NBC: New Orleans

I found this article from a New Orleans paper while looking for information
on Katrina. For those of you that have been to New Orleans and know the
city's charms this could be a disaster from which it would take the city a
considerable length of time to recover, if at all. Let's all hope it doesn't
turn out this bad.



http://www.nola.com/washingaway/thebigone_1.html




THE BIG ONE
A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a
moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time.

By Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid
Staff writers

The line of splintered planks, trash and seaweed scattered along the slope
of New Orleans' lakefront levees on Hayne Boulevard in late September 1998
marked more than just the wake of Hurricane Georges. It measured the slender
margin separating the city from mass destruction.

The debris, largely the remains of about 70 camps smashed by the waves of a
storm surge more than 7 feet above sea level, showed that Georges, a
Category 2 storm that only grazed New Orleans, had pushed waves to within a
foot of the top of the levees. A stronger storm on a slightly different
course -- such as the path Georges was on just 16 hours before landfall --
could have realized emergency officials' worst-case scenario: hundreds of
billions of gallons of lake water pouring over the levees into an area
averaging 5 feet below sea level with no natural means of drainage.

That would turn the city and the east bank of Jefferson Parish into a lake
as much as 30 feet deep, fouled with chemicals and waste from ruined septic
systems, businesses and homes. Such a flood could trap hundreds of thousands
of people in buildings and in vehicles. At the same time, high winds and
tornadoes would tear at everything left standing. Between 25,000 and 100,000
people would die, said John Clizbe, national vice president for disaster
services with the American Red Cross.

"A catastrophic hurricane represents 10 or 15 atomic bombs in terms of the
energy it releases," said Joseph Suhayda, a Louisiana State University
engineer who is studying ways to limit hurricane damage in the New Orleans
area. "Think about it. New York lost two big buildings. Multiply that by 10
or 20 or 30 in the area impacted and the people lost, and we know what could
happen."

Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to
dry out the area and begin to make it livable. But there wouldn't be much
for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins.

The scene has been played out for years in computer models and
emergency-operations simulations. Officials at the local, state and national
level are convinced the risk is genuine and are devising plans for
alleviating the aftermath of a disaster that could leave the city
uninhabitable for six months or more. The Army Corps of Engineers has begun
a study to see whether the levees should be raised to counter the threat.
But officials say that right now, nothing can stop "the big one."

Like coastal Bangladesh, where typhoons killed 100,000 and 300,000
villagers, respectively, in two horrific storms in 1970 and 1991, the New
Orleans area lies in a low, flat coastal area. Unlike Bangladesh, New
Orleans has hurricane levees that create a bowl with the bottom dipping
lower than the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain. Though providing protection
from weaker storms, the levees also would trap any water that gets inside --
by breach, overtopping or torrential downpour -- in a catastrophic storm.

"Filling the bowl" is the worst potential scenario for a natural disaster in
the United States, emergency officials say. The Red Cross' projected death
toll dwarfs estimates of 14,000 dead from a major earthquake along the New
Madrid, Mo., fault, and 4,500 dead from a similar catastrophic earthquake
hitting San Francisco, the next two deadliest disasters on the agency's
list.

The projected death and destruction eclipse almost any other natural
disaster that people paid to think about catastrophes can dream up. And the
risks are significant, especially over the long term. In a given year, for
example, the corps says the risk of the lakefront levees being topped is
less than 1 in 300. But over the life of a 30-year mortgage, statistically
that risk approaches 9 percent.

In the past year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials have begun
working with state and local agencies to devise plans on what to do if a
Category 5 hurricane strikes New Orleans.

Shortly after he took office, FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh ordered aides to
examine the nation's potential major catastrophes, including the New Orleans
scenario.

"Catastrophic disasters are best defined in that they totally outstrip local
and state resources, which is why the federal government needs to play a
role," Allbaugh said. "There are a half-dozen or so contingencies around the
nation that cause me great concern, and one of them is right there in your
back yard."

In concert with state and local officials, FEMA is studying evacuation
procedures, postdisaster rescue strategies, temporary housing and technical
issues such as how to pump out water trapped inside the levees, said Michael
Lowder, chief of policy and planning in FEMA's Readiness, Response and
Recovery directorate. A preliminary report should be completed in the next
few months.

Louisiana emergency management officials say they lobbied the agency for
years to study how to respond to New Orleans' vulnerability, finally getting
attention last year.

With computer modeling of hurricanes and storm surges, disaster experts have
developed a detailed picture of how a storm could push Lake Pontchartrain
over the levees and into the city.

"The worst case is a hurricane moving in from due south of the city," said
Suhayda, who has developed a computer simulation of the flooding from such a
storm. On that track, winds on the outer edges of a huge storm system would
be pushing water in Breton Sound and west of the Chandeleur Islands into the
St. Bernard marshes and then Lake Pontchartrain for two days before
landfall.

"Water is literally pumped into Lake Pontchartrain," Suhayda said. "It will
try to flow through any gaps, and that means the Inner Harbor Navigation
Canal (which is connected to Breton Sound by the Mississippi River-Gulf
Outlet) and the Chef Menteur and the Rigolets passes.

"So now the lake is 5 to 8 feet higher than normal, and we're talking about
a lake that's only 15 or 20 feet deep, so you're adding a third to a half as
much water to the lake," Suhayda said. As the eye of the hurricane moves
north, next to New Orleans but just to the east, the winds over the lake
switch around to come from the north.

"As the eye impacts the Mississippi coastline, the winds are now blowing
south across the lake, maybe at 50, 80, 100 mph, and all that water starts
to move south," he said. "It's moving like a big army advancing toward the
lake's hurricane-protection system. And then the winds themselves are
generating waves, 5 to 10 feet high, on top of all that water. They'll be
breaking and crashing along the sea wall."

Soon waves will start breaking over the levee.

"All of a sudden you'll start seeing flowing water. It'll look like a weir,
water just pouring over the top," Suhayda said. The water will flood the
lakefront, filling up low-lying areas first, and continue its march south
toward the river. There would be no stopping or slowing it; pumping systems
would be overwhelmed and submerged in a matter of hours.

"Another scenario is that some part of the levee would fail," Suhayda said.
"It's not something that's expected. But erosion occurs, and as levees
broke, the break will get wider and wider. The water will flow through the
city and stop only when it reaches the next higher thing. The most
continuous barrier is the south levee, along the river. That's 25 feet high,
so you'll see the water pile up on the river levee."

As the floodwaters invade and submerge neighborhoods, the wind will be
blowing at speeds of at least 155 mph, accompanied by shorter gusts of as
much as 200 mph, meteorologists say, enough to overturn cars, uproot trees
and toss people around like dollhouse toys.

The wind will blow out windows and explode many homes, even those built to
the existing 110-mph building-code standards. People seeking refuge from the
floodwaters in high-rise buildings won't be very safe, recent research
indicates, because wind speed in a hurricane gets greater with height. If
the winds are 155 mph at ground level, scientists say, they may be 50 mph
stronger 100 feet above street level.

Buildings also will have to withstand pummeling by debris picked up by water
surging from the lakefront toward downtown, with larger pieces acting like
battering rams.

Ninety percent of the structures in the city are likely to be destroyed by
the combination of water and wind accompanying a Category 5 storm, said
Robert Eichorn, former director of the New Orleans Office of Emergency
Preparedness. The LSU Hurricane Center surveyed numerous large public
buildings in Jefferson Parish in hopes of identifying those that might
withstand such catastrophic winds. They found none.

Amid this maelstrom, the estimated 200,000 or more people left behind in an
evacuation will be struggling to survive. Some will be housed at the
Superdome, the designated shelter in New Orleans for people too sick or
infirm to leave the city. Others will end up in last-minute emergency
refuges that will offer minimal safety. But many will simply be on their
own, in homes or looking for high ground.

Thousands will drown while trapped in homes or cars by rising water. Others
will be washed away or crushed by debris. Survivors will end up trapped on
roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by water, with no means of
escape and little food or fresh water, perhaps for several days.

"If you look at the World Trade Center collapsing, it'll be like that, but
add water," Eichorn said. "There will be debris flying around, and you're
going to be in the water with snakes, rodents, nutria and fish from the
lake. It's not going to be nice."

Mobilized by FEMA, search and rescue teams from across the nation will
converge on the city. Volunteer teams of doctors, nurses and emergency
medical technicians that were pre-positioned in Monroe or Shreveport before
the storm will move to the area, said Henry Delgado, regional emergency
coordinator for the U.S. Public Health Service.

But just getting into the city will be a problem for rescuers. Approaches by
road may be washed out.

"Whether or not the Airline Highway bridge across the Bonnet Carre Spillway
survives, we don't know," said Jay Combe, a coastal hydraulic engineer with
the corps. "The I-10 bridge (west of Kenner) is designed to withstand a
surge from a Category 3 storm, but it may be that water gets under the
spans, and we don't know if it will survive." Other bridges over waterways
and canals throughout the city may also be washed away or made unsafe, he
said. In a place where cars may be useless, small boats and helicopters will
be used to move survivors to central pickup areas, where they can be moved
out of the city. Teams of disaster mortuary volunteers, meanwhile, will
start collecting bodies. Other teams will bring in temporary equipment and
goods, including sanitation facilities, water, ice and generators. Food,
water and medical supplies will be airdropped to some areas and delivered to
others.

Stranded survivors will have a dangerous wait even after the storm passes.
Emergency officials worry that energized electrical wires could pose a
threat of electrocution and that the floodwater could become contaminated
with sewage and with toxic chemicals from industrial plants and backyard
sheds. Gasoline, diesel fuel and oil leaking from underground storage tanks
at service stations may also become a problem, corps officials say.

A variety of creatures -- rats, mice and nutria, poisonous snakes and
alligators, fire ants, mosquitoes and abandoned cats and dogs -- will be
searching for the same dry accommodations that people are using.

Contaminated food or water used for bathing, drinking and cooking could
cause illnesses including salmonella, botulism, typhoid and hepatitis.
Outbreaks of mosquito-borne dengue fever and encephalitis are likely, said
Dr. James Diaz, director of the department of public health and preventive
medicine at LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans.

"History will repeat itself," Diaz said. "My office overlooks one of the St.
Louis cemeteries, where there are many graves of victims of yellow fever.
Standing water in the subtropics is the breeding ground for mosquitoes."


Herculean pumping task

It probably will be at least four days after the hurricane before the corps
attempts to begin removing water from the city, Combe said. After a 1947
hurricane flooded the east bank, it took several days for the lake to return
to its normal average 14-foot depth, slowing efforts to drain floodwaters
from Metairie and Kenner.

Pumping won't be an option. Swamped existing pumping systems in Orleans and
Jefferson will be useless. Pumps can be brought in, but their capacity is
limited.

"If one goes to construction equipment rental firms, you can rent pumps with
a capacity of 6,000 to 8,000 gallons a minute, but that's just not enough
capacity," Combe said. "After Betsy the corps employed six dredges with a
combined capacity of 243,000 gallons per minute. It would take 44 hours to
drain a half-inch of water from the New Orleans metro area that way."

The most likely alternative is simply blowing holes in the levees or
widening existing breaches. Breaches in the levee totaling a half mile would
allow the water to drain in one day, Combe said. With a more modest effort,
totaling 100 feet of openings, draining would take four weeks. If they do
dynamite the levees, officials must also weigh the risk of another hurricane
hitting in the short term against the urgency of getting the water out.

Water levels will drop only to the level of the lake, leaving areas lower
than that with standing water that must be pumped out. Workers will then
focus on restoring existing generators throughout the city that operate the
pumping system.

Harold Gorman, executive director of the Sewerage & Water Board, said his
agency thinks it can get most of its pumps working in a month, based on its
experience in Hurricane Betsy in 1965. But it may take longer than that just
to get replacement parts for the various pumps and electric motors used in
local drainage systems. "You've got a lot of apples and oranges out there,"
Combe said. "Sometimes it takes six months just to get parts. Sometimes
there are no off-the-shelf parts available."

It will take six months to pump out Jefferson Parish, Combe said. But at
that point, areas of New Orleans will probably still be underwater and may
take many more months to empty.

Getting the water out is just the first step to making the city livable,
officials say. "Imagine the city of New Orleans closed for four to six
months," said Jefferson Parish Emergency Preparedness Director Walter
Maestri. "We'll have to re-evaluate all our sanitary systems, completely
evaluate the water and purification systems, evaluate half to two thirds of
all buildings to see if they were structurally damaged by water pressure and
wind. Restoring electricity will be another complicated problem. Will houses
catch fire when they throw the power switch All that's going to have to be
handled."

With few homes left undamaged, Red Cross and FEMA officials will have to
find property for long-term temporary housing for a possible 1 million
refugees. After Hurricane Andrew, some of the 250,000 residents of south
Miami-Dade County forced to find temporary housing remained in federally
financed mobile homes for 2½ years.

"You'd have manufactured housing brought in and set up in Baton Rouge and
Folsom and so forth," Maestri said. "It's going to have to be north of
Mandeville and Covington, because they're probably going to have hurricane
damage as well. They'll probably use military bases like Camp Shelby in
Mississippi, too. They'll be urban refugee centers, where people will stay
while officials do an analysis to say, 'Yes, you can come back' or 'No, you
can't come back here.' "

New Orleans would face the future with most of its housing stock and
historic structures destroyed. Hotels, office buildings and infrastructure
would be heavily damaged. Tens of thousands of people would be dead and many
survivors homeless and shellshocked. Rebuilding would be a formidable
challenge even with a generous federal aid package.

"You wouldn't have an infrastructure, that's for sure," said Hucky Purpera,
natural and technical hazards chief for the Louisiana Office of Emergency
Preparedness. "What would you be going back to Residents might be going back
in, but would businesses rebuild They'll make decisions based on what's best
for the company. And if you do decide to rebuild, do you rebuild there A lot
of that we don't know."

Still home sweet home

But it's unlikely the city would be completely abandoned, economists and
disaster experts say. Most cities do eventually recover from major
disasters -- though no precedent exists for the wholesale destruction of
"filling the bowl."

No single storm would wipe out the entire New Orleans area. If the east bank
floods, the west bank and St. Tammany Parish would take heavy damage from
wind but be spared heavy storm-surge flooding. The city's location on the
Mississippi River near the Gulf of Mexico would still be strategic for
trade. Industrial plants upriver would remain largely intact.

"It's always recoverable. People own that property. They are not going to
walk away. If someone does walk away, there will be a bank that will
foreclose and ultimately resell that space," said Mary Comerio, a professor
of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of a
book on postdisaster reconstruction. "It will all be at fire-sale prices,
and it will end up a different place, owned by different people."

After a Category 4 hurricane destroyed Galveston, Texas, in 1900, the entire
island was raised 7 feet before rebuilding began. To avoid a repeat
catastrophe, officials would likely consider how to hurricane-proof the
city, or even think about moving it.

"We've not tried to tackle that yet," said Lowder, the FEMA official.
"What's the best way to -- I won't say rebuild -- but where do we go from
here How can we make sure that our recovery doesn't put things back the
exact same way they were"




.

Relevant Pages

  • NYT: Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy
    ... Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy ... Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. ... They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly ... the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual ...
    (alt.politics.bush)
  • New Orleans risks extinction
    ... Modern day New Orleans was a city that defied the odds. ... floods with hundreds of miles of levees and dams. ... Professor Penland has no doubt about why the hurricane was so devastating: ...
    (sci.med.diseases.hepatitis)
  • New Orleans risks extinction
    ... Modern day New Orleans was a city that defied the odds. ... floods with hundreds of miles of levees and dams. ... Professor Penland has no doubt about why the hurricane was so devastating: ...
    (sci.geo.geology)
  • Re: overnight weather satellite pics?
    ... > levee failure and resulting catastrophic flood after the hurricane. ... the city should have made use of EVERY POSSIBLE ... In New Orleans the water didn't rise suddenly. ...
    (sci.space.shuttle)
  • Re: Murder and mayhem in New Orleans miserable shelter
    ... >>levees and he fucked up the response...richests and most inept country on ... Vital measures to protect New Orleans from "catastrophic" hurricane damage ... despite official warnings of impending disaster. ...
    (soc.culture.iraq)