We're all out of old Times-Picayunes. What will we use to build the flood protection we really need?

The New York Times  this week takes a look at the just (well, just about) completed flood protection system (in practice as well as name?) surrounding New Orleans.

When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city’s hurricane protection system became a symbol of America’s haphazard approach to critical infrastructure. The patchwork of walls and levees built over the course of 40 years was still far from complete when the storm came, and even the Army Corps of Engineers admitted that this was “a system in name only.” Flood walls collapsed, and earthen levees built from sandy, dredged soils melted away. 

What has emerged since could come to symbolize the opposite: a vast civil works project that gives every appearance of strength and permanence. No other American city has anything like it. “This is the best system the greater New Orleans area has ever had,” said Col. Edward R. Fleming, the commander of the New Orleans district of the corps.

 "No other American city has anything like it," perhaps, but is what we have anything like what we actually need?  The article, to its credit, admits that it isn't.

The new system was designed and constructed to provide what is informally known as 100-year protection, which means it was built to prevent the kind of flooding that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. That standard is used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to determine whether homeowners and businesses must buy flood insurance to qualify for federally regulated or insured mortgages.

But New Orleans has seen storms far more damaging than the 100-year standard. Katrina is generally considered to have been a 400-year storm, and rising seas and more numerous hurricanes predicted in many climate-change models suggest harsher conditions to come.

“It’s what the country will pay for; it’s what FEMA insures for,” Mr. Doody said. “But our thought and belief is that we all need to be behind protection that’s greater than that.”

New Orleanians who have spent nearly seven years following the contentious process which gave rise to the new defenses are well aware that their inadequacy is baked in to the design limits imposed by Congress.  No doubt the national audience for the NYT piece will be confused about that by the breathless description of the $14.5 billion project "too vast to take in at once, except perhaps from space."  As impressive as those figures are, the truth is they may end up being a massive investment in failure if further action isn't taken.

Furthermore any standard of protection is an elusive moving target as long Louisiana's decaying wetlands continue to erode.  Last month, the legislature approved the state's  50 year master plan for coastal restoration.  The plan is estimated to cost around $50 billion although, given the optimistic pricing of some of its component projects, we can probably expect that figure to rise along with the sea level over the coming half century.

As... um.. luck isn't the word... fate, perhaps, would have it, the state is expecting to tap a significant source of seed money for this fund

Baton Rouge -- Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed legislation that will direct money Louisiana receives from the Deepwater-Horizon-BP oil spill to coastal protection and restoration programs. Jindal's office said late Thursday that he signed House Bill 838 by Rep. Simone Champagne, R-Jeanerette, one of the last bills passed in the waning hours of the legislative session that ended June 4. The bill became effective when Jindal signed it.

Champagne's bill calls for any money the state receives from the federal government as a result of fines imposed under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, associated with the April 20, 2010 spill, to be placed in the state treasury and used for "integrated coastal protection efforts, including coastal restoration; hurricane protection and improving the resiliency of the ... coastal area affected" by the spill.

The new state law anticipates passage of the so-called "RESTORE Act" as part of a federal transportation bill creeping its way through Congress.

Both House and Senate bills include language that would return 80 percent of the fines BP will ultimately be required to pay for violating oil spill provisions of the Clean Water Act to the Gulf Coast states for coastal restoration purposes. Fines could potentially run as high as $20 billion, meaning after the first $2.7 billion is taken off the top and returned to the oil spill liability trust fund to replenish funds withdrawn during the initial cleanup, almost $14 billion would be set aside for the Gulf Coast.

Coincidentally, $14 billion is precisely the amount of annual losses the Gulf Coast faces today as a result of extreme weather events, according to a report from America’s Wetland Foundation and the energy company Entergy.

For Louisianans who have argued for years that, as the parties most responsible for eviscerating our coastal wetlands, energy companies like BP should be made to pay to cost of repairing them, this bill represents only a late and modest nudge in that direction.  Just how modest is yet to be determined, by the way, as BP continues to fight to minimize the size of the amount in damages they'll ultimately have to pay the feds.

BP hopes the U.S. Justice Department will accept less than $15 billion to settle the government's civil and criminal claims for the 2010 Gulf oil spill, the Financial Times reports. Citing an unnamed source "familiar with the discussions" between the oil giant and government negotiators, the London-based newspaper said "negotiations were accelerating" but the amount BP is seeking is far shy of the $25 billion in fines and environmental damage claims the Justice Department wants.

It's beyond shameful that it takes a megadisaster like the 2010 Macondo oil gusher to spur the Louisiana legislature, the US Congress, and BP to make even this slight movement toward ensuring the future of our coastal population. In this regard, we see a direct echo of the events that brought about the flood countermeasures profiled in the New York Times as the article linked at the top of this post observed.

More important, Congress voted the $14.5 billion —nearly three times the annual civil works budget for the agency — up front instead of the usual incremental dribbling out of appropriations. “Full funding of the program gave us lots of flexibility,” said Michael F. Park, the chief of Task Force Hope, the special corps entity created to oversee the projects. 

Mr. Wagner, who lost his home as did other family members in Katrina, said with chagrin, “It feels terrible to say, but it takes a disaster to get that kind of funding.”

And so the question now becomes, what kind of disaster will it take to get the funding we actually need?


Afterthought: Another aspect of the Corps' work the Times completely skips over involves the status of the city's outfall canals and the "temporary" pumps installed at their mouths. The pumps are well beyond their intended term of use as it is and the quality of their installation has been an ongoing source of controversy.

Matt McBride at Fix The Pumps has been reviewing the work along the outfall canals in a series of posts.  The latest looks at the Orleans Avenue floodwalls including complications presented by debris found inside or beneath the remediated sections of berm including tree stumps and concrete chunks and other junk (but no newspaper this time, apparently).

These only represent what was found at the sections into which they dug. Are we seriously supposed to believe that the sections of levee untouched by this project are pristine after reading this stuff? 10'x12' stumps and concrete light pole foundations do not make for reliable levees.

In the event of a major storm, even with the giant surge gates closed and all the new expensive hatches battened down, the city will still depend on the temporary pumps to clear the outfall canals of rainwater and on the floodwalls to hold it back until they do.