Never Should Have Built it There -- New York

After four years of hearing, from commenters on the New Orleans disaster, that "they never should have built it there... they should just move it inland/upstream/away", comes this report on a conference suggesting the dire future that may await New York City if (or, as one expert puts it, "when") a hurricane generates serious storm surge.

The proposed solution: a set of barriers ringing the city to protect it from inundation. The proposed cost: billions of (supposedly federal) dollars. The alternative: there is none, because, says one of the designers of the proposed barriers:

"We're going to have to do something," Bowman said. "Or else you retreat, and that's inconceivable. How are you going to retreat from New York City?"

Well, the same way people do each summer: everybody to the Hamptons.

Here's a suggestion: for the sake of every city surrounded by water (much of Chicago, which I recently visited, actually sits nestled very tightly between a lake and a river), let's fix what the shoddily designed and constructed federal levees did to New Orleans first, and see if that works as a successful model. The Dutch have been doing this for hundreds of years, they may even have something to teach us. Even though they're -- ugh -- Europeans.

Comments

[samlu1]

Hey Harry...yo­u seem like a man who could get things done. When can the world test the levee system pieces for demolitions? When can we get the final autopsy reports of the 5 "contractors" that were killed by local police because the men were "going around detonating the levee system"? Blackwater was called in to NOLA one day after the storm...he­aded by none other than Bush Jrs right hand man Joe Albaugh. Joe was also head of FEMA during 9/11....wh­o on that very morning was at NORAD dealing with over 25 simulated terrorist attacks that were taking place on the morning of 9/11. Hey Harry....w­onder if those 5 contractors and their companies had any direct relationships with the same demolition companies from 9/11? You are not going to like what you find......­.....

[Harry Shearer - Huffpost Blogger]

Before you spread any more of this, pls read at least the exec summaries of the ILIT report and the Team Louisiana report on the cause of the breaches. No big mystery--decades of wrongheaded, shortsighted decisions, fully documented.

[ICanHasDemocracy]

yep, sound advice- you know we can all create our own constellations too by connecting the dots...I can make a hat, or terradacty­l.......th­at being said you can also cover up a conspiracy with incompetence, and fold it up into a nice neat package.

[Bienville]

I have heard those rumors of levees being demolished by explosives.
I have read the reports of three independent levee investigation teams.
I have walked a number of levees before and after the storm (I do not imply that I had any but the typical access of a normal civilian pedestrian­.)
I have ridden out a number of strong hurricanes in my home.
I know the neighborhoods and protected zones of New Orleans quite well.
Several attempts and many tons of dynamite were needed to open the levee at Caernarvon in 1927.

My conclusion is that no levees were blown during Katrina. The evidence of the investigative reports is convincing and compelling; poor judgements made during design and construction for many years prior to Katrina is responsible for the failure of the levees. Hurricanes are very noisy things. Any number of events in a hurricane could be mistaken for an explosion; the immense noise of a hurricane can easily prevent any sound - even that of an explosion - from carrying very far. No single levee failure could target any racial or economic group within the City to the exclusion of harm to another group (i.e., blowing up a levee cannot selvectively harm blacks without also harming whites, and vice-versa­.)

Whatever else you may know, or think you know, please relieve yourself of the notion that levees were deliverately weakened or destroyed during Hurricane Katrina.

[samlu1]

The levees failed TWO days AFTER Katrina left......­....did you test any of the debris yet?

[twofish]

I've been looking at a map of the San Francisco Bay Area and thinking that eventually we'll need a real gate at the Golden Gate, to keep the rising seas from flooding all that high-priced real estate around the Bay. I wonder if anyone in government is thinking about it. It would have to be the Feds -- state government out here is wondering how to keep the lights on past July.

A lot of the Bay was filled in and homes and businesses built on ground likely to liquify after a Great earthquake. A lot of that has been stopped, though there is another proposal floating around to replace the salt ponds with housing. That's the story -- some hit-and-run developer builds on fill, or puts schools and hospitals on a major fault (the Hayward -- overdue for a big quake). Then a quake happens, and they stick a microphone in your face and say "How come you still live here?"

I'll take the once-a-century quake odds for the privilege of living in this beautiful place. But not on fill and not right on the fault. Even in dangerous places, there are places of more or less danger. But rational land use is impossible when everyone wants to maximize their income and wash their hands of the consequences.

[openhand]

Why is this only on TPM? Please spread the word.

Robert Reich. "How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option, And What Obama and the Rest of Us Must Do."

"Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill....co­nt....

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/robert_reich/2009/06/the-public-option-smokescreens.php#comments

[GH]

Well, it will be interesting to see. The enviromentalists, and notably the NY times editorial board have long opposed daming up rivers and building so many levees. As they stated in 1993:

The billions of Federal dollars spent to construct dams and levees have doubtless prevented billions of dollars of damage to the areas they serve. But a dam or a levee in one place creates problems somewhere else. Also, by offering protection, they encourage people to live and work and develop farming in flood plains that are inherently risky.

or, in 2001:

But the Corps has never abandoned its blind faith in dams and levees that, when overused, constrict the river's natural flow, invite overbuilding and end up doing more harm than good.

All of this applies to NOLA, of course - Now NY city is a bit different. It needs the big Dutch wall out in the ocean to protect it. Of course that was proposed for NOLA back in the 1970's - but once again the environmentalists put up such a stink, that the Corps finally gave up on the idea.

[GH]

oops - I forgot to include the quotation marks for the two brief paragraphs I provided. They follow the " : "

[Harry Shearer - Huffpost Blogger]

Correction: there was no big wall proposed by the Corps in the 70s, there were floodgates, similar to what the Corps is building now. And they were opposed for the same reason that some look askance at them now: to prevent lake water from flooding into the city during an emergency, they may prevent those same canals from doing what they were designed to do, draining big rainfall from the city into the lake.

[GH]

Harry - you should know me better. While there is much in life that is difficult to really get ones fingers around-poor news, bs, etc., I'm not going to put something out that doesn't have an element of truth. so ya send me out searching. it's OK-we're all in this together (that's always my message!):
---
A Barrier That Could Have Been
[LA Times]09/09/05

In the wake of HurricaneBetsy 40years ago, Congress approved a massive hurricane barrier to protect NOLA from storm surges...s­igned into law by Johnson, was derailed in 1977 by an environmental lawsuit. .."If we had built the barriers, NOLA would not be flooded," said Joseph Towers, the retired chief counsel for the Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans district.
[..]
The project was stopped in its tracks when an environmental lawsuit won a federal injunction on the grounds that the Army's environmental impact statement was flawed. By the mid-1980s, Corps of Engineers abandoned the project.
--------
Soooo - next time.. how about, "hey, gh, I don't recall that ?
Yes, the locks are way past due -- hope they work -- it's a complicated set of circumstances to use them! But news, is that the public does not have a clue that anything constructive down there has been done since Katrina - nor 117,000 people received average of $60,000 in tax free federal grants to help rebuild/relocate. Our media made damn sure of that. If people knew - they would be armed to argue for more(;-/e

[GH]

Actually Harry, I remember hearing another reason why the floodgates were stopped back then. Seems that the levee boards wanted the Corps to take over maintenance of the city's canals. The Feds argued that that was city facilities - they do the big river control projects, etc.

Here - check out this story: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-na-levee25dec25,1,6536569.story

[Agent420]

The Army Corp of Engineers are a bunch of clowns. Most of what the build is over priced and needs constant maintenance. They are so full of themselves that they think they are more powerful than nature. We see the results of their egomania.

[Bienville]

That the environmentalists put up "a stink" about sealing the Lake with floodgates is not why they were not built. The law requires that every federal project complete an environmental document. The Corps did not follow that law in their plan. "Environmentalists" sued. A judge ruled that the Corps must follow the law and produce the necessary document before proceeding. Instead, the Corps shelved the project.

[susang]

The best chance for NYC is for them to keep the Army Corps of Engineers as far away from their city as possible.

[doctorj2u]

Again Harry, thank you for you ceaseless efforts to help New Orleans. I just heard on the local news that the Mississippi delta is losing land more rapidly than any other place on the planet! I cannot understand why America and American media thinks of this as a non-issue.

[nicho]

Find out what those stupid socialist Europeans did in Holland -- and we'll do the opposite. We'll show them we're number one.

[SoonerThought]

Harry, if you insist on making sense, people will not know how to take your commentary­...

[davidly]

If only the Dutch hadn't made that trade, we'd've had on our own shores an example after which to model N.O.

[LittleJoey]

I had friends that lived on the Mississippi River near St. Louis. After their Great Flood of 1993 a national TV reporter asked one of them "Why do YOU PEOPLE still live here?"
The explanation from my friend was simple, he said "My family has been here since 1770's, they were French Creole who married Native Americans".
When asked about how they have lived so long in the "floodplain" , my friend said "You either get behind a levee, or you get up higher than the water. Gotta live with the River, best not to ignore it."
Those comments never made the news.

[samlu1]

Mr. Shearer...­..have you listened to or read any of the Presidential transcripts from Aug 28th 2005-Sept 18th 2005? The White House has now said it destroyed ALL transcripts of what was said and done during that entire time frame. Saying quote "it would be too embarassing for the country to hear"!!!! What could possibly be too embarrasing for the former administration? I will tell you.......­...

Bush ordered the murders of thousands of US citizens and destruction of property by US soldiers, law enforcement, and private contractors. That is an immediate impeachable offense. That is why the world will never know what was done or said duing that time frame. The financial crimes and land grabs conspired by Bernanke during Katrina got him the post for Fed Chairman one month after Katrina. That too was also on the transcripts.

[Marnie1]

I hope that the ACE has enough sense, this time, to realise that the back side of any strong roating storm, hurricane or tornady, can be just as destructive as the front side.
For tornadoes its mostly the debris that is being hammered into anything left alive or standing.
For hurrianes it is pushing the lead edge, and the flooding from heavy rains that proceeded bakc into the path of the still rising storm surge.

For an island like New York not only would there be that kind of back wash, but there is evidence on at lease one Mediterrian and one Hawian island of tidal waves that pass around the islands and met and slammed into itself again on the back side of the islands creating a wave that was much higher than that leading edge of the tidal wave.

New York could conceivably be affected by both the back wash flooding and the head on collision of the divided storm surges, head-on collision, on the lee side of the island.

Yup better rebuild New York in the Rockies. And what about San Fran. and t he earthquakes. Better get it out of harm's way. Maybe onto the

New Orleans however being a port city can't effectively move away from the Gulf.

[Realization]

New York is on a river. No tidal wave backlash there. And any surge flooding is probably quite manageable. Did these guys look at a chart? As for New Orleans, there would have been a lot less of a problem if there weren't new man-made channels and if the marshes hadn't been destroyed. There was once good natural protection that would have absorbed a lot of the force of the water. And a lot of NO is below sea level and the dikes were not good. You could look at them and tell that. Thanks to the Corps of Engineers and short funding.

[GH]

It's more complicated than that. NOLA is sinking. The old wetland areas much faster than others. It is the daming up of the Mississippi River long time ago, that ended the seasonal silt depositing floods on the area,which served to build up the marsh lands and to counter the natural sinking of the area. Building on top of the muck causes it to sink. Pumping the water out so that one could build on the area caused it to sink. It continues to settle -- at a much faster rate than the oceans are rising, by the way.

For the record, a good bit of the marsh lands were actually created by the daming up of the Mississippi River, as it created a new and more defined delta where the sediments have now been deposited for many a year. Harry can probalby add to this discussion. I only lived there for a short time.

[rf dude]

So mebbe better to build

the Ground Zero memorial

in the Catskills.­..
--

[AmericanSon]

In 20 years, it will become obvious to everyone that all areas around the world that are less than 20 feet above sea level will have to be permanently evacuated. There simply is not enough money to pay for all the dikes and levees to keep the sea from swallowing New York City, New Orleans and the entire state of Florida. All of you people living on the coasts, get ready now to move inland.

[GH]

The seas are not rising at that rate. (20 feet in 20 years - been listening to Al Gore and Harry Smith again?) In fact, NOAA will tell you that in their 100 to 150 year record of charting sea rise around the coast line of the US - that nothing has changed - anywhere- during this historic record. In other words - there is absolutley no evidence that sea levels have begun to rise any faster than they were prior to the record. Here in LA - the rate is 3 1/4 inches per 100 years. NOLA looks worse on the charts, as it is mostly the land that is sinking. The New York area is seeing something in the order of 7 inches per 100 years.. and it's a straight line trend - except that it's been going down in a short term cycle for a number of years now. Here's The Battery, NY:
http://co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8518750

[fogbreath]

it is not just NYC, but the whole upper east coast which has not had a hurricaine do major damage for many years.
Cape Cod which used to have mostly saltbox houses which withstood such storms now has many three story houses mostly of glass.
In Providence there are water mark memorials three and four feet high on walls in downtown.
a storm barrier was put in in the mid fifties which hasn't had a real test as yet.

[audadvnc]

About "moving to the Hamptons" - out on the end of Long Island, barely above sea level, mansions built on sand? Yeah, moving all the Wall Streeters out there for the next hurricane sounds like pretty good idea, actually! And poetically correct!