One for New Orleans, as usual. One for Boston. The New Orleans surprise comes at the hands of -- no surprise -- the Army Corps of Engineers. Rob Marshall, part of the T-P team that just won't quit on this story, reports that the fix of the side of the Industrial Canal that flooded the lower Ninth Ward will entail raising the effective height of that side. The other side, facing the main part of the city, has not been raised -- yet. So, if storm surge gets into the canal this year, guess what happens?
Should a Category 3 storm like Katrina strike while that disparity exists during the next two hurricane seasons, storm modelers and engineers said, the lower west wall will be overtopped sooner and the volume of water pouring into the western section of the city from the canal will be greater and last longer than during Katrina.
"Any surge coming up the canal under this configuration will simply go over the west side much faster than before," said Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center and a member of the state team investigating the levee failures.
The Corps plans to heighten the west side of the canal around September 2007. Why the lack of synchronicity?
Col. Lewis Setliff III, commander of the corps' levee rebuilding effort, ...said he did not know why both projects were not attempted simultaneously. "I don't have an answer for that."
Alright then. That we can take to the bank. Meanwhile, in Boston, the Globe reports that the scandal-plagued Big Dig is not the only most expensive urban construction project in the history of the universe, the concrete used to build the highways and tunnels in the project may have been "tainted" as part of a massive fraud, meaning that those highways and tunnels aren't as safe as Bostonians might have hoped they were getting for their $14 billion (and ours).
This story isn't making nearly as much national news as a certain car incident involving a certain Kennedy. Maybe your assignment for the weekend is to come up with a sexier word for "infrastructure."