Their levees, our levees (redux)
February 13, 2006 • (0) Comments
We’ve all seen that clever photo essay comparing New Orleans’ earthen and concrete levee construction to technological marvels of engineering in “enlightened” Europe. Are Europeans just smarter?
My long-time friend and liberal foil Greg Katz forwarded this link to a recent photo essay last night and, while I haven’t bestirred meself to opine in a while, this one deserved a riposte. In the interest of fair play, I’m sure Greg won’t mind if I publish my side of our correspondence.
“Greg, a fascinating exercise and a worthy debate. What America does in N’awlins will say a lot about our priorities. Nevertheless, when history judges what happened there, local Democrats will come out stinking worse than anything you can hang on the current federal administration.
Start with the locals’ failure to evacuate and outright malfeasance by uniformed emergency personnel. Add the spectacle of televised municipal and state officials fueling rumors of widespread mayhem, significant loss of life, and civil breakdown that were quickly determined to be false. Add the continuing efforts by liberal race-baiters to make this a black man’s Dunkirk worthy of national shame, rather than a rallying point for national unity. And then throw in 50 years of self-delusion about the consequences of a Cat-5 storm. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but not as much as is being directed at the President.
But because the Port of New Orleans is vital to our national interests (and ignoring the city’s value as a cultural icon and playground), I’ll take your bait and consider how the Europeans treat similar threats.
Here’s a link to more information about recent Dutch developments: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_318.html. We all know that the Dutch live behind dikes, of course, but they also need to manage periodic storm surges coursing in from the North Sea along numerous navigable waterways that can’t be closed to shipping without crushing the European economy. What isn’t well understood here is that there are at least 7 million people living in the lowlands threatened by these surges, including the inhabitants of four major cities surrounding Holland’s national capital. A 1953 Storm Surge killed some 1,835 of them and wrecked their national economy, the worst flooding in 300 years (and a much larger consequence than the Delta faced). This is one of Europe’s largest population centers, and arguably, they have nowhere else to go.
Your photo depicts the Oosterscheldekering, a nine kilometer barrier originally designed as a closed dam. The section shown is a picture of huge sluice-gate-type doors that were installed over a 4-kilometer stretch after public outcry that the Oosterscheldekering would damage marine life. It took years to balance environmental, commercial and public safety considerations before that structure could be built, and it’s just one part of Holland’s system of flood controls.
Penning this quickly, I haven’t had time to research this in detail but I’d be interested in knowing what the per capita cost of erecting the entire network of surge barriers represents to Holland’s economy. Would Americans willingly shoulder a similar cost-per-head to resurrect the pre-July-2005 New Orleans?
London’s Thames Barrier is a much less ambitious response to the same 1953 North Sea Storm Surge. In Britain’s case, only 307 people were killed. The Barrier spans a 523-meter wide section of the river and divides it into six channels between nine large concrete piers that are shaped like the hulls of ships. Hydraulics raise the flood gates from below the water, and have been used about 90 times (in addition to monthly tests). The barrier was commissioned in 1984 (three decades after the proximate cause) at a total construction cost of £534 m plus about £100 m for river defenses and is expected to cope with sea level rises until about 2030, when a more comprehensive solution will need to be found. The cost so far equates to roughly $2.2 billion in 2001 dollars—a tiny fraction of what Louisiana congressmen are asking Americans to contribute for the restoration of the Delta region.
The flood control project at Venice is actually not a very convincing straw-man for American policy in the Delta. That’s because flooding is a phenomenon Venetians know well. The increased flooding is caused by two things money can’t directly address: the city is sinking and the sea level is rising. Add to that the regular occurrence of moon-induced high water and you have a mess that even a fantasist like Ray Nagin couldn’t cook up.
Venice is actually a collection of many small islands connected by bridges and separated from the Adriatic Sea by a strip of narrow barrier islands much like the Carolina Lowcountry. When the tides are higher than normal, water surges through the Lagoon’s inlets and floods the city, forcing people to walk around on raised catwalks or passerelle set up for these occasions. In November 1966, the city was under a 1.94-meter tide (nearly six and a half feet), almost 1.5 meters over the normal tide, causing the worst flooding in recent history. In recent years, Venice floods as much as 100 times annually, so flooding has become a customary experience factored into the normal rhythm of Venetian life.
Because flooding occurs so frequently now, the ground floors of most buildings have been abandoned and many people have moved away. You might say that Venice is reverting to a natural condition that is appropriate to its location. During medieval times, Venice was a thriving metropolis of 250,000 people; today the population is a mere 60,000. As getting around is difficult, there are no cars or trucks to move goods around in Venice, and the place is more museum than vibrant, viable city. It’s too early to argue that that’s an appropriate fate for New Orleans, but Venice proves that such outcomes aren’t exceptional in history.
In any case, the proposed flood gates at the three inlets to Venice’s Lagoon have been extremely contentious as public policy and, after more than a decade of debate and planning, are still unfinished and unproven. Critics note that—if it works at all—the $4 billion project will only stop the most extreme incidents of flooding, and then only for a few decades until it becomes necessary to raise the gates permanently, turning the Lagoon into an uninhabitable cesspool. The project will NOT secure Venice’s place as a lively modern city—what proponents of flood control in New Orleans insist must be our policy goal.
The three European public works projects you cite are surely engineering marvels. All of them served to enrich some group or another of well-placed engineering and construction companies. All of them are bold attempts to hold back forces of nature that are regularly observed. Even then, none of these projects occurred without rancorous public debate over the uses of public money to thwart a hostile and implacable natural order. Hurricane Katrina was a rare, catastrophic event. It’s been six months since New Orleans’ levees broke and five months since the city was pumped clear. Whomever history assigns the blame for our current grief, it will almost certainly be many years before we know whether restoration plans on ANY scale are a good investment or a bad one.
Using Europe’s public works experience to call shame on American policy is short-sighted. I’m willing to bet you that the US Government will make incremental repairs to New Orleans’ levees over the remaining term of George Bush’s presidency while planners debate the shape of the ultimate engineering solution. That solution will cost more money than anyone can conceive and won’t be built until a Democratic administration has its opportunity to award the pork to its own set of contractors. Because of pandering to African-American voters who’re being convinced that rebuilding New Orleans is somehow all about THEM, the project will be built quickly and without regard to cost overruns or critical quibbles.
Thirty years from now, when the next Cat-5 bears down on Bourbon Street, who will we blame?”