UNDER a daffodil-yellow tent on the east bank of the Mississippi river in Algiers, New Orleans, artists are spray-painting giant alligators, voodoo spirits and a 3-metre-tall, pink-fringed foaming bathtub. As preparations for the Mardi Gras parades intensify, it is hard to believe that just six months ago one of the worst natural disasters in US history tore through these streets.
“I feel good,” says Clayton Jones, shrugging his shoulders and grinning. A New Orleans native who has worked for years in the “dens” where the floats are stored, he is living in a trailer provided by the US government’s Federal Emergency Management Agency in the yard of his house. “If we don’t celebrate Mardi Gras, it will feel like we are not coming back,” explains stained-glass artist Elsa Jones, as she mixes a pot of glue. Others are less happy. “How in the hell can you party when people don’t have their homes,” asks Mike Esnault, an electrician who worked in the Bywater neighbourhood until Katrina destroyed his car.
This tension between revival and depression characterises New Orleans today. Some hope the storm that struck on 29 August will allow them to build a city with better schools, less crime, state-of-the-art flood protection and a revitalised coastline. Others fear too many friends will not return, once unique neighbourhoods will become ghost towns, and New Orleans will become a caricature of its former self.
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“People hope the storm will allow them to build a city with better schools, less crime, state-of-the-art flood protection”
No one knows which scenario will play out, but crucial decisions are being made right now – by federal and local governments, by engineers rebuilding the levees and revitalising the Louisiana coastline, and by the people who face the heart-wrenching choice of whether to return to their broken homes or start a new life elsewhere (see Time line).
“I want to know what they are going to do to make us safe,” explains Debbie Winding, who lives with her husband and child in a trailer outside their home in the Broadmoor district. Winding is acutely aware that the 2006 hurricane season begins on 1 June – and there’s no guarantee it won’t arrive early.
Because of this threat, Congress has given the US Army Corps of Engineers $770 million to restore by June the damaged levees, flood walls and pumps that were supposed to protect the city. “We are working 24 hours a day,” the corps’ Walter Baumy assures a residents’ meeting at Loyola University, near Broadmoor.
Before Katrina, the 17th Street, London Avenue and Orleans canals that extend into the city from nearby Lake Pontchartrain (see Map) were lined by “I walls”. These comprised a series of sunken steel supports, which formed the base for concrete slabs that ran along the top of the levees like teeth. Pump stations fed water from the city’s underground drainage system into the canals, which drain into Lake Pontchartrain. Similar systems also lined the banks of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), which sits to the north-east of St Bernard’s Parish, and the Industrial Canal, which borders the Lower 9th Ward.
As Katrina whipped up a storm surge in Lake Pontchartrain, water flowed into the canals from the lake, instead of the other way around. In the 17th Street, London Avenue and Industrial canals, the steel supports slipped, gaps appeared between the I walls’ concrete slabs, and water tore through. Steel sheets lining the MRGO also slipped, dumping water into St Bernard’s Parish and New Orleans East.
“The steel supports for the levees slipped, gaps appeared between the walls’ concrete slabs, and water tore through”
Independent engineers have said that the steel supports slipped due to an effect known as scouring. As water overtops a wall, the turbulent cascade pouring down the other side scours out the earth below the wall exposing the supports. Eventually the steel supports slip and the concrete teeth separate from each other.
The I walls will be replaced by T walls along the 270 kilometres of levee that were breached, Baumy tells the residents’ meeting. Shaped like an upside-down T, the two horizontal arms will be buried in the levee and act as a kind of splash pad to protecting the underlying soil from scouring. Horizontal steel girders will also reinforce the steel supports for walls, helping to prevent them tilting if scouring does occur. Additionally, new gates will temporarily seal off the canals from the lake during storms, and new interim pumping stations will drain water from the canals into the lake.
Is this enough? “I just feel afraid,” says Broadmoor resident Gerald Philips. Dressed in blue dungarees, a bowler hat and a large gold chain, Philips has travelled to the meeting with his wife from Houston, Texas, where he is staying with family.
The mistrust arises because the flood protection system the corps is responsible for has been condemned by two independent teams of scientists, who blamed faulty design and maintenance for its failure. “This was the biggest civil engineering disaster in human history,” says civil engineer Robert Bea of the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to a study into how the levees broke funded by the National Science Foundation.
From a hindcast, a computer model of the storm, combined with an analysis of the high-water line on walls and nearby homes, plus countless eyewitness reports, scientists from the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge showed that the levee breaches and flood wall failures on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, which flooded the bulk of the city, were not simply caused by overtopping, but by failure of the walls. “It was bad design all the way,” says Paul Kemp, a storm surge modeller at LSU. Bea and colleague Raymond Seed have analysed the spongy soil at many of the failed levees and say they believe it was too weak to secure the steel supports.
The corps’ official response is not expected until May, when it is due to release its own analysis of the levee failures. For now it maintains the levee system was overwhelmed by a storm it was not intended to handle. “If we made a mistake, we want to know too, but data is still being collected,” says Richard Wagenaar, New Orleans district commander for the corps.
On Monday, however, the American Society of Civil Engineers’ External Review Panel, which is independently reviewing the corps’ investigation into Katrina, issued a damning report, blaming the splitting of control between multiple levee boards for the “catastrophic failures” of the flood protection system.
The corps acknowledges that the repairs will only restore New Orleans’s flood protection system to more or less how it was before Katrina struck. However, a bill passed by Louisiana’s House of Representatives on 16 February will consolidate the local levee boards that shared responsibility for maintaining the structures.
Yet what most residents want is for their city to be protected against the next category 5 hurricane, something that is impossible to guarantee. “Many savvy politicians don’t use the words ‘category 5’ anymore,” explains coastal scientist Denise Reed of the University of New Orleans. The problem is that its definition – sustained winds greater than 250 kilometres per hour – “has a bottom but no top”, says Jon Sobiech, speaking for the corps in New Orleans. All the same, the corps is to conduct a two-year, $20 million study into the options for protecting New Orleans against future floods. At the moment there are two competing possibilities.
The Dutch plan, named for its similarity to the walls protecting the Netherlands from the North Sea, is a 480-kilometre-long system of barricades and levees slicing through the marshland sprawling along Louisiana’s coast with the Gulf of Mexico. Gates that only close during storms would allow tidal exchange between inner and outer marshes.
Coastal scientists warn such a wall could alter the marshland’s delicate salinity balance and block the currents that feed it with silt. As well as devastating wildlife and being an eyesore, this could compromise the barrier islands and shallow marshes that offer the Louisiana coast natural protection against storm surges. “You destroy the wetlands and you bring the hurricane to your door, like a big bad wolf,” says Oliver Houck, an environmental lawyer at the city’s Tulane University. The vast structure would also cost up to $35 billion.
No wonder coastal scientists favour investing in coastal restoration as a buffer against storms and to protect rural areas, and ring-fencing cities such as New Orleans with stronger levees. Congress will vote on which plan, if either, it will fund once the corps releases its final report in December 2007. However, the second plan could get a helping hand from another source.
“Coastal restoration would be a buffer against storms and protect rural areas, ring-fencing cities with stronger levees”
For years scientists have warned about erosion of the Louisiana coastline. The levees that hem in the Mississippi river prevent it from replenishing the marshes with silt, and in the past 100 years more than 400,000 hectares of marshland has been lost. What’s more, the criss-crossing canals built across the marshes to excavate offshore oil and gas disrupt the delicate balance of tidal exchange.
Although the state receives $50 million from federal government for diverting river water, installing silt traps and piping in sediment, this is “a drop in the bucket”, says Sidney Coffee, head of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, based in Baton Rouge. Katrina, though, has awoken Louisiana’s politicians to the need for coastal restoration as a means of flood protection, as well as for the environment. Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco is now pressuring federal government to hand over billions in royalties from contracts with oil and gas companies prospecting off the Louisiana coast to pay for coastal restoration.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration announced on 15 February that it will ask Congress to award $4.2 billion for owners of homes damaged in Louisiana. Together with the $6.2 billion Congress approved last year, this would be enough to buy up severely damaged homes for $150,000 each.
However, less than half of New Orleans’s 450,000 former residents have so far returned. If the rest choose not to come back, there won’t be a big enough tax base to pay for schools or garbage collection, nor enough people to draw the businesses that raise an area’s property values.
How do most New Orleanians feel about their future? “It changes every hour,” says Shirley Laska, who teaches risk management and sociology at the University of New Orleans, her eyes filling with tears. “One minute you are filled with energy and revitalisation and the next the water isn’t working because of a leak and you think ‘oh God’.
The gentrification of new orleans?
Hurricane Katrina may have demolished neighbourhoods without paying heed to the colour or creed of their residents, but the New Orleans that emerges from the wreckage is likely to be smaller and whiter, say sociologists and urban planners. “Poorer people have less means to rebuild. And in New Orleans, the poor are disproportionately black,” explains Elliott Stonecipher, an independent demographer based in Shreveport, Louisiana.
In January, John Logan of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, released a study showing that if people returned only to undamaged neighbourhoods, New Orleans would lose 80 per cent of its black residents but only 50 per cent of its white ones. The study cannot make an absolute prediction, as many people have returned to damaged homes. “But it was an eye opener, it sparked one’s imagination,” says Shirley Laska, a sociologist at the University of New Orleans.
Tim Joder, head of the College of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of New Orleans calls the report “misleading” because three of the neighbourhoods that suffered the most flooding – Lakeview, St Bernard’s and Plaquemines – are predominantly white. But he agrees that the city could become more white, and more prosperous, simply because relatively richer white residents are the ones who can afford to start over. “Katrina did not target a particular proportion of the population,” he says. “But it is extraordinarily difficult for people who don’t have resources to come back and rebuild.” Laska is deeply troubled by this prospect. “The African American culture is what makes this city. It’s said that some want the city and not the culture. You can’t have that. Then you will have Disneyland,” she says.
A huge effort is under way to allow displaced residents to vote in the election for New Orleans mayor. Whoever wins the election will help decide which neighbourhoods are revitalised, which areas of the city receive flood protection, and how funds for rebuilding or compensation are distributed. A bill passed by the Louisiana senate on 16 February will create 10 satellite voting centres throughout Louisiana for this purpose, and as 91av went to press the bill looked likely to be signed into law by Louisiana’s governor.
One plan, known as the Baker Bill after its proposer, Congressman Richard Baker of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, would have the state buy up damaged property at 60 per cent of its pre-Katrina price, redevelop it and then sell it. If this land is turned into mixed income housing, then the same type of people will return to it, Logan says. If the housing is sold to the highest bidder, however, then gentrification will occur.
Goodbye mister go
“If they close MRGO, I can rebuild my home,” says Alonzo Bowens, a native of New Orleans East, a neighbourhood that sits between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, the two large bodies of water that border New Orleans.
Bowens, who plays clarinet and saxophone at the jazz club Maison Bourbon in the French Quarter, blames the loss of his home on flooding from a 121-kilometre-long, 13-metre-deep waterway called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet or MRGO (pronounced Mister Go), which lies north-west of it. Many in St Bernard’s Parish, which lies south-west of MRGO, feel the same way, and last month residents from New Orleans East staged a “MRGO must go” rally. Meanwhile scientists remain divided over the role the controversial channel played during Katrina.
Completed by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1968 to connect the port of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico, the channel has always readily filled with silt that must be dredged. Coastal scientists agree it created an ecological disaster, destroying 7800 hectares of marshland during its construction, with further erosion destroying another 1400 hectares. The saline water it carried to the marshes killed cypress trees and altered the bird and marine life in the region. “Many people see it as the devil incarnate,” says Denise Reed, a coastal scientist at the University of New Orleans.
What is not clear yet is whether there is any scientific basis for residents’ fears – that the waterway flooded New Orleans East and St Bernard’s Parish.
The corps says aerial photos of the storm damage, which reveal scouring of the east banks of the levees that border MRGO, show it was a storm surge rising from Lake Borgne (see map), rather than water coming up MRGO, that flooded St Bernard’s Parish. “If MRGO was not there, we would have seen exactly the same effects from hurricane Katrina,” says Richard Wagenaar, New Orleans district commander for the corps.FIG-mg25404102.jpg
However, storm surge modeller Paul Kemp of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge disagrees. He says that even if the water in MRGO did not cause the damage, the levees that hem it in did. MRGO joins up with another channel called the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) at a point to form a kind of Y-shape between St Bernard’s and New Orleans East. When the storm surge pressed in from Lake Borgne, the meeting point of the levees of these two waterways acted as a water trap, causing water to build up and finally break through. The steel flood walls that should have hemmed in MRGO are now in tatters. A computer simulation supports his theory, which he plans to publish.
So will MRGO go? Congress has refused to fund further dredging of the water over the next two years, and its depth has already halved from 13 metres to 7.5 metres. All the same, an official death knell for the waterway has yet to be sounded.
