Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
fl ood control structures. This last method is the one that was supposed
to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina.
Hurricane Katrina
In the late summer of 2005, Hurricane Katrina roared ashore in New
Orleans, generating the city's twenty-eighth major fl ood, causing $134
billion in damage, the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history. Barge
shipping was halted, as was grain export from the Port of New Orleans,
the nation's largest site of grain exports. The extensive oil and gas pipe-
line network was shut down by the loss of electrical power, producing
shortages of natural gas and petroleum products. Total recovery costs
for the roads, bridges, and utilities, as well as debris removal, have been
estimated at $15 billion to $18 billion.
The storm surge was 20 feet high, creating a disaster zone covering
90,000 square miles in three states, an area larger than Kansas. Eighty
percent of New Orleans disappeared under water that was up to 15
feet deep, 1,300 people died (1,800 in the three-state affected area),
and the United States faced a humanitarian disaster on a scale not seen
since the Great Depression. With a second inundation from Hurricane
Rita in September, it took fi fty-three days from Katrina's landfall to
pump the city dry; because half the city lies below mean sea level, the
water would not drain out by itself and had to be pumped uphill.
Approximately 1.5 million people aged sixteen and older left their
homes. As of 2009, only three-quarters of Louisiana residents had
returned.
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The hurricane destroyed or damaged 300,000 homes on the
Gulf Coast and led to billions of dollars of waste in the emigration
that followed.
New Orleans was a catastrophe waiting to happen, with extensive
and repeated warnings from scientists, engineers, and the media. The
population of nearly half a million lived in a bowl between the natural
levees of the Mississippi River and the built levees along Lake Pontchar-
train. Katrina brought severe winds, record rainfalls, and storm water
damage, followed by the collapse of major canal fl oodwalls that allowed
water to fi ll the bowl in about 80 percent of the city. Rescue operations
were remarkably inadequate, evacuation was incomplete, levees col-
lapsed, and those remaining in the city were in desperate straits. As
Jeffrey Mount, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the
University of California, Davis, has said, “The dark secret that no one
wants to share is that there are two kinds of levees: those that have failed
and those that will fail.”
