EJ, St. Charles levees' strength in question

Study shatters faith in levee strength

Substantial work planned in East Jeff

Despite withstanding Hurricane Katrina and being poised to become the area's first levee to reach the vaunted 100-year storm elevation, the East Jefferson lakefront levee might not be adequate and may need to be totally rebuilt or substantially enlarged.

Stunning new data spit out by a complex geotechnical computer model has concluded that lake levees in East Jefferson and St. Charles Parish could be at risk for catastrophic failure.

Though Army Corps of Engineers officials said some experts doubt the accuracy of the new analysis, the agency intends to identify and implement solutions -- which could range from entirely rebuilding the levees to constructing a huge rock jetty in front of them.

"Our new method of analysis has given us (data) that we don't intend to ignore," said Lt. Col. Murray Starkel, deputy commander of the corps' New Orleans District.

Because the corps is under the gun to provide an improved hurricane protection system by 2011, officials said they can't wait for the results of additional studies that might ultimately debunk this new finding of the "Spencer's method" analysis.

"There will come a point at which we go forward with (contracts), even if they produce an overly conservative design," said geotechnical engineer John Grieshaber, technical support chief for the corps' Hurricane Protection Office.

"We will award contracts to meet that 2011 date, and if we find out later that we can do with a less conservative design, we can modify a contract in the field," he said.

Design standards updated

The computer-generated data, which blindsided even those engineers overseeing planned improvements to the region's hurricane protection system, are the result of applying more conservative design standards adopted since Katrina.

Key to that corps effort to ratchet up reliability, complex computer software was specially adapted over the past year that enabled the Spencer's analysis to identify any type of failure that could possibly occur in tricky south Louisiana soils.

As recently as January, engineers overseeing planned improvements to the East Jefferson lakefront predicted that it would be the first to attain the new elevations needed to help provide a stepped-up 100-year level of storm surge protection by 2011.

But the very next month, the Spencer's software began unspooling the news that it had identified a failure potential not detected by previous computer analyses in the Lake Pontchartrain levees of East Jefferson and St. Charles Parish.

"No, we absolutely did not expect this result," Rich Varuso, geotechnical chief for the district's engineering division, said of the geometry-based calculations that resulted.

Improving stability

In response to the Spencer findings, a team of consulting engineers already are analyzing methods of providing additional stability in the two areas that have been red-flagged.

In both cases, the deficiency stems from the size of geosynthetic materials -- heavy-duty fabrics, often made of polyester or polypropylene -- that were buried beneath the levees and berms to help stop levees from moving and failing.

Because the materials were used primarily in East Jefferson and St. Charles Parish, corps officials said the dilemma appears limited to the two parishes.

Spencer's analysis concluded that the geosynthetic material currently in place is about 20 feet too short to prevent the kind of "rotational failure" that the stuff is designed to prevent.

The previous analysis, called Method of Planes, or MOP, did not identify such a failure potential, Varuso said.

Varuso and Starkel say no earthen hurricane protection levee has ever suffered a rotational failure, which generally occurs when levee movement creates a crack near the crown and total collapse follows.

Experts disagree

Varuso said geotechnical engineers who have reviewed Spencer's geometry-based calculations at the lakefront disagree on whether they are valid findings or a fluke created by reconfigured software.

"Some experienced engineers in this field say there's no way that this (kind of failure) can happen under these circumstances, that physics won't allow it .¤.¤. and other experienced engineers feel that it could happen," he said.

Varuso said the new findings already have been passed along to other corps districts and some academicians for their opinions, and additional in-depth analyses and testing are being planned. Those findings will then be peer-reviewed by experts outside the agency.

But for now, Varuso and others said the corps can't wait for those results to endorse or debunk the findings.

"We're going to consider that it's legitimate, valid, until our own studies show otherwise unless they show otherwise," Varuso said.

Corps decision-makers said they will take no chances: If the calculations turn out to have been wrong, Starkel said, the corps's path of prudence will result in an overdesigned protection system for the two parishes.

"Is this really an issue we need to be concerned with, or is it an anomaly?" asked Starkel. "We're going to err on the side of caution and proceed with our evaluation of designs to address it. .¤.¤. We're being uber-conservative."

Although levees and floodwalls throughout the region are being reassessed using Spencer's method, it is the geosynthetic fabrics located mainly in East Jefferson and St. Charles that threw up the red flag.

"I don't think it's going to be a major factor anywhere else, but we'll have to see when the (complete analysis) is finished," Starkel said.

Each of the options being evaluated would alter the face of the lakefront in varying degrees, just as each will have varying effects on the environment and the neighborhoods that nestle up to the levees.

"We well understand the impact that expanding the footprint of the levees will have on humans and the environment," Starkel said. "Our goal has always been to design more robust levees in the same footprint if at all possible."

Starkel said all the alternatives will be publicly aired in a variety of venues once the geotechnical team finishes its analysis, possibly in June.

The options also will be included in Independent Environmental Reports, due out later this year, that will identify the corps' preferred method of addressing the stability issue.

Options to fortify the levees in East Jefferson and St. Charles include degrading the existing levees to bury and anchor wider lengths of the heavy-duty geosynthetic fabric, then rebuilding the levees. During hurricane season, no more than 300 feet of levee would be degraded at any one time.

Another option is ignoring the use of geosynthetic fabric and instead enlarging the levees and berm.

In East Jefferson only, additional options include building a large rock breakwater on the wave berm or even replacing the earthen levees with a floodwall.

Length of construction is particularly dicey against the backdrop of providing a higher level of protection by 2011.

"I would suggest to you that is a sacred date, and there will be protection by then," Grieshaber said.

Starkel said it's too soon to estimate additional costs, but said the corps hopes to mine any extra money needed from the contingency and escalation dollars built into the 100-year budget.

Ironically, the use of geosynthetic fabric was a concept pioneered in the New Orleans district, Varuso said, as a way of strengthening levees in highly developed, urban areas where right of way is at a premium.

"If we follow that (Spencer's) analysis, we're talking about drastic changes in EJ," Grieshaber concluded. "Maybe we'll end up getting information that allows us to tweak things so that the solution won't be as drastic as those (now) being considered.

"But at the end of the day, there will have to be some type of change out there, and we're not just going to add more (dirt) to the top of the levee," he said. "That won't do it."

Parish to start FEMA trailer lawsuits

After 16 months of administrative cajoling, Jefferson Parish officials said Tuesday that they will begin filing lawsuits this week against any persistent denizens of FEMA trailers.

Inspectors found 600 illegal trailers lingering in unincorporated areas during the weekend: 421 in West Jefferson and 179 in East Jefferson. That's down from a peak of more than 17,000 in the summer of 2006.

Parish attorneys will go to court Thursday with the first 30 lawsuits against property owners with FEMA-issued trailers on their land, Parish President Aaron Broussard's administration said. The process will continue until all trailers have been targeted.
The threat of lawsuits is the latest and most aggressive effort to date in the public campaign to return Jefferson's neighborhoods to their appearances before Hurricane Katrina.

"It's been long enough," said Kennith Lassalle, president of the Civic League of East Jefferson. "There may be a few people with extenuating circumstances, but not as many as there are trailers."

Soon after the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane, the Parish Council suspended the law banning travel trailers in single-family zoning districts. By January 2007, parish officials were pressing to remove them, and code-enforcement inspectors started combing neighborhoods to post warning signs on trailer doors. As residents continued to rebuild their storm-damaged houses, the Broussard administration granted several extensions for the trailers' removal, then drew a line in the sand: March 1 was the deadline for the parish to begin considering lawsuits.

Kenner has taken a similar approach, with a deadline of May 31. After that, property owners could be subject to lawsuits, city officials say. According to the latest estimates, about 400 trailers remain in Kenner, down from a post-Katrina high of about 4,000.

Gretna this month counted 40 trailers, all but eight deactivated and awaiting FEMA pickup. Though its deadline for removing trailers was Jan. 1, residents could secure an extension if they could prove they were still repairing their houses. At last week's City Council meeting, Gretna officials said they will start issuing citations for remaining trailers in upcoming weeks.

Westwego has only a handful of trailers, and officials are pressing FEMA to remove them. The city has not renewed permits for residents with trailers.

A single trailer awaiting FEMA collection remains in Harahan, a city once home to about 200, Mayor Paul Johnston said.
In unincorporated areas, parish officials said any property owner who has asked FEMA to remove a trailer, but is still waiting for it to be hauled away, may avoid a lawsuit by submitting a signed and notarized affidavit to the parish attorney's office. Information about the process is available on the parish's Web site: www.jeffparish.net.

Lassalle, the Civic League president, said FEMA is partly to blame for trailers still in Jefferson Parish.

"At two of the trailers in my neighborhood, there's been no one living in them for eight or nine months, but FEMA just hasn't picked them up," said Lassalle, who lives in the Suburban Terrace neighborhood in Old Jefferson.
Parish officials said FEMA is trying to provide rental assistance and other help for trailer residents. FEMA's rental-resources phone number is (888) 294-2822. Its Web site is www.fema.gov.

Help also is available from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at www.hud.gov and (866) 373-9509.

What would you do with 3 Trillion dollars?

This has everything to do with New Orleans and Kanye West was correct, W doesn't give a fuck about black people.

Agency Is Under Pressure to Develop Disaster Housing

GULFPORT, Miss. — After the federal government announced in February that it would no longer use travel trailers to house the victims of future disasters, there was an initial sense of relief along the hurricane-scarred Gulf Coast.

The flimsy little white boxes are unpleasant to live in and tainted with toxic formaldehyde fumes. And they cost the federal government billions of dollars.

But that relief quickly turned to exasperation when it became clear that the government did not have an immediate backup plan. Without the trailers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has no reliable way to rush immediate shelter to thousands of victims of an earthquake, or a wildfire, or another catastrophic hurricane.

Though FEMA is considering several new ideas, including a so-called panelized home partially built at a factory, the agency’s effort to develop a trailer replacement has not impressed many housing experts.

“FEMA seems like a babe in the woods on this stuff,” said John Henneberger, co-director of the Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service, which is working on trailer alternatives. “They seem to be clueless.”

The view in Washington is not much different. “It just sounds like they still don’t know what they’re talking about, to be frank,” said Ronald D. Utt, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “To say, O.K., we didn’t get it right with trailers so we’ll move on to something more exotic like prefab housing is a bizarre suggestion.”

There are several proposals that FEMA may try in future disasters, including houses made of shipping containers and one that can be shipped flat and unfolded upon delivery. Here in Gulfport, the state has designed and built what are known as the Mississippi Cottages — skinny but sturdy little houses that can be seen lined up by the hundreds in a staging area here.

But while the cottages are the only alternative that has been fully tested and appear popular with those who live in them, they have proved hard to place because of local government resistance. And they were produced through an effort that FEMA may have a hard time replicating.

FEMA is under increasing pressure from Congress to develop disaster housing. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who leads a subcommittee on disaster recovery, has begun an investigation into the agency’s policies, and, at a hearing this month, castigated agency officials for failing to develop a strategic plan. Congress had set a deadline for the plan of July 1, 2007; the agency now says it hopes to have one by June 1.

Her goal, Ms. Landrieu said in an e-mail message, is to “make sure the next time a disaster strikes, housing — a basic human need — will be safe for all our families.”

FEMA officials say they are pushing hard to move the last 30,000 families out of temporary housing, most of which is made up of trailers. (There were almost 119,000 trailers in use at the peak.) As the trailers are emptied, they will probably be sold for scrap, said David Garratt, acting assistant administrator for disaster assistance at FEMA.

As for the pace of the hunt for a replacement, “we recognize, to some extent, this is an urgent need,” Mr. Garratt said. “But we don’t want to treat disaster victims as guinea pigs.”

In the meantime, FEMA is planning to order formaldehyde-free mobile homes and a little-used mini-mobile home, called a “park model,” to house disaster victims. But it is far harder to find sites for the bigger units; last fall, for example, the agency had more than 57,000 trailers in use along the Gulf Coast, but fewer than 7,000 mobile homes, and only 1,600 park units.

After the California wildfires last fall, FEMA was able to install only 50 mobile homes; it found them hard to transport on winding roads and hard to install on steep sites, said Jack Schuback, who runs the agency’s joint housing solutions group.

Many experts have long urged FEMA to work closely with federal housing officials to find existing apartments for disaster victims, rather than focus on trailers. The agency insists that it does so whenever possible, although its efforts along those lines in New Orleans and Mississippi have been roundly criticized. But after a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, there was no existing housing nearby.

Relocating families might mean sending them far from their jobs and the houses they hope to rebuild.

One of FEMA’s criteria in evaluating trailer alternatives is that they have a smaller footprint than mobile homes, Mr. Schuback said.

The agency is also looking for housing that can accommodate families and people with disabilities, that can be delivered quickly, that can be installed in different environments, and that will not be too costly. The travel trailers cost as little as $11,000 apiece, but installing and maintaining them averaged $30,000, and sometimes far more, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Using a lengthy checklist, FEMA has evaluated about 66 proposals, Mr. Schuback said, and visited 37 sites. But only half a dozen have been deemed promising enough to try during a disaster.

“I want to emphasize that we have not yet found the golden unit that will solve all disaster housing,” he said. “The process has ruled out far more units than it has yielded.”

The agency is being cagey about which proposals made the cut, but it did say that it is evaluating two that are being tried by states under a $400 million pilot project that Congress required FEMA to undertake in June 2006.

Texas is supposed to try the panelized home. It has signed a contract with an international company called Heston, but none of the houses have been built.

The only units FEMA says it is planning to test are the Mississippi Cottages, which have tin roofs, small porches and are colored like Easter eggs — rose-hip pink, malted mint, cloudless blue. The cottages are on wheels, but the larger models can be put on permanent foundations. All are equipped with appliances, beds, a table and chairs, ceiling fans, even pots and pans, and cost an average of $32,000 apiece to build.

With its built-in closets and spacious kitchen cupboards, their cottage feels like a mansion, said Vicki Ladner Meshell and her husband, Rickey, whose apartment in Long Beach was washed away by Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge.

“We love it — except when all four of us are trying to get ready at once,” Ms. Meshell said of the little aqua-colored cottage, which her family eventually hopes to buy. The cottage is rent-free, although they pay $210 a month for the trailer site, plus utilities.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency has installed more than 2,000 of them throughout southern Mississippi, and plans to put in 3,500.

But local governments in Mississippi have resisted the cottages. They fear people who get cottages will simply live in them and not rebuild their houses, said Mike Womack, executive director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

“They’re too nice,” he said. “I’ve heard this over and over again.”

Losing Our Will

wonder what the answers would be if each American asked himself or herself the question: “How is the war in Iraq helping me?”

While the U.S. government continues to pour precious human treasure and vast financial resources into this ugly war without end, it is all but ignoring deeply entrenched problems that are weakening the country here at home.

On the same day that President Bush was announcing an indefinite suspension of troop withdrawals from Iraq, the New York Times columnist David Leonhardt was telling us a sad story about how the middle class has fared during the Bush years.

The economic boom so highly touted by the president and his supporters “was, for most Americans,” said Mr. Leonhardt, “nothing of the sort.” Despite the sustained expansion of the past few years, the middle class — for the first time on record — failed to grow with the economy.

And now, of course, we’re sinking into a nasty recession.

The U.S., once the greatest can-do country on the planet, now can’t seem to do anything right. The great middle class has maxed out its credit cards and drained dangerous amounts of equity from family homes. No one can seem to figure out how to generate the growth in good-paying jobs that is the only legitimate way of putting strapped families back on their feet.

The nation’s infrastructure is aging and in many places decrepit. Rebuilding it would be an important source of job creation, but nothing on the scale that is needed is in sight. To get a sense of how important an issue this is, consider New Orleans.

The historian Douglas Brinkley, who lives in New Orleans, has written: “What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”

We could have saved the victims of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, but we didn’t. And now, more than 2 ½ years after the tragedy, we are still unable to lift the stricken city off its knees.

Other nations can provide health care for everyone. The United States cannot. In an era in which a college degree is becoming a prerequisite for a middle-class quality of life, we are having big trouble getting our kids through high school. And despite being the wealthiest of all nations, nearly 10 percent of Americans are resorting to food stamps to maintain an adequate diet, and 4 in every 10 American children are growing up in families that are poor or near-poor.

The U.S. seems almost paralyzed, mesmerized by Iraq and unable to generate the energy or the will to handle the myriad problems festering at home. The war will eventually cost a staggering $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. When he was asked on “Democracy Now!” about who is profiting from the war, he said the two big gainers were the oil companies and the defense contractors.

This is the pathetic state of affairs in the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Whatever happened to the dynamic country that flexed its muscles after World War II and gave us the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations (in a quest for peace, not war), the interstate highway system, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the finest higher education system the world has known, and a standard of living that was the envy of all?

America’s commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, and our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, went up to Capitol Hill this week but were unable to give any real answers as to when the U.S. might be able to disengage, or when a corner might be turned, or when a faint, flickering hopeful light might be glimpsed at the end of the long, horrific Iraqi tunnel.

A country that used to act like Babe Ruth now swings like a minor-leaguer. The all-American can-do philosophy has been smothered by the hapless can’t-do performances of the people who have been in charge for the past several years. It’s both tragic and embarrassing.

The war in Iraq stands like a boulder in the road, blocking progress on so many other important issues that are crucial to our viability as a society. We’ve seen this before. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which included the war on poverty, was crippled by the war in Vietnam.

On the evening of April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went into Riverside Church in Manhattan and said of the war in Vietnam: “This madness must cease.”

Forty-one years later, we can still hear the echo of Dr. King’s call. The only sane response is: “Amen.”