With all the attention to Katrina +5, very little ink was spilled on exactly what is going on around the proximate causes of so much of the death and destruction in New Orleans: the failure of the outfall canal walls.
I'm proud to report the Army Corps of Engineers is doing lots!
Well, not really. Read below.
After the storm, the Corps put up three gate structures at the end of the canals to stop storm surge from getting in. They also installed pumps at those gates to pump out the rainwater that is put into the canals by the City of New Orleans's pumps. With the gates closed, that rainwater must go somewhere, so theoretically it is supposed to go through the Corps' pumps. But it's not so easy getting rainwater from the streets to those pumps.
The walls along the canals, except at the sections that breached or nearly breached, have not been touched. As a result, pumping by the city at any time (not just hurricanes) must be constrained to a so-called "safe water level" in each canal - Orleans Avenue - 8 feet, 17th Street - 6 feet, and London Avenue - 5 feet. The walls are actually about 12 to 14 feet tall. The level at London Avenue is so low that the city's pumps have had to be turned off on at least three separate occasions, including during normal, non-tropical rainstorms.
But the real problem is at the gates and pumps. The pumps, made of carbon steel and coated with some paint, are sitting in the second largest salty lake in the U.S. - Lake Pontchartrain. And, not surprisingly, they are rusting to bits.
There are 54 hydraulically powered pumps across all three sites. The Corps has pretty much let the vast majority of them rot over the last three years. And when I say "rot", I mean holes the size of a fist in piping conveying pressurized hydraulic oil. Has the Corps launched an all-out effort to fix the problem and ensure the citizens of New Orleans have safe reliable pumping during a hurricane or tropical storm? Not so much.
They've replaced some of the guts of about 25% of the hydraulic pumps with stainless steel. The rest are waiting to fail, an "imminent" danger according to the Corps' own pump repair contractor. They are currently not repairing any of the pumps.
But what they have done this spring and summer is plant lots and lots of trees at each site. They paid a contractor $273,000 of hurricane repair money to pretty up the pump-and-gate sites. That sum would have paid to fix two of the pumps.
The details are here.
That's your Corps of Engineers!