Error processing SSI fileResurrecting New Orleans: Part 2
Shoring up levee system a top priority
New Orleans has been a natural disaster in waiting -- a huge coastal city slung precariously below sea level, ringed by heaps of earth and concrete. They were never meant to handle the punch Katrina dealt.
Among the most urgent priorities in reclaiming New Orleans, disaster experts said, is fortifying the levees and flood walls that surround most of the city. But the work ahead is as uncertain as it is massive.
"Where do you start? You save lives and you feed people and give them water. After that, nobody knows the extent of what has to be done," said Ken Topping, a former Los Angeles city planner who has studied how cities get rebuilt after disasters. "It's the biggest challenge of its kind. Nobody has ever experienced anything like this before."
High water propelled by the hurricane breached New Orleans' high levees in three places. Pumps that drain water from the city aren't working and need to be fixed. Vast wetlands that once helped shield the city from powerful hurricanes have vanished. Planners and engineers already are talking about relocating whole sections of the city hardest hit by the flooding.
No one knows how much fixing the city's defenses will cost, but the price is sure to be astronomical.
"It's going to cost billions just to repair the levee system, to say nothing of rebuilding the city. And that's just staggering, and it's not even counting the other Gulf Coast communities," said James Schwab, who has studied rebuilding efforts after disasters for the American Planning Association.
Part of the challenge, he said, is that there's no real blueprint for such a massive endeavor. "This is disaster recovery from another planet," he said.
Engineers have warned repeatedly that the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain, which looms over the city, wouldn't withstand much more than a modest hurricane strike. Since 2001, Congress and the Bush administration cut funding for the city's two main flood-control programs -- including its giant levees -- almost in half. Last year, the government spent about $42 million.
"We've been fighting for a long time to strengthen the levees and get full funding for these. Hopefully, it will no longer fall on deaf ears," said Brian Richardson, a spokesman for Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La. "Would the money have saved us? Unfortunately, we'll never know."
Just patching the holes in that protective bulwark won't be enough. "I think they're going to have to completely restrategize the positioning of the city and all the levees. There is going to have to be a complete reanalysis of how the city is protected," said Grover Mouton III, the director of the Tulane Regional Urban Design Center, based in the city.
Those defenses should be secured before new developments go up, said Stephen Villavaso, who does planning work in New Orleans. "I think probably we shouldn't let development go forward until there is true hurricane protection," he said.
Even more changes will likely be needed within the city. Some particularly low-lying neighborhoods such as the lower Ninth Ward, an impoverished pocket of the city now plunged under deep water, might not be rebuilt at all, said Kristina Ford, a former New Orleans planning director. Others might need to be artificially elevated to protect against future flooding. That could leave engineers with the task of relocating entire neighborhoods.
"You can look at parts of the city and say it shouldn't have been built that way in the first place, and we shouldn't rebuild it that way," Ford said.
Still, she said that while re-engineering parts of the city could make future storms less catastrophic, there's ultimately no way to guarantee the safety of a city in such a precarious spot. "If you look at New Orleans, you exist in New Orleans in a provisional way, between Lake Pontchartrain that's 5 feet higher than you are and the Mississippi River that's 5 feet higher than you are," she said.
That leaves engineers with the question of how best to guard a coastal city that sits more than 6 feet, on average, below the water line. Engineers said that while there's no way to guard against every storm, they can build stronger defenses -- but it will carry an enormous cost. The huge price of building such fortifications is widely cited as among the reasons the city didn't have bigger walls in place when Katrina struck.
Experts who study disasters say the scope of the destruction in New Orleans is clearly unmatched in modern American history. Until last week, the most devastating storm to hit the country was Hurricane Andrew, which blew across South Florida in 1992, leaving a quarter-million people homeless and causing $30 billion in property damage.
The scope of the destruction, combined with New Orleans' vulnerable geography, has raised questions about the wisdom of rebuilding at all -- though most experts said abandoning the city is nearly unthinkable.
"You could argue New Orleans is a natural lake. Rebuilding it raises a lot of questions about how you keep this from happening again," said Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington. "It's one thing to ask should I live on the Gulf Coast, where hurricanes happen, versus putting hundreds of thousands of people in essence at the bottom of a lake and counting on a system of levees and pumps to keep everything right."
Major roads, bridges need costly repair
Road building has always been about clearing obstacles -- both physical and political.
Experts say officials in New Orleans and around the Gulf of Mexico will face plenty of both as they try to recover from Katrina.
Finding money, setting priorities, marshalling the work force and the materials and pressing ahead quickly despite objections will require someone with czar-like powers.
"It takes someone in charge who says, 'I'm not taking no for an answer from any of you,'" said Thomas Brahms, chief executive officer of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. "You don't want a governor or someone else stepping in front of a czar when something happens."
California's earthquakes in the past 15 years have offered some lessons on how to rebuild infrastructure quickly, but Brahms said the scale of the damage in New Orleans is likely to be far more widespread with repair costs running in the billions of dollars.
The federal government is likely to pay for 75 percent of repairs to bridges and highways around New Orleans, while Louisiana kicks in the rest, said Mary Comerio, an architecture professor at the University of California-Berkeley and author of "Disaster Hits Home: New Policy for Urban Housing Recovery."
"There's going to be some damages, some will be minor, some, major," she said. "Every bridge, every road is going to have to be inspected. It's a systematic process, going bridge by bridge and roadway by roadway."
Several bridges in New Orleans have collapsed, and many of the city's roads remain under water. Once the water is cleared out, the assessment of all of its roads will begin to see which can support the weight of trucks and other vehicles that will pour into the city to clear the debris and bring in the repairs.
"You have to determine what part of the structure is salvageable," said Tim Noles, a partner with Hardesty and Hanover, a nationwide engineering consulting firm. Noles said road beds can be washed out by the extensive flooding, and bridge foundations can face similar problems. The high water also can slam debris into bridge decks, damaging them as well.
Early rebuilding efforts are likely to focus on federal and state highways, which bring goods and people into the city. Planners trying to reopen bridges in a hurry can install temporary prefabricated spans within a matter of weeks if the conditions are right, Noles said. The U.S. military uses similar technology to move troops and supplies in war zones.
When a major earthquake struck northern California in 1989, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was repaired and reopened in about a month, but the experience convinced officials to begin planning for a sturdier replacement.
Other roads took longer to rebuild. The double-decked Interstate 880 was demolished and wasn't rebuilt until 1997. Even then, it was no longer a double deck and it was rebuilt in a different location. Several other freeways were scrapped completely, including Interstate 480. That move allowed the redevelopment of the Embarcadero on the waterfront.
Determining the damage and designing the fixes in Katrina's wake will require engineers from across the country and likely beyond. Noles said the states affected are likely to pull engineers off other projects to get them working on emergency repairs in the worst areas.
Michigan's transportation experts are prepared to help, said Larry Tibbets, chief operating officer of the Michigan Department of Transportation. All the states participate in what's known as an emergency management pact. When officials in the affected states determine what they need, they can put out a request for help from engineers to technicians.
"We're at the ready," Tibbets said. "If and when they ask us for help, we're ready to go."
Copyright © 2005
The Detroit News.
Use of this site indicates your agreement to the Terms of Service (updated 12/19/2002).