Early last year, a TV interviewer asked Bruce Thompson if he would be her “levee professor” – someone who would explain for her the complex interplay of boards, regulations and engineering that makes up the New Orleans flood protection system.
Thompson, who was then an executive member of mayor Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back commission, felt he was not the person best qualified. Turning to Billy Marchal, a fellow member, Thompson asked, “Who teaches this stuff?” Marchal replied, “No one.” At that point, says Thompson, “I realised we needed to open a levee school.”
Little more than a year later, that is exactly what Thompson and Marchal are doing. In the next few months, volunteer members from two newly created flood protection authorities will receive a crash course on levee fundamentals, taught by staff from Louisiana State University as well as private consultants. The curriculum for the three-day course, now awaiting state approval, will include everything from the physics of levee design to the laws that dictate how flood control is meant to work in a post-Katrina world.
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“Courses will cover everything from the physics of levee design to the laws that dictate how flood control is meant to work”
The levee school is a home-grown approach to the problem of how to protect New Orleans from a repeat of the disastrous flooding that occurred in 2005, when earthen levees that were breached by hurricane Katrina allowed in a deluge that left 80 per cent of the city underwater. While the media spotlight has tended to focus on suggested big engineering solutions, such as a wholesale diversion of the Mississippi or the construction of a vast flood barrier running the length of south-eastern Louisiana, the levee school illustrates a dramatic change in the largely invisible human element of the system.
“If I had $10 to spend on a levee, I would put $8 on people and $2 on dirt,” says Robert Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done forensic work on how the levees broke. “The most important parts of flood protection are the people and the knowledge that they have.”
Although the 2005 failures have been attributed mainly to bad design, Bea’s study showed that inadequate oversight by a dozen Balkanised volunteer levee boards played a role. Levees along the London, 17th and Industrial canals were breached, in part, because there were trees growing on them that should not have been allowed to grow. Katrina’s winds blew the trees over, pulling out their roots, and this left craters in the levees that flood waters gushed through. Rumours also circulated in the months after Katrina about “drive-by inspections”, in which board members who were supposed to check levees never even bothered to stop their cars.
As of January 2007, the old levee boards have been replaced with new authorities that Thompson and Marchal hope to imbue with a higher level of technical expertise. Both trained as engineers and are also local businessmen intent on spreading the kind of know-how that could prevent a future catastrophe. “We need people with a 35,000-foot view of flood protection,” says Thompson.
Once the inaugural class has graduated, he adds, the intention is to open the levee school to others, including politicians and reporters. “The overall mission statement is for Louisiana to become a centre for world excellence in flood protection,” Thompson says. Given predictions for another bad hurricane season this year, class will be in session none too soon.
