SaraDay
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Registered: May
2002
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(old article,
but still important)
quote:
'Big Easy' a bowl of trouble in hurricanes
By James
West, USATODAY.com
With the 2000 hurricane season
entering its most fierce stage, should the "Big Easy" change
its nickname to the "Big Worry"? Officials there who plan
for hurricanes think so.
The last time a major
hurricane – with winds over 111 mph – came close to New
Orleans was Hurricane Camille in 1969, says Paul Trotter,
chief of the National Weather Service office in nearby
Slidell, La. That storm came ashore about 55 miles east of
New Orleans in Mississippi. Trotter says that there have
been 12 or 13 major storms to hit within 85 miles of New
Orleans in the last 120 years, or an average of one major
hurricane occurring once a decade.
"With Camille
hitting over 30 years ago, we are well overdue for a major
one," Trotter says.
New Orleans, a city of nearly
1.4 million people, sits below sea level, as much as 8 feet
lower than water in nearby Lake Pontchartrain and the
Mississippi River and its delta, where it empties into the
Gulf of Mexico. This in effect creates a "bowl" that
floodwaters can settle into, like water headed for a
stopped-up drain.
To combat this unique problem, a
system of levees surrounds the city to hold back the waters
of Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River
to the south, says Joseph Suhayda, director of the Louisiana
Water Resources Research Institute at Louisiana State
University in Baton Rouge. The levee that holds back Lake
Pontchartrain is 15 feet high while the one guarding against
the Mississippi River is 20 feet tall.
Suhayda says
the 15-foot levee will protect the city from a minimum
hurricane of Category 1 or 2 intensity and at best a
fast-moving Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson
hurricane intensity scale.
"A slow-moving Category 3
or any Category 4 or 5 hurricane passing within 20 or 30
miles of New Orleans would be devastating," Suhayda says.
The storm surge — water pushed into a mound by
hurricane winds — would pour over the Pontchartrain levee
and flood the city. A severe hurricane could push
floodwaters inside the New Orleans bowl as high as 20-30
feet, covering most homes and the first three or four
stories of buildings in the city, he says. "This brings a
great risk of casualties."
In this type of scenario
the metro area could be submerged for more than 10 weeks,
says Walter S. Maestri, Director of Emergency Management for
Jefferson Parish, which encompasses more than half of the
city. In those 10 weeks, residents would need drinking
water, food and a dry place to live.
Besides the
major problems flooding would bring, there is also concern
about a potentially explosive and deadly problem. Suhayda
says flooding of the whole city could easily mix industrial
and household chemicals into a toxic and volatile mix.
Coupled with an estimated 100,000 tons of sediment, a
cleanup could take several months. In the worst case
scenario, the mix of toxic chemicals could make some areas
of the city uninhabitable. "It could take several years for
the city to recover fully, economically, from a strong
hurricane," says Suhayda.
To make residents aware of
the dangers New Orleans faces, Maestri and his staff visit
churches, professional organizations and social clubs almost
every week of the year to discuss the risks. They distribute
videos to schools, libraries and even to video stores for
free distribution to the public. They also provide
information to the commercial mass media to make the public
aware.
Maestri says that the public knows and
understands the threat they face if a major hurricane was to
strike near New Orleans. For instance, when Hurricane
Georges threatened the Gulf Coast in 1998, an estimated 60
percent of the New Orleans population evacuated the city,
Maestri says. It was the largest evacuation in U.S. history
at the time, according to the National Weather Service. Even
then, not everyone could get out, and the Louisiana
Superdome in New Orleans was used as a shelter for the first
time. Fortunately for the city, Hurricane Georges, a
Category 2 hurricane with winds near 110 mph, landed to the
east in Biloxi, Miss.
Despite the difficulty in
getting everyone out, Maestri says evacuation is the best
policy for a city under sea level and not fully protected
from storm surge and flooding. But he is concerned that he
still might not have enough advance warning to evacuate all
of New Orleans. Improvements in hurricane predictions during
the last 30 years have made it possible for the National
Hurricane Center to issue hurricane warnings 24 hours ahead
of when a storm hits. But, Maestri says it takes nearly 72
hours to fully evacuate New Orleans. This means that an
evacuation order must be issued using a forecast that could
have an error of 150 miles. While Maestri and his team are
busy evacuating the city, the storm could be heading for
Alabama and Mississippi to the east or the bayous of western
Louisiana instead of New Orleans.
An evacuation
could create a ghost town unnecessarily and make people more
complacent when the next hurricane nears the Gulf Coast.
Maestri is also concerned that he could be placing evacuees
in the path of danger if a storm struck along the evacuation
routes instead of New Orleans.
Besides getting
everybody out, Suhayda says there are two alternate
solutions that would protect people from potential flooding
if a category 4 or 5 hurricane were to hit the city. The
first would be to raise the levees, especially the one
bordering Lake Pontchartrain. Raising the lake levee to the
20-foot height of the Mississippi River levee should give
enough protection for the city. Another solution, the
so-called "haven plan" by Suhayda, would involve building an
internal levee that would protect the city's core;
hospitals, government buildings and transportation as well
as the electrical and water infrastructure would be safe
from the ravages of a flood.
But the two plans
involving the building of new levees are massive and
expensive public works projects, Suhayda says. They would
take more than a decade to plan and build, he concludes,
leaving the city with no improvement to its hurricane
problem in the near future.
"Residents will have to
deal with a threat of flooding for at least the next 10-15
years."
Contributing: Chris Vaccaro, USATODAY.com
Last edited by
SaraDay on 08-28-2005 at 10:58 AM
IP:
68.229.150.232 |
08-28-2005 08:55
AM
