Not the “leaky” levees we desire
22nd May 2008
Maybe there are old newspapers stuck between that leaky levee sheetpiling.
Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm.
“It is all based on a 30-year-old defunct model of thinking, and it means that when they wake up to this one — really — our cost is going to increase significantly,” said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California at Berkeley. …
Timothy Kusky, a geologist with Saint Louis University and an expert on the Mississippi River, said engineering a safe levee system in New Orleans will be very difficult because of the soil.
“You’ve got old riverbeds and floodplain deposits all interlayered and distributed laterally in a very complex way, and then you build a levee across them,” Kusky said.
As a result, a levee sinks at different rates, and the sinking creates “little cracks in them that promote seepage, and also the old river channels and floodplain deposits have different potentials for underseepage,” he said.
So is that leaky levee really a problem?
And what do the presidential candidates have to say about building levees and reforming the Corps of Engineers? John McCain isn’t sure America should rebuild neighborhoods after disasters. That’s one battle he’s willing to concede without as much as a skirmish, but a hundred-year in Iraq? Hooraw!
As for old ways of thinking — that conversation is long overdue.
Now, if we could only get the more desirable leaky levee idea implemented in areas where natural alluvial deposits will restore degraded wetlands.
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