The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is scrambling to complete rebuilding of levees in and around New Orleans which were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina six months ago. But critics are saying that the Corps is using substandard materials and ignoring levees with structural damage, which will leave the city with even less protection than it had last year.
This is yet another example of how the government makes things worse whenever it tries to “fix” something. And at a price tag of $1.6 billion, the reconstruction project, which National Science Foundation experts and a state-appointed team of scientists say shortens the normal years-long process of building a proper levee to just a few weeks, is set to be yet another colossal waste of money which will “create a sense of security that doesn’t exist,” said Louisiana State University engineering professor Ivor van Heerden, who heads the state team of experts.
The Corps disputed the assertion that it was using substandard materials, but admitted that work needed to bring the levee system up to a level that would withstand a hurricane like Katrina would not be complete by June 1.
The Corps said several steps that could help the levee system survive a major hurricane will have to wait until next year. For example, systematic testing for weak soils beneath the levees will not be completed until 2007. Two of the most devastating flood wall breaches during Katrina have been blamed in part on weak, peatlike soils beneath the walls’ foundations.
In addition, a plan to line the bases of certain critical levees with a protective layer of rock or concrete — a process known as “armoring” — is not expected to begin until summer, and then only if Congress provides additional money. Levee armoring significantly lowers the risk that a levee will collapse when it is overtopped by floodwaters.
A recent report by a prestigious panel of the American Society of Civil Engineers described the lack of armoring in New Orleans’s levees as a “fundamental flaw” that demands urgent attention. The same report also faulted the Corps for making predictions about the system’s safety before the agency officially determined what caused the levees to fail in the first place.
“Overtopping during Katrina caused catastrophic flooding and destruction of the levees themselves,” said David E. Daniel, president of the University of Texas at Dallas and a member of the engineers panel. “It is inevitable that the levees will again be overtopped — the only question is when.” — Washington Post
I’m sure as hell not going back to New Orleans. The question is, should anyone go back, and should the levees be rebuilt at all? Harvard University economist Jeffrey Alan Miron says no.
The Katrina disaster occurred mainly because government spent billions constructing these levees in the first place; without this intervention, people would not have been living in areas well-below sea level. Repeating the initial mistake is an incredible waste of resources. More generally, government-subsidized flood insurance, and attempts by the Corps to promote human activity in areas where Mother Nature never intended, make no economic sense. — The Case for Small Government
I’m kind of inclined to agree with him. It is, after all, a colossal waste of taxpayer money for all of us to subsidize the rebuilding of New Orleans every generation or so — or even every couple of years.
Found via LP Blog.
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Lenny Zimmermann
Mar 06, 2006
Well, I’m not too sure I agree that the levees necessarily lead to population of those areas. Indeed many of those areas were populated to some extent despte the flooding. New Orleans is just in too strategic a spot for there NOT to be a city here. It just has too many advantages comercially and militarily and in order to facilitate those advantages you need people here.
One thing that is very imprtant to note here is that the primary levee system for the region is the Mississippi River levee, and that system held up just fine. It was the hurricane leveee system that failed due to improper engineering in the first place. Plus the level of portection decided upon was based on a fairly poor risk assessment and was simply never updated.
The problem I have is that the region here is vital enough to the state of Louisiana and the United States (we ARE the largest US port by tonnage) that some kind of levee system is needed. And so far the RIVER version of that levee has worked great for… at least 4 decades, but I believe it’s actually been a good deal longer then that. However the local region is usually screwed out of a great deal of local resources by the Federal Government (oil and gas leases are a huge boost to the Federal pot, but they don’t share much at all with the State whose borders those leases are being given to) and that leave the local region ill equipped to build those levees on their own. Worse is that the levees need to be fairly contiguous and seamless with each other for a far greater distance than any local governmental entity could manage. In libertarian terms I can build the best damned levee in the world, but if my neighbor builds nothing it don’t do me much good. Whose getting screwed in the equation?
At any rate the whole damned mess is so convoluted that, effectively, we have no choice but to turn to the Feds to build the damned levees and we are at thier mercy for how they do it.
I agree about federal flood insurance. It probably should be privatized and as it is we pay out the ass for insurance around here anyway, both flood and standard homweowners (I pay more than 4 times as much on my little $150k home in Metairie as my Dad pays on wht is at least a $ .5Mil home in New Jersey and that’s just for homeowner’s.) So we HAVE and we DO pay for our insurance pretty extensively, we’re still gettting screwed by our insurance companies anyway and I’m not about to feel sorry for them because insurance is all about risk management. Besides most of the houses in this region have been paid for 3 times over in insurance by now.
Finally your final statement is a bit out of whack. New Orleans is a city over 300 years old and it has not had to be rebuilt every generation, let alone every few years, during htat time span. A few times, yes, notably twice to fire, not flood. We’ve also known about the Katrina scenario (and have been warning the US Corps of Engineers and the Feds about it!) for decades, but have never gotten the funding to build the non-river levees to proper specs. For us the Katrina scenario was a risk assessment factor known as a 500-year event. That’s not to say another storm like that won’t hit us in the same way this year, it’s always a possibility, but statistically speaking it should be a good long time before we get nailed like that again.
It’s all about the risk assessment. The region cannot viably be abandoned (and why should it when it normally never has these problems) and you can bet the locals won’t abandon it. We know too much what it means to be here. I would be happy to tell the Feds to shove it and do it all on our own, but frankly they just won’t let us do it anyway. Because the Feds know just how much we mean to them as well, when all is said and done.
May 14, 2007
Dylan’s Blog Project » Blog Archive » The Levees