many senior citizens died, residents are looking into their own text-messaging system for emergency alerts. Self-sufficiency is everyone's mantra, from civic associations to city hall.
May 19, 2006
The failure of New Orleans' levees during Hurricane Katrina reflected decades of technical and institutional problems in the Army Corps of Engineers' efforts to protect the city, according to investigators who will publish their findings Monday. The report from the University of California-Berkeley engineering department will say that the corps lacked a coherent strategy for protecting the city, the Los Angeles Times reports. The organization's technical prowess suffered when it was forced to deal with modern political realities, particularly in Louisiana, according UCB professor Bob Bea, and at the same time, the corps has suffered an erosion of its technical capabilities. The implications of the report are far-reaching because the corps is responsible for civil works projects that guard public safety in almost every corner of the nation.
Massive floodgates designed to better protect the heart of New Orleans from the type of storm surges that breached levees during Hurricane Katrina may not be installed until July, more than a month after hurricane season starts, a top Army official said Friday. But large storms are rare before August, and the Army Corps of Engineers said it has a plan to reinforce the levees if another major storm threatens any earlier than that. The Corps is installing the floodgates to protect the levees that Katrina weakened along three major drainage canals that channel rainfall from city streets into Lake Pontchartrain, reports The Associated Press.
May 18, 2006
Officials on both sides of the Orleans-Jefferson parish line are sparring over control of two huge pump stations, including one that drains neighborhoods in the city and the suburbs that flooded heavily during Hurricane Katrina, The Times-Picayune reports. The main prize is Pump Station No. 6. The New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board owns the facility and wields the lion's share of power over pumps there that drain about 7,500 acres of Broadmoor and Uptown. But because the station also drains about 2,500 acres of Old Metairie and Old Jefferson, Jefferson Parish pays for about a quarter of the cost to operate and maintain it. The point of contention is the plan drafted by Jefferson officials, which they say would let them drain Old Metairie and Old Jefferson without overloading the 17th Street Canal by slightly reducing the amount of water Orleans Parish drains into the canal. But S&WB officials said the plan would risk flooding the Interstate 10 underpass near the Mounes Street railroad crossing, shutting down one of the area's main routes for evacuating hundreds of thousands of people.
An environmental group says thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi and Louisiana may be living in unsafe conditions after tests it conducted showed dangerous levels of formaldehyde in some Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, reports The Associated Press. The Sierra Club on Wednesday asked for a congressional hearing after it claimed that 30 out of 32 trailers it tested had levels of formaldehyde that were unsafe.
May 16, 2006
The repair of levees and floodwalls broken or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina is on track, but the system still won't be high enough to prevent flooding by a similar storm this year, a senior Army Corps of Engineers official said Monday. "If another Katrina were to occur tomorrow, you're going to have 6 feet of water overtopping some levees,” Don Resio told members of a National Academies of Science committee reviewing the corps' investigation of the levee failures. He explained that the agency is studying how to protect the New Orleans area from hurricanes even larger than Katrina. But until Congress provides authorization to build something safer, he said, the refurbished levee system will remain susceptible to overtopping, reports The Times-Picayune.
May 15, 2006
Generations of New Orleanians worked for 300 years to raise a great city in the often inhospitable terrain along the banks of the Mississippi River, but it took Hurricane Katrina less than six hours to put that labor of love under water, damaging 200,000 homes and killing more than 1,200 people. The Times-Picayune reports that timelines developed by forensic engineering teams probing the failure of the hurricane protection system provide a slow-motion picture of a deadly tragedy that unfolded with surprising speed.
May 12, 2006
Floodgates to block tidal surges out of the weakened 17th Street and London Avenue canals, and auxiliary pumps to help prevent inland flooding when the gates are closed, will not be ready as promised when the hurricane season opens June 1, Army Corps of Engineers officials confirmed late Thursday. Corps commanders said braced-steel sheet piling will be installed at canal bridges to turn back high water, and portable pumps will be used to provide limited storm water drainage if an early-season storm surge threatens the city before the work is complete. And they added that the work probably won't be finished before early- to mid-July, reports The Times-Picayune. It isn't ideal, said Col. Richard Wagenaar, commander of the corps' New Orleans district, but the sheet-piling contingency plan will keep the floodwalls from breaching, as happened under the weight of Katrina's surge, inundating most of New Orleans and part of East Jefferson.
May 9, 2006
The Louisiana Health Department cleared the way Monday for people to begin to return to the New Orleans neighborhood that faced Hurricane Katrina's worst fury, saying tap water in part of the Lower Ninth Ward is safe. The area where tap water was declared safe encompasses the 10 blocks or so closest to the Mississippi River, where the ground is higher, reports The Associated Press. In other parts of the neighborhood, people still must boil water before using it to drink, prepare food or bathe, Mayor C. Ray Nagin noted. Officials said they do not know when they'll be able to open those areas.
May 8, 2006
Tens of thousands of New Orleans’ hurricane-ravaged houses rot in the sun, still waiting to be gutted or bulldozed, reports The New York Times. Now officials have decided where several million tons of the debris will be dumped: in man-made pits at the swampy eastern edge of town. But more than a thousand Vietnamese-American families live less than two miles from the edge of the new landfill. And they are far from pleased at having the moldering remains of a national disaster plunked down nearby, alongside the canal that flooded their neighborhood when Hurricane Katrina surged through last year. Environmental groups are also angry, accusing local and federal officials of ignoring or circumventing their own regulations, long after the immediate emergency has ended. The same thing happened after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, they warn, and that dump ended up becoming a Superfund site.
May 5, 2006
When the Army Corps of Engineers finishes rebuilding the east side of the Katrina-shattered Industrial Canal floodwall to 15 feet by June 1, residents of the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish will have the hurricane protection they were supposed to have before the storm hit, reports The Times-Picayune. The completion of that job, however, will have the unintended consequence of putting the rest of New Orleans in a more dangerous position than before Katrina, storm experts and engineers said. The west wall isn't scheduled to be raised to the authorized 15 feet until Sept. 1, 2007; should another Category 3 storm before then, the lower west wall will be overtopped faster and the volume of water pouring into the western section of the city from the canal will be greater and last longer than during Katrina. The commander of the corps' levee rebuilding effort said the agency is aware of the problem; he also said that he did not know why both projects were not attempted simultaneously.
The water is fine but do NOT come on in. That’s the word from scientists charged with checking water quality both before and after Hurricane Katrina along Hancock County, Mississippi’s Gulf Coast beaches. And county officials agree with that advice even though the beaches are not officially closed, reports MSNBC.com. Frequent tests at numerous coast checkpoints for months have shown that the water is as free of the most common contaminant that comes with the devastation of a hurricane — sewage — as it was before the storm. But the shallow ocean floor is far from free of the dangerous wreckage that Katrina’s surge washed into the gulf.
May 3, 2006
The forces that caused two breaches in the London Avenue Canal floodwall, submerging much of New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood during Hurricane Katrina, were similar to those that brought down the 17th Street Canal floodwall, the team of government, academic and industry experts investigating the failures for the Army Corps of Engineers said in a report released Tuesday. The Times-Picayune reports that according to the team, rising water pressure inside the canal pushed the floodwall away from the canal, creating a space between the wall and its interior levee. The opening extended below the wall and through a narrow layer of clay silt that acted as a barrier between water in the canal and a thick layer of very porous sand; pressurized water moved down the opening into the sand and quickly traveled under the wall. The Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force does not think the disaster can be tied to any obvious engineering shortcomings, its leader said. But those involved with Team Louisiana, the state investigation into the failures, disagreed.
Statements by the Army Corps of Engineers that the New Orleans area was protected against the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane were "at best a rough estimate and at worst simply inaccurate," according to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s final report on Hurricane Katrina released Tuesday. Noting data from the National Weather Service about the severity of storms, evidence of subsidence that left levees and floodwalls below authorized levels and gaps created by unfinished projects, the panel concluded in "Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared" that the system was not capable of protecting against a Category 3 hurricane, such as Katrina, with winds up to 130 mph and a storm surge as high as 12 feet, reports The Times-Picayune.
May 1, 2006
As they completed sections of the New Orleans area's hurricane protection system in the 1980s and '90s, Army Corps of Engineers officials assured residents the structures had been raised to standards mandated by Congress, reports The Times-Picayune. That, however, was mostly a legal fiction, documents and interviews with current and former corps employees show. The corps' levees and floodwalls might have met specifications in the plans, but the engineers involved knew the measuring stick being used was out of date. In fact, many sections of the system were a foot or more below authorized heights because the local office of the corps made a decision in 1985 not to use updated elevation values for projects then under way.
April 28, 2006
Hurricane Katrina not only crumpled bridges, toppled power lines and pocked roads, the legendary storm caused almost $1 billion in damage to municipal sewer systems across Louisiana, The Times-Picayune reports. Katrina left behind several badly damaged sewage treatment plants and about 5,000 miles of cracked sewage collection pipes in the New Orleans area alone, according to a report released this week by an industry group. The staggering cost of repairs makes up the bulk of an estimated $1.4 billion in sewer infrastructure losses to municipalities along the Gulf Coast, including Mississippi and Alabama.
April 27, 2006
An otherwise unremarkable 1.2 inches of rainfall burned out three massive Sewerage & Water Board pumps Wednesday, officials said, though no flooding was reported. The problem pumps at stations in Lakeview, Gentilly and Mid-City are among the largest in New Orleans' unique drainage system and were driven by huge electric motors that sat partly submerged in saltwater for as long as three weeks after Hurricane Katrina as did scores of of others in the system, reports The Times-Picayune. The motors burned up when wiring insulation failed as they began to turn under a normal operating load, said Joseph Sullivan, the S&WB general superintendent. The rain was the first significant precipitation in what has been an unusually dry year, and the trouble underscores the vast municipal drainage system's need for almost $40 million in post-Katrina work that has received little public attention.
April 26, 2006
President Bush asked Congress yesterday for $2.2 billion in new spending to rebuild the hurricane protection system for the New Orleans area, even as he threatened to veto the overall spending bill if Congress did not remove a cornucopia of non-emergency items. In an unusually blunt message to Senate leaders, the White House demanded that lawmakers eliminate $14 billion in domestic provisions and "remain focused on urgent national priorities," The New York Times reports. The flood protection money, added to a request already before Congress for $1.4 billion for rebuilding the levees, would be used to replace 36 miles of flood walls around the city with higher walls of a stronger design. It is part of a $19.8 billion request from the administration for work in Louisiana in a $106 billion emergency spending bill that was originally intended for the Iraq war and hurricane recovery.
Corps of Engineers on Tuesday, accusing the agency of ignoring repeated warnings that a navigation channel it built would turn into a "hurricane highway," reports The Associated Press. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Orleans and several prominent trial lawyers from Louisiana, Florida and California are backing it. At issue is a 76-mile shipping channel built in the early 1960s as a short-cut to New Orleans. For years, environmentalists and emergency planners have blasted the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or MR-GO, as a destructive force because it has eroded enormous tracts of wetlands and increased the threat of flooding.
April 25, 2006
A top federal official ignited controversy Monday when he said overtopped rather than breached levees accounted for much of the water that engulfed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. A federal investigation due out in June will say just that, Dan Hitchings, director of Task Force Hope for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, told a House committee. But his comment was disputed moments later by a Louisiana State University professor in charge of the state’s investigation of what happened to the levees: “Eighty-seven percent of all water that got into New Orleans was because of levee breaches,” Ivor L. van Heerden told the House Committee on Transportation, Highways and Public Works.
Can the Lower Ninth Ward be saved? The answer may be depend on whether it is really "lower" at all, according to The New York Times. Though its name is based on its position at the southern end of the ward rather than its elevation, the neighborhood is often on planners' lists for future parkland instead of houses. That open land would draw off floodwater from elsewhere in future storms. Last month, Mayor C. Ray Nagin warned residents of the devastated area that the Army Corps of Engineers had told him that the neighborhood was likely to flood again if a Katrina-style hurricane hit New Orleans this year or next year.
April 24, 2006
All day, every day and into the night, crews for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pour concrete into walls, pack dirt into hills and ram steel into the earth. They are scrambling to undo the damage Hurricane Katrina inflicted on the region's levee system, reports USA TODAY. Their task is urgent: Hurricane season begins June 1. But even when the holes are plugged — a $2 billion endeavor — the entire 350-mile protection system remains flawed, the corps now admits. Flood walls are too weak in some places; earthen levees are too short in others. Locals say the only thing that will save the low-lying region from more flooding this summer is not getting hit with a strong storm.
April 20, 2006
New Orleans will enter the hurricane season in six weeks without important pieces of its storm protection, not because Congress is dragging its feet, but because the Army Corps of Engineers is waiting for congressional authorization that it already has, Sen. David Vitter told corps officials Tuesday. The Louisiana Republican said critical projects such as armoring levees and moving pumping stations to the lakefront could have begun under an emergency financing bill passed last year that included broad authorization to cover any flood-control repair work, reports The Times-Picayune.
April 19, 2006
Forget about "Katrina cough." Despite claims that there have been more coughs, sore throats and runny noses since Hurricane Katrina roared through the New Orleans area, a new state health department study has found that the storm's lingering local effects do not include an increase in severe respiratory problems, reports The Times-Picayune. A check of more than 56,000 local emergency room visits from October through March showed that slightly more than 1 percent were for asthma and about 7 percent were for respiratory infections. These rates were similar to national statistics, researchers said.
April 17, 2006
In the rush to rebuild New Orleans, environmentalists say the hurricane-smashed city is dumping its debris into the swamps by the truckload — and throwing away an opportunity to turn America's costliest natural disaster into the nation's greatest recycling effort. The Associated Press reports that every day trucks rumble down the streets on their way to the Old Gentilly Landfill, a municipal dump in the swampiest part of the city, to unload the debris that homeowners and contractors have piled up on the curbs throughout New Orleans.
April 14, 2006
Battered by Katrina and bruised by Rita, the resilient people of Plaquemines Parish fear their knockout blow will come not from the next big storm, but from the federal government's move to exclude them from a strengthened levee system that would wrap around the rest of the metropolitan area, reports The Times-Picayune. Donald Powell, President Bush's point man for hurricane recovery across the Gulf Coast, announced Wednesday that the administration will not immediately seek $1.6 billion needed to beef up levees that protect lower Plaquemines and the parish's east bank. In a cold cost-benefit calculation, Powell said the administration could not justify spending that huge sum on an area that before Katrina was home to 14,000 people — just 2 percent of the region's population.
April 13, 2006
The Bush administration proposed spending an additional $2.5 billion for New Orleans levee construction yesterday as it issued long-awaited construction guidelines for the flood-prone region. The Washington Post reports that the new guides would require rebuilding many heavily damaged houses at least three feet above ground. With tens of thousands of houses awaiting reconstruction, the moves could help resolve an impasse over how to rebuild the low-lying metropolis. Uncertainty over the levees has left homeowners unsure about how high houses should stand to avoid flooding or whether to rebuild at all.
The shrimpers, fishing captains and oystermen along the Gulf Coast seem to have been forgotten as the government funnels aid to a region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The Associated Press reports that very little of the $68 billion appropriated has found its way to the watermen of the Gulf or to rebuild onshore facilities. Meanwhile, massive amounts of debris have made shrimping dangerous in many areas and oysterbeds have been ruined by silt. As the Senate prepares to debate the latest Katrina aid bill, the watermen are pinning their hopes on an ambitious $1.1 billion aid plan by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.
Hurricane Katrina pushed a small amount of dioxin-contaminated soil into areas around Gulfport's Seabee base, a company representative monitoring the site said at a base advisory board meeting this week. The dioxin came from 850,000 gallons of Agent Orange that had been stored on the base between 1968 and 1976, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. Agent Orange was the military code name for one of a powerful group of herbicides used during the Vietnam War.
April 12, 2006
Critics are praising the Army Corps of Engineers’ levee work as they struggle to improve flood control around New Orleans and its suburbs before the hurricane season begins June 1, according to The New York Times. The endorsement is a turnabout from just two months ago, when researchers funded by the National Science Foundation said the corps and its contractors in St. Bernard Parish were rebuilding parts of these levees with sandy soil likely to wash away under in a big storm. On Saturday, however, the researchers said they were pleased to see that some 650,000 cubic yards of high-quality Mississippi clay was being brought in to supplement the local soil.
April 7, 2006
Two of the independent investigators who have been most critical of the Army Corps of Engineers are scheduled to meet with agency officials Saturday to discuss concerns about the quality of repairs to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet levees. The Times-Picayune reports that engineering professors Bob Bea and Ray Seed of the University of California-Berkeley got into a fight with the corps last month with accusations that the agency was using substandard soils to rebuild a part of the levee shattered by Hurricane Katrina. The corps fired back with a national news release that questioned Bea's findings. The professors responded with their own national news release questioning the corps again. Now, the Berkeley engineers say they hope this weekend will begin a new era of cooperation.
April 6, 2006
In the closest thing yet to a mea culpa, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged Wednesday that a "design failure" led to the breach of the 17th Street Canal levee that flooded much of the city during Hurricane Katrina, reports The Times-Picayune. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock told a Senate committee that the corps neglected to consider the possibility that floodwalls atop the 17th Street Canal levee would lurch away from their footings under significant water pressure and eat away at the earthen barriers below.
April 5, 2006
Calling it a “life or death situation,” U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana announced Tuesday that she will hold up all of President Bush’s executive appointments until he commits to funding $6 billion in levee protection for her state, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. As do all senators, Landrieu has the power to place a hold on executive appointments that must be approved by the Senate. Currently, 27 appointments sit on the calendar. The Democrat sent a letter revealing her intentions to Bush on Tuesday.
April 4, 2006
Some sections of levee in the New Orleans area require little or no height adjustments, while other sections must be raised by as much as 8 feet to satisfy the Army Corps of Engineers that the structures will withstand the next hurricane of the century, a corps official reported to Louisiana's flood protection panel Monday. Dan Hitchings, civilian director of the corps' Task Force Hope, told the governor's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority that since Hurricane Katrina, the federal agency has changed its reckoning of the height and strength of levees needed to certify that they can survive a so-called “100-year” storm surge, reports The Times-Picayune.
April 3, 2006
Thousands of homeowners affected by Hurricane Katrina are afraid to rebuild because federal officials haven't yet issued new flood advisories for New Orleans and adjacent parishes. The Associated Press reports that even with enough insurance and savings to start over, many are reluctant to start expensive reconstruction until FEMA issues advisories that will tell them what they need to do to mitigate the risk of flooding again. The issue isn't flood insurance or building permits. As long as homeowners follow the existing maps — last revised in — they'll be grandfathered into the federal flood insurance program. But surrounded by rotting drywall and the painful memories of Katrina, residents say they're afraid to invest financially or emotionally before FEMA gives them some advice.
Spurred by the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — made worse by the tattered state of wetlands that once served as a cushion against storms — some government officials, engineers, academics and nonprofit advocates are pushing anew for a profound strategy change in the effort to rebuild the coast, reports The Times-Picayune. On the way out is a long-standing doctrine that backed massive diversions of large portions of the Mississippi River as a means to recreate the flooding that built and nourished marshes for thousands of years before the levees went up. Instead, there's renewed fervor for more aggressive projects, centered on rebuilding marshes with sand and sediment pumped via pipeline across long distances.
March 31, 2006
The Bush administration said yesterday that the cost of rebuilding New Orleans's levees to federal standards has nearly tripled to $10 billion and that there may not be enough money to fully protect the entire region, reports The Washington Post. Donald E. Powell, the administration's rebuilding coordinator, said some areas may be left without the protection of levees strong enough to meet requirements of the national flood insurance program. Those areas probably would face enormous obstacles in attracting home buyers and investors willing to build there.
Hurricane Katrina's devastating strike on New Orleans last fall highlighted shortcomings in the city's levee system. It also focused attention another long-term problem: The city and the area around it are sinking, reports The Christian Science Monitor. New research suggests, however, that at least for nearby Michoud, La., the dominant driver pulling the region under may not be among the usual suspects: oil extraction, pumping groundwater to the surface, or diverting the Mississippi for navigation. Instead, the King of Slump may be a deep fault that cuts across southeastern Louisiana and under Michoud.
See Christian Science Monitor article
March 30, 2006
The cost of restoring levee protection in the New Orleans area to pre-Hurricane Katrina levels will be about $6 billion, twice as much as the Bush administration and Congress have appropriated to date, Donald Powell, the federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding, told members of the state's congressional delegation Wednesday. Powell said he wanted to update the delegation on the latest cost estimates, but he did not commit to a financing source or whether the administration would seek the traditional 35 percent local share for the work. He said that "will be part of the deliberations" in coming weeks, reports The Times-Picayune.
March 29, 2006
Flood maps used for insurance purposes and minimum building elevations have become more complex and confusing in the wake of Katrina and Rita, experts say. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that after the hurricanes pushed walls of water into some coastal communities, the Federal Emergency Management Agency created “flood recovery maps,” many of which may eventually be used to set future flood elevations. The new maps are in addition to the old flood maps FEMA used to set insurance rates and municipalities used to set minimum building elevations.
March 28, 2006
If a supposedly self-supporting federal program was hemorrhaging cash while exacerbating the very problems it was designed to fix, you might think Congress would rush in to stanch the bleeding. But if the enterprise in question were the federal flood insurance program, you'd be dead wrong. Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch reports that more than six months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the program's finances, members of a House committee just got around to a first attempt at reconstructive surgery. Judging by the result, they seem to have settled for a few stitches.
See Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch article
March 27, 2006
An organization of civil engineers has questioned the soundness of large portions of New Orleans' levee system, warning that the city's federally designed flood walls were not built to standards stringent enough to protect a large city, reports The Washington Post. The group faulted the agency responsible for the levees, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for adopting safety standards that were "too close to the margin" to protect human life. It also called for an urgent re-examination of the entire levee system, saying there were no assurances that the miles of concrete "I-walls" in New Orleans would hold up against even a moderate hurricane.
A clearer picture of what residents may be up against when a storm such as Hurricane Katrina is barreling down on them might motivate them to make the potentially life-saving move to head for safer ground, according to meteorologists and university researchers. The Mobile Register reports that a better understanding of why people do what they do is crucial to tailoring weather information in a way to get them to make the right decisions to protect themselves, according to scientists and researchers attending the 60th Interdepartmental Hurricane Conference in Mobile, Ala.
It's the worst year for crawfish production in decades, because of a shortage caused by drought and saltwater intrusion from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, according to the Houston Chronicle. Bob Odom, Louisiana's commissioner of agriculture and forestry, said that in his 26 years in office, "This is probably the worst I've ever seen as far as crawfish production." Louisiana is at about 35 percent to 40 percent of its normal crawfish output, he said. Earlier in the season, he was forecasting a smaller output of 20 percent to 25 percent. His state produces 90 percent of the crawfish consumed in the United States.
March 24, 2006
The Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, in partnership with United Steelworkers of America, on Thursday launched a $35,000 project to remove from 10 eastern New Orleans homes what the center's director, Beverly Wright, called "contaminated soils" left by Hurricane Katrina's flood. The Times-Picayune reports that the project, dubbed "A Safe Way Back Home," will remove 2 to 3 inches of existing soil, replace it and resod the yards of the homes, which include Wright's residence. Wright called the project a model for the rest of the city. Tom Harris, administrator of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality's environmental technology division, called it "completely unnecessary."
Nearly seven months after Katrina, the streets of New Orleans are still strewn with thousands of abandoned cars — many of them flooded-out, some stolen, some left by residents who have not returned since the Aug. 29 storm, The Associated Press reports. Many of the vehicles have been plundered of everything of value, including the tires. Many are encrusted with the dried gray muck left over after the floodwater receded. Some have become havens for insects and rats.
March 23, 2006
They are monumental things, these structures, as tall as four-story buildings and as brutal as bad public art. Each of them slightly resembles a giant's chair with massive steel lattices of pipe braced and welded every which way. But they could save central New Orleans from the next hurricane, The New York Times reports. The Army Corps of Engineers is now unveiling the 45-foot-tall frameworks that, mounted with gates, will soon be placed side by side near the mouth of the 17th Street Canal to prevent a storm from once again sending Lake Pontchartrain into New Orleans.
March 22, 2006
The mammoth effort to restore the greater New Orleans hurricane protection system to pre-Katrina levels by June 1 is 46 percent complete “and accelerating,” Col. Lewis Setliff III, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official in charge of the $770 million Task Force Guardian effort said Tuesday. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that Setliff, who is in charge of rebuilding the 169 miles of levees and floodwalls breached by Katrina in the New Orleans area, expressed confidence that the team of nearly 300 corps employees and more than 1,000 contract workers will complete its task before the start of the 2006 hurricane season.
March 21, 2006
As they near the end of their investigations into the deadly failures of New Orleans’ hurricane protection system, some of the nation’s top engineering minds have come to one unshakable conclusion: If the Army Corps of Engineers had built the region’s levees to the same standards it uses for dams, the city may well have survived Katrina without catastrophic flooding. Representatives of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the National Science Foundation said Monday that some of the problems they think played key roles in the disaster — low engineering safety standards, lack of rigorous peer review and shoddy maintenance — are simply not tolerated by the corps when building dams, but are commonplace in levee projects, reports The Times-Picayune.
March 20, 2006
Once the salt water is in your veins, Louisiana's coastal folk say, it's hard to give up the lifestyle of moonlit shrimping trips, the town ''fais do-do'' dances and afternoons spent on the bayous angling for catfish. But since last year's catastrophic hurricanes, this swampy land defined by Cajuns, cypress and tupelo gum forests, bayou-side saloons and, more recently, subdivisions, may have become too vulnerable for that lifestyle to continue, reports The Associated Press. Even before the devastation caused by Katrina, Louisiana's swampy coast had been sinking by as much as 2 inches a year. Along with that subsidence, the area is even more susceptible to flooding because last year's hurricanes damaged vast tracts of wetlands — already shrinking because of man's activities — that used to buffer the area from storms blowing in off the Gulf of Mexico.
Every Wednesday and Saturday, a band of volunteers converge on New Orleans' neighborhoods to attack what many now consider its greatest enemy: trash. The Los Angeles Times reports that they are tackling the heaps of paper, cartons, blankets, tattered clothing, wood and rug remnants that litter the city's streets and median strips — referred to here as "neutral ground" — six months after Hurricane Katrina tore through. Residents acknowledge that the city always has struggled with garbage collection. But the local government has faced a myriad of other post-storm challenges and only Friday kicked off a city-sponsored volunteer cleanup. Garbage has become New Orleans' new emblem; in many neighborhoods, more rubbish than cars line curbs.
March 16, 2006
The urban legend that mulch will be infested with termites from the debris from trees toppled by Katrina and Rita has circled the globe faster than a Category 5 storm. The Washington Post reports that county extension agents, pest specialists and other professionals have been deluged with e-mail from people raising the alarm. But experts say that the chances of the insects arriving in mulch are highly unlikely for various reasons. And even if said bugs made it this far, they could be effectively eradicated.
March 14, 2006
Scientists working on an independent study of a floodwall that collapsed during Hurricane Katrina said Monday that a government test 21 years ago predicted the wall could fail. The Associated Press reports that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a levee and floodwall system to test a design similar to the 17th Street Canal in 1985, which "indicated that failure was imminent," according to a statement from Raymond B. Seed and Robert G. Bea, in charge of the National Science Foundation's Independent Levee Investigation Team.
March 13, 2006
The force of surging high water from Hurricane Katrina bent back a key New Orleans flood wall and splintered its foundation, an investigating panel said in a report that sheds new light on the cause of the city's flooding while raising questions about the safety of the surviving levees. The report contradicted earlier views about why the 17th Street Canal levee collapsed, but it also said that the failures were "not anticipated" by the designers and that the system did not perform as intended, according to The Washington Post. A 450-foot section of the flood wall near Lake Pontchartrain collapsed Aug. 29 without ever being overtopped by Katrina's storm surge, according to the panel, which was appointed by the Army Corps of Engineers.
About half of the homeowners who live in federally designated flood plains do not have flood insurance, a nationwide study indicates. But more single-family homeowners in the South — including those in the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast — are insured than elsewhere across the country, according to the RAND Corp. study released Monday. The Associated Press reports that the new data come as the Federal Emergency Management Agency prepares to issue flood elevation maps that will likely require more homeowners to carry insurance — and, ultimately, dictate how hurricane victims are allowed to rebuild.
Rules requiring pre-demolition inspections for asbestos are being relaxed for some hurricane-damaged homes, though the debris will have to be handled as if it contains the harmful material, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. Normally, only buildings that are “structurally unsound and in danger of imminent collapse” are freed from the asbestos-inspection requirement. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently expanded that definition to include homes that have been washed off their foundations or are so flood-damaged that they must be torn down.
March 8, 2006
Weather data showing the need to raise the height of levees to defend New Orleans against stronger hurricanes was not incorporated in Army Corps of Engineers designs, even though the agency was informed of the new calculations as early as 1972, government records show. The Times-Picayune reports that the heights of floodwalls and levees now being rebuilt by the corps are based on research for a likely worst-case storm done in 1959. When weather service research in the 1970s increased the size and intensity of such a storm and its projected surges, the corps stuck to its original design specifications when work began in the 1980s, including for structures that failed during Hurricane Katrina.
A dispute over the safety of levee repairs in New Orleans intensified Tuesday, when the head of an academic team investigating levee failures during Hurricane Katrina said the repairs being overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers were flawed, according to a Los Angeles Times report. The corps is not paying adequate attention to the technical concerns the team is raising, said Raymond B. Seed, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, in a letter Tuesday to the corps commander. The issue involves the team's findings that the corps is using weak sand — which would quickly erode during storms — to rebuild about 12 miles of damaged levees just outside New Orleans on a shipping channel known as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet.
March 7, 2006
The White House has defended the quality of materials being used to rebuild the levees around New Orleans, as President Bush got assurances from the Army Corps of Engineers that it was on track to restore the system by the start of hurricane season. The Associated Press reports that Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, head of the Corps, told Bush in a private briefing that 100 miles of the 169 miles of levees damaged by the Aug. 29 hurricane have been restored. Strock took issue with the findings of two teams of independent experts who said the Corps was taking shortcuts and using substandard materials, leaving large sections of the system substantially weaker than before the hurricane.
March 6, 2006
The Army Corps of Engineers seems likely to fulfill a promise by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans's toppled flood walls to their original, pre-Katrina height by June 1, but two teams of independent experts monitoring the $1.6 billion reconstruction project say large sections of the rebuilt levee system will be substantially weaker than before the hurricane hit. The Washington Post reports that these experts say the corps, racing to rebuild 169 miles of levees destroyed or damaged by Katrina, is taking shortcuts to compress what is usually a years-long construction process into a few weeks. They say that weak, substandard materials are being used in some levee walls, citing lab tests as evidence.
A litany of environmental and health unknowns hangs over the New Orleans region more than six months after Hurricane Katrina, from 46 potential hot spots of contamination and the continuing cleanup of 8 million gallons of spilled oil, to health care workers raising the alarm over a spike in Legionnaires' disease. The Times-Picayune reports that nevertheless, authorities expressed increasing confidence in recent days that the region successfully skirted the nightmare scenario: a New Orleans forever marred by tainted soils, fouled waterways and unexplainable health maladies. Instead, state and federal environmental agencies and public health officials depict a region grappling with problems already present on Aug. 29.
An emptied New Orleans is seeing the return of one longtime resident it could do without: the termite. Reuters reports that scientists had predicted the dirty salt water that flooded New Orleans in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina would spell the demise of the voracious Formosan subterranean termites that have plagued the city for more than 50 years. But Formosans, unlike native termites, can establish colonies in trees or buildings and probably fled to higher ground when Katrina's rains started, insect experts said.
In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President George W. Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials. The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about flood waters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.
See Associated Press article/USA TODAY blog
March 3, 2006
In the hectic, confused hours after Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, Louisiana's governor hesitantly but mistakenly assured the Bush administration that New Orleans' levees were intact, according to a new video obtained by the Associated Press showing briefings that day with federal officials. The timing of the levee breach has been a key issue in exhaustive reviews of failures to respond to Katrina and highlights miscommunication about the scope of the storm's damage at all levels of government.
See Associated Press article, view video footage
A number of businesses owe their livelihood to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, the reviled navigational shortcut between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico that many faulted for much of New Orleans’ devastation. The New York Times reports that the canal, referred to locally as “Mr. Go,” is widely considered an environmental disaster. Residents and officials in New Orleans say they want it shut down or at least bottled up. If the channel is closed, thousands of jobs could be lost unless the government spends $400 million to move the nine major businesses that currently depend on the channel directly to the banks of the Mississippi.
March 2, 2006
Months after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters receded, New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward was still covered with a layer of crusty dark dirt. National Public Radio reports that some scientists and environmental activists say the dried muck from the floodwaters that still covers some inner city neighborhoods could pose health risks to people who return. Experts disagree about whether the floodwaters are the source of the high levels of contaminants or if the contaminants were in the soil before the storm. But the fact that there are high levels of lead, arsenic and other hazardous chemicals is not in dispute.
See National Public Radio article, hear report
March 1, 2006
On the day that Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, President Bush and a top presidential aide were worried about whether New Orleans' levees had held, according to a transcript of discussions among disaster officials on the front lines of the storm. Those concerns, expressed about midday Aug. 29, are in contrast to an image of a detached president and also to what happened later that night. That's when an official manning the federal emergency operations center held off acting on reports of levee breaches as he waited for confirmation. The transcript, obtained by The Times-Picayune, illustrates the gulf at the highest levels of government between concern for the disaster and action.
February 28, 2006
The Bush administration has asked Congress to pay for two huge gates in the New Orleans area to close off the navigational canals that devastated the city's Lower Ninth Ward, along with "armored" levees that would not be destroyed when water washed over the top, according to the most recent details of its spending plan. The New York Times reports that the $1.46 billion flood-control proposal is part of the administration's $19.8 billion emergency financing request that was announced this month.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco expressed concern Monday that language attached to the $4.2 billion that President Bush recently proposed for additional housing recovery financing in southeastern Louisiana could radically alter the landscape in New Orleans, The Times-Picayune reports. In Washington for the National Governor's Association meeting, Blanco said she is worried that restricting the housing money to "mitigation" uses could turn the worst flood-damaged sections of the city into green space, off limits to residential or commercial development.
February 23, 2006
Floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina deposited arsenic, lead and petrochemical compounds across greater New Orleans in amounts that are potentially dangerous to human health despite federal and state assurances that the sludge is safe, according to a new study based on Environmental Protection Agency data. The Washington Post reports that the study, which was conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council and is to be released today, urges the government to clean up the waste before permitting young children to return to the struggling city.
February 22, 2006
State officials likely will require owners who receive renovation grants to elevate their houses if a FEMA cost-benefit analysis shows it makes fiscal sense, Louisiana Recovery Authority director Andy Kopplin said Tuesday, according to The Times-Picayune. Raising a house that meets that standard likely will be an attractive option because federal hazard-mitigation grants should cover the cost and the homeowner will wind up with a property that is less prone to flooding, Kopplin said.
February 21, 2006
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ investigation into the flooding of New Orleans after Katrina is overlooking one of the most important causes: organizational failures, according to an outside engineering group working officially with the corps. The New York Times reports that the corps is spending about $20 million to understand the physical causes of the levee breaches that left more than 75 percent of New Orleans flooded. But the engineering group said the corps should also be looking into "discontinuity and chaos" in the creation and maintenance of the levees, according to a letter from the group to Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the chief of the corps.
Eager to demonstrate a new interest in political reform, Louisiana legislators have passed a constitutional amendment consolidating the state's patronage-ridden levee boards, hoping to prove they could be trusted with Washington's money, several said. But legislators turned back another crucial goal of those pushing for change, refusing to approve a bill that would shrink New Orleans's bloated government, The New York Times reports.
February 17, 2006
Almost six months after Hurricane Katrina, a mammoth red barge, an enduring symbol of the storm, still sits in the middle of what's left of the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans. USA TODAY reports that the wayward vessel got there after tearing loose from its moorings and riding a torrent of floodwater into the neighborhood, coming to rest on top of houses, fences and the nose of a yellow school bus. It has been at the heart of lawsuits and investigations.
After resolutely resisting critics’ attempts to alter the governor’s levee board overhaul plan, the Louisiana House gave a nearly unanimous blessing Thursday to the milestone legislation dissolving local commissions in the New Orleans area in favor of regional authorities in charge of hurricane protection, The Times-Picayune reports. Swept forward by a surge of public opinion after Hurricane Katrina in favor of changing the fragmented and parochial system of flood control in the storm-ravaged region, the two bills are intended to address Louisiana's reputation for political fiefdoms and an open door to patronage.
The two U.S. senators who produced the 2002 campaign finance overhaul law are now turning their attention to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Times-Picayune reports that Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., have tried before to pass legislation to change an agency they say sometimes builds unneeded projects that can't be justified by legitimate cost-benefit analyses, and that also at times ignores adverse environmental consequences. The failure of the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the senators said, ought to give Congress real impetus to bring changes in 2006.
February 14, 2006
The Army Corps of Engineers is building a 13,000-square-foot model to try to recreate the conditions that occurred in Hurricane Katrina and to help the agency figure out why things went so tragically wrong, reports The New York Times. The model is only one part of a $20 million effort to study the effects of the storm, along with computer simulations, intensive data gathering and analysis.
February 10, 2006
Senate Democrats investigating FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina say they have documented nearly 30 instances in which federal and local government officials gave early reports on Aug. 29 that levees had broken and that New Orleans was flooding, including one report at 8:30 a.m. the day of the storm. That information is likely to raise fresh questions about why President Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff were evidently unaware of the flooding until the day after the storm, CNN reports.
February 8, 2006
Levee board consolidation doesn't sound like political dynamite. But as residents of post-Katrina New Orleans wrestle with whether it is worth rebuilding shattered homes and lives, it has become a potent symbol of efforts to tackle a long-standing culture of cronyism that may have worsened the disaster, Reuters reports. Critics say the local bodies in charge of the barriers that failed to stop Hurricane Katrina's devastating floods were rife with patronage, with officials handing out contracts to friends and neglecting their main duty of ensuring the levees were in good condition. Boards even branched into real estate and gambling.
Mississippians could get stuck paying thousands of dollars to have hurricane debris removed from their properties if it's not cleared by March 15, reports The (Jackson) Clarion-Ledger. That's the deadline to have the Federal Emergency Management Agency pick up the full tab for debris removal. Afterward, the state and municipalities, many of which have been financially decimated by Hurricane Katrina, each will have to pay 5 percent of the total cleanup cost. A 5 percent share could amount to millions of dollars for many of the Coast's hardest-hit counties and cities, which will have to decide whether to pick up any debris after the deadline.
Seeking more money from Washington for hurricane relief, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco entered uncharted legal territory with a threat to block oil and gas leases worth hundreds of millions to the federal treasury unless the state received its "fair share" of the revenues. The New York Times reports that oil and gas companies pay for the right to extract natural resources from the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana collects royalties, as well as severance taxes on resources extracted within three miles of its border. Those programs add hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the state treasury.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to ask Congress for millions of dollars in additional funds to build permanent canal closures and pumps in Orleans Parish and for wetland restoration and other coastal hurricane protection projects, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. Maj. Gen. Don Riley, director of Civil Works for the Army Corps of Engineers, said during a news conference that the additional projects are part of the corps’ plans to increase hurricane protection after initial repairs from Hurricane Katrina are complete.
February 7, 2006
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has adopted higher flood elevation standards for all FEMA-funded projects in low-lying areas of the state, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. The new standard will exceed those used by the National Flood Insurance Program and will play a major role in rebuilding efforts from Hurricane Katrina.
February 6, 2006
Like myriad other local institutions in New Orleans, Louisiana’s levee boards have existed for years in relative obscurity, all the while amassing wealth and property, and even maintaining their own police forces. But following the disastrous flooding after Hurricane Katrina, the operations of the levee boards have come under intense questioning, The New York Times reports. And today, the State Legislature convenes a special session that will consider whether to consolidate the local boards in Orleans and seven neighboring parishes into one regional board that would be professionally run and managed.
February 3, 2006
A termite expert is questioning whether tiny, voracious Formosan termites played a role in the failure of levee walls in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, The Times-Picayune reports. Louisiana State University entomologist Gregg Henderson, a world-renowned expert on termites, said there are clear signs that the destructive insects were present, and he wants the opportunity to dig into the levees beneath the walls to find out if termite nests contributed to their weakening. Army Corps of Engineers officials, however, say no evidence has been found to indicate that termites undermined the integrity of the levees.
Local companies claim the garbage parade is passing them by while the out-of-state contractor hired to remove hurricane debris in Mississippi uses what they call underhanded delay tactics. The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports that AshBritt, the Florida company contracted through the Army Corps of Engineers to remove Katrina debris, filed a protest last month hoping to stop federal "set-asides." The set-asides would give $300 million of additional cleanup money to Mississippi companies and minority- and woman-owned firms. Local firms are upset because they feel they are getting a cold shoulder in their own backyards.
February 2, 2006
A federal judge in New Orleans has certified as a class-action a lawsuit against Murphy Oil Corp. over an oil spill after Hurricane Katrina, according to the Associated Press. U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon's decision applies to an area in St. Bernard Parish that falls between what the plaintiffs said was damaged and what Murphy sought. The refinery spilled about 1 million gallons of oil in the aftermath of the Aug. 29 hurricane. The suit claims Murphy was negligent. The company has denied the claim.
January 31, 2006
A day before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries fired off an urgent request for 300 rubber rafts to rescue people from what was expected to be high water in New Orleans. Marked "Red-High" priority, the plea went to the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Denton, Texas, where a team of disaster experts considered it, The Times-Picayune reports. As Katrina lashed southeast Louisiana and ruptured New Orleans' levees Aug. 29, FEMA gave its answer: "Request denied." The episode, which came to light Monday at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is just the latest in a growing collection of planning miscues that, despite years of warnings, left the region woefully unprepared for the storm.
January 30, 2006
As state and federal agencies race to fix almost 170 miles of local levees damaged by the storm before the next hurricane season begins June 1, armoring -- protecting the surface of levees with concrete, rocks or synthetic fabric to prevent erosion and scouring -- has become a constant in discussions about the effort. According to The Times-Picayune, the subject will be back in the headlines this week when the Army Corps of Engineers expects to forward a request to the White House for an appropriation of up to $600 million for levee armoring in the New Orleans area. Corps officials said the proposal will carry an "urgent" tag the agency hopes will speed its journey to approval in a Congress facing tighter budgets and a lengthy to-do list.
January 27, 2006
Protecting coastal Louisiana from storms isn’t a lost cause, despite public comments by a few scientists who say the state is sinking too fast to save. That’s the message from a group of nationally known experts who issued a report Thursday on coastal planning, according to The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. But changes must be made — and those changes shouldn’t be the wholesale adoption of the Dutch storm-protection system that has drawn the attention of Louisiana public officials, said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
January 24, 2006
In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show. The Washington Post reports that a 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center was delivered by e-mail to the White House's "situation room," the nerve center where crises are handled, at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet accompanying the document.
January 20, 2006
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed 115 oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico in the worst natural disaster to hit the oil and natural gas industry in the Gulf, the Minerals Management Service said Thursday. The Times-Picayune reports that the most recent assessment from the federal agency showed that in addition to the destroyed platforms, 52 platforms and 183 pipelines were damaged, and 418 "minor pollution incidents" occurred within a four-week period in August and September. A spokeswoman could not provide the cumulative amount of oil that was spilled.
January 18, 2006
Eight Gulf Coast plants in Mississippi that handle hazardous waste or chemicals and were directly in the path of Hurricane Katrina did not release those chemicals into their surroundings, a new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report concludes. The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports that EPA investigators took soil and sediment samples around the eight sites and compared the amounts of chemicals in those samples to known levels before the storm. They also compared the results to guidelines developed for lifelong exposure deemed by officials to be safe for people.
The debate about levee board consolidation is building steam heading into a Feb. 6-17 special session of the Legislature that will include proposals for overhauling the levee governing systems in the New Orleans area and southeast Louisiana. The Times-Picayune reports that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco has charged the newly created Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority with the task of bringing legislation into focus for levee board consolidation, in addition to the authority's initial mission to combine coastal restoration and flood protection into a single strategy that would also set the state's financial priorities on the issue.
January 17, 2006
The 17th Street levee in New Orleans failed because its engineers made a series of crucial mistakes, one of which was to base the levee design on the average strength of the soil rather than on the strength of its weakest layer, investigators recently told the Los Angeles Times. The faulty soil analysis is one of many defects or flaws in concept, design, construction and maintenance that left many of the levees in New Orleans especially vulnerable to Katrina. Environmental miscalculations, including the loss of natural protection from marshes, added to the problems.
January 13, 2006
Attorneys argued in federal court on Thursday over whether homeowners whose property fell victim to an oil spill from Hurricane Katrina can band together and sue Murphy Oil Corp, in a class-action lawsuit. Reuters reports that at the hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Eldon Fallon, attorneys for residents of St. Bernard Parish, where the spill occurred, argued Murphy is responsible for oil damage to some 10,000 houses in an area of about 6 square miles.
Local leaders in Hancock County, Miss., are not buying a FEMA assertion that more than half of Hurricane Katrina's mess has been cleaned up. The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports that according to a FEMA statement released this week, debris removal operations in Mississippi are more than 60 percent complete. But officials in Hancock County, one of the hardest hit by the Aug. 29 storm, said the numbers are misleading, and are not a reflection of the progress being made here.
Ignored in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Pine Belt area of Mississippi, officials with the region's solid waste authority are now poised to help in the cleanup. The Hattiesburg American reports that the head of the area’s Solid Waste Management Authority tried to notify the Corps of Engineers and FEMA in the weeks after the storm that the federally approved landfill in Perry County was available for debris cleanup, but no one ever called him back.
See Hattiesburg American article
January 10, 2006
An independent group of scientists and engineers is working on a coastline strategy that could help planners in combining coastal restoration efforts with improved hurricane protection in a "multiple lines of defense" approach for New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana. The Times-Picayune reports that it may also become a starting point for the controversial decisions about which areas will be ringed with levees and open for development and which areas will be targeted for wetland restoration outside the levee system.
When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast, they turned dozens of communities into massive trash heaps. When the winds died down and the flood waters receded, the storms left behind a line of debris some 500 miles long. The National Journal reports that by year's end, contractors hired by the Army Corps of Engineers and other government agencies had hauled away some 40 million cubic yards of junk in Louisiana and Mississippi. Even so, millions of cubic yards of debris remained, much of it in houses that will have to be gutted or demolished.
January 9, 2006
Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu is leading a delegation to the Netherlands on Monday to study the flood control systems protecting a nation much farther below sea-level than New Orleans, the Associated Press reports. The Netherlands' ambassador invited Landrieu after Hurricane Katrina broke floodgates and levees, flooding most of New Orleans and all of neighboring St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, she said. Holland recently completed a 50-year program to build dams, sea walls, and surge barriers designed to protect the south of the country against almost any storm.
January 6, 2006
When she calls the Legislature into an upcoming special session, Gov. Kathleen Blanco wants lawmakers to tackle two politically thorny issues: consolidating levee boards in south Louisiana and shrinking the New Orleans government, the Associated Press reports. Blanco told the New Orleans City Council on Thursday that those two items were planned for the special legislative session agenda that she will devise for a second hurricane recovery session.
January 5, 2006
The bulk of nearly $3 billion allotted to the Army Corps of Engineers under a huge spending bill signed by President Bush in the waning days of 2005 will pay for building and restoring Louisiana levees along waterways from Lake Pontchartrain to Venice, with nearly one-third going to rebuild local parish levees to their original design heights. The Times-Picayune reports that under the law, the corps will spend more than $1.1 billion to return levees, floodwalls and giant drainage pumps that typically are maintained by local or state authorities to their pre-storm status or better, while the remainder will be split mostly to expedite the agency's ongoing hurricane projects and to study flood control in south Louisiana.
The bulk of nearly $3 billion allotted to the Army Corps of Engineers under a huge spending bill signed by President Bush in the waning days of 2005 will pay for building and restoring Louisiana levees along waterways from Lake Pontchartrain to Venice, with nearly one-third going to rebuild local parish levees to their original design heights. The Times-Picayune reports that under the law, the corps will spend more than $1.1 billion to return levees, floodwalls and giant drainage pumps that typically are maintained by local or state authorities to their pre-storm status or better, while the remainder will be split mostly to expedite the agency's ongoing hurricane projects and to study flood control in south Louisiana.
December 21, 2005
Researchers say Hurricane Katrina was a weaker storm than first thought when it slammed the Gulf Coast, with the strength of a Category 3 storm instead of a Category 4, according to the Associated Press. New data shows Katrina's top winds were about 127 miles at impact, and that New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain were likely spared the storm's strongest winds, according to the National Hurricane Center.
December 20, 2005
In Louisiana, contractors have disposed of more than six million pounds of waste so far throughout the state, and workers say it is only the beginning, according to The New York Times. There have been 222,000 refrigerators, washers and dryers gathered, and more than a million containers of hazardous waste have been plucked from land and sea. Many of the disaster recovery efforts are financed through FEMA and are managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency and other government organizations, and are carried out by contractors.
December 16, 2005
From the moment New Orleans' filthy floodwaters were pumped into Lake Pontchartrain, regulators said environmental rules had to be set aside to save the Gulf Coast from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. The Associated Press reports that federal and state agencies waived environmental laws regulating open burning and asbestos removal and waived rules for landfills, gasoline and diesel fuel standards, and water and air pollution—all in the name of recovery and rebuilding. Some say the waivers went too far, padding the pockets of oil companies and creating long-term environmental hazards.
The Bush administration yesterday pledged an additional $1.5 billion in federal spending to strengthen New Orleans's storm-battered levees, vowing to give the city "better and safer" flood walls but stopping short of explicitly promising protection against catastrophic Category 5 hurricanes. The Washington Post reports that the proposed new spending would double the White House's previous $1.6 billion commitment for levee repairs and match the level sought by Louisiana's congressional delegation in budget negotiations in recent weeks.
In another indictment of local oversight of levees in the New Orleans area, a U.S. Senate committee heard wide-ranging testimony Thursday about lax maintenance, confusion over who was in charge of emergency repairs and even a report that the Army Corps of Engineers was blocked by a local levee official from trying to fill breaches in the London Avenue Canal. The Times-Picayune reports that a colonel who testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security said corps officials and contractors who responded to the breached levees after the hurricane found themselves locked in the middle of "turf wars" involving some of the levee districts with jurisdiction: Orleans, East Jefferson and West Jefferson.
See The Times-Picayune article
December 15, 2005
Some New Orleans neighborhoods are covered in a layer of sediment containing with levels lead above the concentration the federal government considers hazardous to human health, a new study has found. The lead poses the greatest hazard to small children who might play in that dirt, said Steven M. Presley, a toxicologist at Texas Tech University, who led the soil survey team, according to The Washington Post. The hazard could be reduced by keeping the dirt from becoming dry and airborne, by covering it with uncontaminated soil or, if necessary, by hauling it away.
December 14, 2005
It will likely be another year, and possibly longer, before the millions of tons of debris generated by Hurricane Katrina will be removed from the streets and yards of southeast Louisiana, officials said Tuesday — and that's not including the mountains of debris expected when thousands of homes in the region are razed. The Times-Picayune reports that making matters worse, from the perspective of reeling local governments, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has told local leaders that come Jan. 15, it will no longer pick up the entire cost of the effort.
December 12, 2005
A broad clash has developed along the Gulf Coast over whether to cede large swaths of land to nature, to rebuild much as it was, or to rebuild homes at a higher price with more robust foundations and on structures that raise them above the ground. The New York Times reports that the post-Katrina debate is playing out in Mississippi with a cast of characters that includes storm victims, coastal engineers, mortgage lenders, the insurance industry, and local, state and federal government officials.
More than three months after Katrina, thousands of workers cleaning up the unfathomably vast mess seem barely to have scratched the surface, says USA TODAY. With so much hurricane debris from Katrina and Rita — more than 100 million cubic yards, enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome 22 times over — they could be doing their dirty job for two years or more. The cost could be as much as $4 billion.
December 6, 2005
Soil and sediment samples taken at 11 locations around coastal Mississippi revealed elevated levels of heavy metals, dioxin and microorganisms, including arsenic levels more than twice the federal limit at DeLisle Elementary School, according to a report released by the Sierra Club on Monday. The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports that the tests were completed by an environmental consultant from New Iberia, La., who said that her test results were consistent with those found by the Environmental Protection Agency, but that interpretations of those results were different.
December 5, 2005
Before Hurricane Katrina, levee inspections in New Orleans were so superficial that one engineer who used to work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said he conducted more diligent inspections on Florida levees that protected cattle, The Times-Picayune reports. Engineers familiar with proper levee inspection routines across the country said the annual tours of New Orleans' vital hurricane protection levees — described by critics as cursory drive-bys more about fellowship and lunch than looking for problems — sounded nothing like the serious geotechnical investigations conducted in other places.
December 2, 2005
The debate over whether the toxic discharges that swept over New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish after Hurricane Katrina have left the area unfit for human habitation reignited on Thursday, as state environmental officials and local environmental and citizens' groups accused one another of misinterpreting data. The New York Times reports that a Louisiana state toxicologist said that about 95 percent of the city was fit for long-term human habitation. Local environmental and citizens' groups, however, citing analyses of their own samples and those the government collected from the sediment in once-flooded areas, said that without an extensive cleanup of toxic sediments, at least 75 percent of the city was unfit for families with children.
November 30, 2005
The floodwall on the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans was destined to fail long before it reached its maximum design load of 14 feet of water because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers underestimated the weak soil layers 10 to 25 feet below the levee, the state's forensic levee investigation team concluded in a report to be released this week. The Times-Picayune reports that the miscalculation was so obvious and fundamental that investigators said they "could not fathom" how the design team of engineers from the corps, local firm Eustis Engineering and the national firm Modjeski and Masters all could have missed it.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision to waive environmental restrictions on oil refineries in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has polluted the air in southeast Louisiana, a local environmental group said. The Associated Press reports that oil refineries there were allowed by the EPA to emit more pollutants into the air than they normally could so that operations could start up faster. But the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has charged that the waivers contributed to very high levels of benzene detected by EPA sampling in early October.
November 29, 2005
Building a flood protection system in New Orleans strong enough to withstand Category 5 storms is proving to be an astronomically expensive and technically complex proposition, The New York Times reports. It would involve far more than just higher levees: there would have to be extensive changes to the city's system of drainage canals and pumps, environmental restoration on a vast scale to replenish buffering wetlands and barrier islands, and even sea gates far out of town near the Gulf of Mexico.
November 22, 2005
Louisiana officials are concerned that the nationally televised comments of an Louisiana Recovery Authority official could help kill what they say is a comprehensive plan for protecting New Orleans from major hurricanes and restoring the state's fractured coastline, reports The Times-Picayune. Congress already is considering levee-raising and wetlands restoration, two critical steps to better protect southern Louisiana. The authority's executive director said on 60 Minutes that within 90 years the city would be an island surrounded by water and that people and businesses should move away.
November 21, 2005
For 300 years, the sea has been closing in on New Orleans. As the coastal erosion continues, it is estimated that the city will be off shore in 90 years, according to a report by 60 Minutes. As the city begins what is likely to be the biggest demolition project in U.S. history, the question is, can — or should — New Orleans be back together again?
November 18, 2005
The structure the Corps of Engineers chose to protect against a Category 3 storm in New Orleans was built atop previous work done by the Orleans Levee District and the Sewerage & Water Board, using engineering drawings and soil strength information handed down by the local agencies -- but never vetted through separate investigations by the corps, The Times-Picayune reports. Major General Don T. Riley, director of civil works at the Corps of Engineers, said the practice was "not atypical" because the corps often partners with other agencies, many of which have done earlier work on the sites.
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1132299709115270.xml
September 29, 2005
Koch Membrane Systems, a subsidiary of conservative patron Koch Industries, is helping FEMA and the military purify water in Biloxi, Miss. The Center for Public Integrity's reporting on Koch and the oil industry was among the winners announced at the Society of Environmental Journalists award ceremony last night.
Gulf storms put Koch's water filters to the test
Center for Public Integrity "Politics of Oil" report: Koch's Low Profile Belies Political Power
Winners: SEJ 4th Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment
September 23, 2005
Using the government's most covert satellites, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is turning its cameras toward Hurricane Rita and the destruction it is expected to inflict on the Gulf Coast. The spy agency usually provides images and analysis of what's happening in other countries, but the office tasked with observing North and South America has lately found its work focused on hurricanes. Images of damage captured after Katrina struck included a gas rig that vanished from the sea and broken levees. In Rita's case, the agency is inventorying beforehand the locations of hazardous material, petroleum refineries and other potentially problematic facilities.
Spy imagery agency prepares to record Rita's destructive path