Just gonna leave the spillway open all the time now

It's another January high river season.

“This morning, the National Weather Service forecast has the river getting to 15.1 feet here at the Carrollton gage,” Roe said. “We are watching that very closely. Trigger point for phase 2 flood fight is 15 feet and rising so we are seeing if that forecast is going to come in a little bit lower of a little bit higher and we will make a decision of whether to go into phase 2 based on that.”

On Jan. 9, the Corps entered its stage one flood fight following the river’s rise to 11 feet. Roe said the high river is due to heavy rain to our north that is now making its way to the coast.

In recent years, flood fights in January have been followed by springtime openings of the Bonnet Carre Spillway to relieve pressure on levees from New Orleans south.

2019 was an absolutely devastating year for oyster fishers on the Louisiana coast.  It would be a while before they'd begin to recover either way. But now they face the prospect of going through it all over again.

Meanwhile, in  other flood control news, just as the corps of engineers begins public discussions of necessary upgrades to our perpetually sinking levee system, the big question we've been worrying about for over a decade is coming to a head.  How do we pay to maintain the system we have?

The multiparish dispute is complicated by many factors, but the principal one is that the Lake Borgne levees protect parts of Orleans and Jefferson parishes in addition to St. Bernard. The agreement calls for St. Bernard to bear most of the cost of maintaining them, and many residents and officials see that as unfair.

The parish’s residents have twice voted down a proposed 7.5-mill property tax that would have raised new money for levee maintenance. St. Bernard residents already pay an 11.33-mill tax that mostly goes to levees. Had the new tax passed, the various levee district millages would have been reallocated, with 15.4 mills going to levee maintenance and 3.43 mills transferred to the parish for drainage.

That’s more than St. Bernard’s neighbors pay their local levee districts: New Orleans residents pay a little over 10 mills for levee maintenance, and East Jefferson property owners pay just 4.02 mills. However, New Orleans residents also pay 16.23 mills for drainage, and Jefferson residents pay between 4 and 5 mills.

The parish governments and flood protection authorities each have their own pots of money and constituencies, but, as we all know very well, they're really maintaining one big interdependent system. So, even under the wholesale reorganization of the regime after Katrina, there will always be disputes like this to deal with.  Apparently, there is a fix in the works, albeit a potentially problematic one.

CPRA officials said Wednesday they plan to submit a bill in the upcoming legislative session that would address such funding disparity issues for both the east bank and West Bank regional levee authorities. The legislation might allow the authorities to set regional tax rates to pay for levees' operation and maintenance.

I'm very curious to see more about how that works.  I assume it still means that tax rates have to be authorized by voters in one way or another.  Or maybe not?

Spoilers

Kind of giving away the game publishing this in April.  You're supposed to hold all the big revelations until hurricane season starts.

But now, 11 months after the Army Corps of Engineers completed one of the largest public works projects in world history, the agency says the system will stop providing adequate protection in as little as four years because of rising sea levels and shrinking levees.

The growing vulnerability of the New Orleans area is forcing the Army Corps to begin assessing repair work, including raising hundreds of miles of levees and floodwalls that form a meandering earth and concrete fortress around the city and its adjacent suburbs.

“These systems that maybe were protecting us before are no longer going to be able to protect us without adjustments,” said Emily Vuxton, policy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental group. She said repair costs could be “hundreds of millions” of dollars, with 75% paid by federal taxpayers.

“I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,” Vuxton said.

It's only necessary if you want people to be able to actually live here.  Since so much of what gets invested in South Louisiana builds either oil and gas infrastructure or amusing things for tourists to spend money on, it's not clear that's really the priority.

But if protecting residents isn't the main priority, it might still be something we're a little bit interested in as long as we can maintain it anyway. In that case, it's about time to start working on that federal funding again.  Sounds like a great job for our conservative "small government" congressional delegation to talk to Donald Trump about. Or maybe if that doesn't go so well, we could always wait for the Democrats to come around on that "green dream or whatever." 

Who knows how that might turn out? If you think you know how it ends, please don't spoil anything.

Why did it fall the way it did?

I used to wonder if the 17th Street canal levee breach after Katrina that flooded Lakeview could have just as easily broken on the Jefferson rather than the Orleans Parish side. Maybe it wouldn't have made a tremendous difference in the amount of water that ended up piling into Lakeview thanks to the breach in the nearby London Avenue canal levee.  Or maybe it would have.

One thing's for sure, it would have meant a lot more damage in Metairie.  And this McBride post indicates it sure could have happened that way. More to the point, though.  Maybe it still could.

Given the shallow depth it was found in 2011 and 2014, it makes sense some of the debris was part of the I-wall and levee construction in the early 1990's. That work did involve placement of dirt on top of the existing levees at the time. It extended the entire length of the canal (all the yellow and red lines shown above). Other, deeper debris has likely been there far longer. The records of nearly every soil boring taken in 1981 along the west bank - long before the I-walls were put in - have numerous mentions of shells, wood, bricks, and other "miscellaneous fill." Those records were used in the basis of design for the Corps' early 1990's work. This junk has been known to the Corps for a very, very long time. It also very likely extends the entire length of the canal on at least the Jefferson Parish side.

How it got there doesn't really matter now though, because all the junk is still there today, and the integrity of the outfall canals remains the responsibility of the Corps. As the decision recorded in the contractor quality control log of March 11, 2011 indicates, there is no way the 17th Street canal west bank levees would be built today with the debris-riddled dirt that is currently sitting in them. That dirt is - according to the Corps - "unsuitable." Yet there the levees sit.

Correction: Originally this post cited a breach in the Orleans Avenue outfall canal.  Orleans Avenue did not, in fact, breach. Here's that T-P Katrina animation in case anyone else needs a refresh.

Meanwhile, it's hurricane season

Corps watchdog Matt McBride has a new post up concerning some little-publicized work the Corps has been doing on the outfall canals.  McBride's observations of the dug out soil from the levees under maintenance lead him to believe that it may contain unsafe quantities of debris.

By any standard, including the Corps', the dirt coming out of the levees at both these sites would be unsuitable for use in any levee. How do we know that? The Corps themselves said so just four years ago, during a different debris mess that made the news.

In late 2009 and early 2010, reports emerged about large amounts of concrete and other debris being found in the top layers of lakefront levee in Kenner during an enlargement project. That soil had been trucked there in the early 2000's and had not been systematically checked for debris. After a couple of Times-Picayune articles, the Corps held a public meeting on January 28, 2010.

Maybe we should sue the hogs

Ask Garret Graves if this is a scrape or a heart attack.

MARRERO, La. (AP) — Feral hogs are rooting up levees on Jefferson Parish's west bank, causing damage that could pose a threat to flood protection, officials say.

The west bank levee board has enlisted the help of the U.S. Agriculture Department determine the size of the hog population before deciding what measures to take.

That's a wrinkle

I'm working on a more comprehensive post about yesterday's adventures with the Governor and the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority.  But this morning's Advocate brings up an issue I haven't considered in this editorial.

The scale of the lawsuit and its potential impact on public policy underscore the Flood Protection Authority’s obligation to conduct its business in the public interest. We must wonder if the authority’s strategy for advancing the lawsuit meets that standard.

The board did not publicly debate its decision to file the suit, a troubling move given the potentially sweeping consequences of the litigation. The board didn’t vote publicly to file the suit, although it did vote to hire attorneys who are now representing it in the litigation.

That omission raises troubling legal questions of its own. The board’s actions seem to violate the spirit if not the letter of the Louisiana Open Meetings Law.

Print is dead

Not too long ago we were beside ourselves with indignation to learn that Army Corps of Engineers contractors were stuffing our floodwalls with old newspapers. Friday afternoon, we learned what kinds of materials one might substitute in the post-print era.

Test trenches cut into a problematic levee being raised south of Marrero unearthed logs, concrete chunks, tires, hubcaps, a hot water tank and a shopping cart, according to a blistering report by the West Bank levee authority that questions the levee’s structural integrity. The testing also revealed sections of wet and poorly compacted clay that prompted a levee authority official to dub it the “jelly doughnut levee,” according to the report released Friday.

I guess that once we've decided we can call pizza a vegetable and pepper spray a food product, we're not really that far off from making jelly doughnuts out of old water heaters and shopping carts, much less calling them levees.

But that's not the interesting part. What's interesting is this little bit that comes in at the end.

Officials with Phylway Construction of Thibodaux, which has a $28.8 million contract to raise the levee, have not returned repeated calls seeking comment in the past several months.

The corps’ own inspectors had faulted the company for refusing to cooperate with efforts to resolve the debris problem.

In August, the corps directed Phylway to stop using a Waggaman borrow pit owned by the River Birch landfill in favor of the Willow Bend pit in Donaldsonville.

A River Birch official said the landfill had simply leased out a portion of its corps-approved pit and that it was up to Phylway to ensure any woody debris was removed from the clay.

That's not just any jelly doughnut. That's a River Birch filled jelly doughnut. There's bound to be all sorts of interesting things stuffed in there.. although mainly bullshit and money. But this is all very much in line with the flavor profile at the Slabbed kitchen so we'll let them sort this out for us.

Halloween milestones

Mark Moseley calls attention to the fact that today is the 6th anniversary of the creation of Sandy Rosenthal's Levees.org watchdog group. And I suppose he's right to do so. For all of of the self-aggrandizing bullshit emanating from Levees.org over the years, I can't say that they've necessarily been on wrong side of things big picture wise.

It's nothing novel to observe that we live in a world where embarrassing self-importance is a pre-requisite to "success" in anything even when it comes to fighting the losing although largely righteous battle Levess.org has. But by being the enormous egotistical crybabies they've been they have, in fact, managed to at least delay the inevitable calcification of the myth that New Orleans was flooded by a "natural disaster" rather through the negligence and dishonesty of Corps of Engineers' flood protection "system in name only."

Of course in the long run, the same mistakes are going to be repeated by the same people regardless. But thanks to Sandy, fewer of us can claim to have been totally ignorant of just how that happened. So, yeah, congratulations.

Meanwhile, October 31, 2005 was also the first day that New Orleans offered library services to the public after Katrina. I remember it as though it were something I blogged about only yesterday. One advantage of having done that is that I, unlike apparently anyone else in the city, can actually remember this having happened at all. I guess Sandy Rosenthal wasn't the only self-important loudmouth stupidly trying to combat the inevitable collective amnesia these past 6 years after all.