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August 20, 2007As the Dutch DoA few days ago, The New York Times had a front-page story that began: Six inches. After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans's hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcher's Gentilly neighborhood. Looking over the maps that showed other possible water levels around the city, Ms. Pratcher grew increasingly furious. Her house got four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and still stands to get almost as much from a 1-in-100 flood. By comparison, the wealthier neighborhood to the west, Lakeview, had its flooding risk reduced by nearly five and a half feet.... New Orleans was swamped by Hurricane Katrina; now it is awash in data, studied obsessively in homes all over town. And the simple message conveyed by that data is that while parts of the city are substantially safer, others have changed little. New Orleans remains a very risky place to live. The entire flood system still provides much less protection than New Orleans needs, and the pre-Katrina patchwork of levees, floodwalls and gates that a Corps of Engineers investigation called "a system in name only" is still just that.... "We have spent a lot of money and gotten some very good patches, but we're putting them on this decayed old quilt," said Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who is an author of an independent report on the levee failures. "We're still with this damned patchwork quilt." As a result, the city still lacks a system that can stand up to that 1-in-100 storm, let alone one like Hurricane Katrina, which the corps calls a 1-in-396 storm. The work that could build the more robust system--originally estimated at $7 billion, and now at least twice that--will not be completed until 2011 at the earliest, and experts agree that even that level of protection will be less than the city needs. I've been driving about Holland this past week, and if you go anywhere near its border with the ocean, you cannot escape an obvious conclusion: the Dutch are damn serious about flood control, and the United States (in the case of New Orleans) is not. Remember the photos of the dikes that failed in New Orleans. That handiwork of the Army Corps of Engineers looked like a mess of a plywood and rusty steel plates stitched together by amateurs: not very effective and certainly not very aesthetic. In the Netherlands, here's what flood protection looks like:
It's a substantial sea wall that is 15 to 20 feet high that runs for scores of miles--and it's easy on the eyes. No doubt, this costs much money, and the Dutch dikes have had some problems (and they're probably not strong or tall enough to deal with rising sea levels caused by global warming). But most of Holland has an interest in keeping dry and in preparing for a 1-in-1000 flood. So it's worth it.
Sheep and rainbows are extra. Posted by David Corn at August 20, 2007 05:24 PM |
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"HUBRIS is a bold and provocative book that will quickly become an explosive part of the national debate on how we got involved in Iraq." --Tom Brokaw |
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