Bush seeking another $1.5 billion for New Orleans levees
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Printable FormatCHICAGO TRIBUNE
By Mark Silva and Michael Oneal
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration, promising to build the most protective levees that hurricane-ravaged New Orleans has ever seen, announced Thursday it will seek $1.5 billion more from Congress to help the city rebuild its flood defenses.
"The levee system will be better and safer than it's ever been before," said Donald Powell, the federal official overseeing Gulf Coast reconstruction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
While promising to have adequate levees in place for next year's hurricane season, however, federal officials are unable to promise that the levees ultimately completed around New Orleans two years from now will be able to withstand the assault of a Category 5 hurricane.
Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm on Aug. 29, flooding New Orleans and killing more than 1,300 people along the Gulf Coast.
Engineering experts say the federal funding now envisioned for levees falls far short of what is needed to protect New Orleans, situated below sea level, from the worst possible storm.
Rebuilding the city's levees to withstand a Category 5 storm could cost more than $30 billion -- 10 times the $3.1 billion in spending that the White House touted on Thursday, with $1.6 billion already committed and President Bush now seeking another $1.5 billion.
"I don't think we can design a system that can compete with Mother Nature," Powell said at a White House briefing.
"What we're saying is that we are going to do whatever is necessary to make sure we have stronger and better levee systems than we've ever had," he said. "The federal government is committed to building the best levee system known in the world."
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, meeting with officials at the White House and on Capitol Hill on Thursday, suggested Katrina has become "the new standard" against which New Orleans measures its hurricane defenses. However, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and business leaders have maintained that New Orleans must gird for a Category 5 hurricane if it is to provide the assurances needed for redevelopment.
Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said the funding for levees that Bush is seeking falls well short of what ultimately will be needed to boost New Orleans' hurricane defenses.
"Everything we know says if we abandon the patchwork-quilt approach to flood protection that we've used up to now, it's going to cost much more than that," said Bea, who served on a National Science Foundation task force that investigated the New Orleans levee failures.
The funding Bush is seeking "is probably sufficient to get close to completion of the Category 3 protection that we had hoped was in place prior to Katrina but which turned out not to be the case," Bea said in an interview Thursday. "But the complete rehabilitation of the system is probably more than $30 billion to provide adequate protection" against Category 5 storms.
Yet Nagin maintains that the new levees will become part of "the holy trinity of recovery" in New Orleans. That triumvirate includes new housing and economic incentives for redevelopment of the city.
"These levees will be as high as 17 feet in some areas," Nagin said at the White House. "We've never had that. ... These levees will be fortified with rock and concrete. These levees will have a pumping system like we've only dreamed of."
Encouraging more displaced residents to return to New Orleans, Nagin acknowledged that the hardest-hit parts of the city, including the Ninth Ward, are not ready for revival.
"The entire city is not going to come back simultaneously," he said. "But at the end of the day, our entire city will be here."
Of the 450,000 residents of New Orleans who were displaced by Katrina, only about 100,000 have returned to the city.
By the start of next year's hurricane season, which officially starts in June, New Orleans will have an improved version of the levees that were supposed to be in place before Katrina, according to Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, head of the Army Corps of Engineers.
The complete building of bigger and better, armor-fortified levees will take longer. "Two years is what we are looking at to accomplish the program," Strock said Thursday.
Reconstruction now under way, with $1.6 billion in federal funding already committed, includes repair of the breaches in levees that led to widespread flooding of New Orleans after Katrina.
This includes correction of design and construction flaws in the levee system, returning them to the heights for which they had been authorized prior to Katrina, according to Powell.
With the additional $1.5 billion that Bush is seeking, the Corps of Engineers plans to bolster the levees with stone and armor, close three interior canals for flood-prevention and provide "state-of-the-art" pumping systems to drain the canals in a storm.
"The levee system will be better and stronger than it ever has been in the history of New Orleans," Powell said. "If a hurricane of the nature of Katrina ever struck New Orleans again, I am convinced that catastrophic flooding would not occur again."
Still, given that most experts believe protecting Southeastern Louisiana from the worst nature has to offer will require a comprehensive system of man-made infrastructure and coastal wetlands restoration, the administration's plan can only be viewed as a stop-gap measure. Cost estimates for a system that could truly protect the region run to $32 billion, dwarfing the administration's request.
Scientists have warned for years that a long-term plan must include improved levees and massive floodgates as well as major initiatives to restore the wetlands and barrier islands that help blunt the storm surges kicked up by hurricanes.
"Those barrier islands are our first line of defense," said Greg Stone, director of the Coastal Studies Institute at Louisiana State University. "I call them speed bumps."
Dan Hitchings, director of Katrina relief for the Corps of Engineers, agrees that much more is needed. But he said that the administration's plan was designed to address the most glaring holes in the hurricane protection system while leaving the Corps time to study a more comprehensive solution.
Congress has already given the Corps $8 million and two years to study the problem and come up with a workable design to protect the region. An initial plan is due in several months.
In the short term, however, the new money requested Thursday would give the Corps the resources to fix the holes in the hurricane protection system that allowed for the most damaging flooding.
The major problem areas at the moment are along the three drainage canals that stretch from Lake Pontchartrain into the heart of New Orleans. When water driven by Katrina surged into the lake and then into those canals, the floodwalls along them burst in several places, inundating the city.
Forensic engineers are still trying to figure out why the floodwalls failed and who's at fault. But what is already clear is that they will not stand up to another major storm.
The best long-term solution would probably be to put massive floodgates along the narrow strait that connects Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico to block storm surges before they enter the lake. The gates could be left open most of the time to protect the lake's ecology. But they could be closed during a hurricane so the storm surge is kept out of the lake and away from the city and its drainage canals.
Nagin also provided a briefing on recovery efforts Thursday for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who has been outspoken about rebuilding in the wake of Katrina.
Obama echoed a hope that Bush also voiced when he delivered a national address from Jackson Square in New Orleans on Sept. 15, promising a city rebuilt better than before.
"Ideally, this is an opportunity to make a better New Orleans," Obama said. "We had a school system that wasn't working. We had areas of the city that needed revitalization. This should be an opportunity."