Gating the Rigolets?

This was on the cover of the paper recently:

New $1.1 billion hurricane levee proposed for New Orleans East Land Bridge 

I expected a bit better writeup on this very important project.  It's a large levee proposed stretching from New Orleans East to Slidell.  It will have gaps in the channels at the Rigolets, but will have options to install gates at a later time.  

Note that the gating of the mouth of the lake has been proposed on numerous occasions in the past.  Proposals go back at least 40 years.  It's back under discussion, partly because of Isaac's LaPlace flooding. Here's a letter to the editor shortly after Isaac calling for the gates.  

Putting in the levee along the old St. Bernard birdsfoot is a pretty low-risk, moderate-reward project.  In fact, it was even called for in the Corps' original 1962 plan for hurricane protection levees around New Orleans, but was shelved for a variety of reasons including cost.  So long as you maintain sufficient gaps for normal inflow and outflow, there's very little impact on the lake, although there's not as much of a mitigation against storm surge.  The natural tendency is to want to gate off the final gaps, but that could cause problems.  

Gates present problems risk for two main reasons: flow and backside fetch-driven-flooding.  

The first issue is flow.  Lake Pontchartrain is really more akin to a tidal mudflat than a traditional lake.  There are MASSIVE inflows and outflows in that lake on a regular basis.  Even without hurricanes, the tidal flows through the Rigolets can reach ~6-8 knots.  That's really moving.  Any gated structure will mean a choke point which will increase the flowrate much higher.  That means the structure will be very, very vulnerable to scour and undermining.  Here's an illustration of scour at the Rigolets:

Source:

McCorquodale, J. A., Georgiou, I., Retana, A. G., Barbe, D., & Guillot, M. J. (2007). Hydrodynamic Modeling of the Tidal Prism in the Pontchartrain Basin Estuary. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA.

This is a trestle bridge that supports the CSX line that runs along the Gulf Coast.  The pilings interrupt the flow and cause major scouring in the vicinity.  Note that scour very nearly destroyed the Corps-built Old River Control Structure in 1973, partly due to a design flaw:

 In 1973, a large flood tested the ORCS to its limits.  Huge scour developed underneath the large steel pilings which anchored the structure to the river bottom. The structure was almost swept away, and emergency concrete was poured into the holes as a kind of large Band-Aid.

Any gate structure in the Rigolets would have to cope with similar, powerful scour effects.  

The other problem with gating the Rigolets is backside flooding.  You'd think that if you just built a giant plug, well, that'd solve all your problems, right?  Like putting up a giant dam, no storm surge could enter and no flooding would result, right?  Not quite.  

A term used in physical oceanography is "Fetch".  Fetch describes how wind (even very weak wind) acting over a large enough surface area begins to build up waves and surge.  Isaac, despite being barely a Category 1 storm, covered a very large surface area.  Despite they eye hitting Port Fourchon, I had friends in Charleston, SC lose power from the outer bands of the storm.  Despite weak winds, they were able to act over a large area and build up a pretty impressive surge, as anyone in Braithwait or LaPlace can tell you.  

How does this relate to gating the Rigolets?  Well, let's suppose you had a continuous, 50' barrier keeping the mouth of the lake plugged up through any and all hurricanes,  you still have the surface area of Lake Pontchartrain that the wind can act upon.  The lake is ~24 miles wide by at least double that width in the other direction.  The surface area of the lake is ~630 square miles.  Even if you have a weak wind, it has enough surface area to act upon to still make a significant surge.  Even if you have gates, you'll still need levees around the edge of the lake!  Gates alone are not enough.  

Purely fetch-driven surge in Lake Pontchartrain can pile up to 6 feet+ on the Lake (Source: Ed Fleming at a presentation I attended).  Furthermore, that surge can be driven North, South, or West, depending on the direction of where the hurricane hits.  For example, a hurricane that hits Morgan City has a north-east quadrant that would drive storm surge to the Northshore.  A hurricane that hits Bay St. Louis would push surge southwards onto the lakeside levees of Jefferson and Orleans Parish.  Note that there are no Federal flood protection levees anywhere on the Northshore and, while they have been authorized for LaPlace, no funding has ever come forward to actually build them.*  Getting around to building more levees, given current rigorous standards, could be pricey.  

My main point is this is a levee project to pay particular attention to.  Especially if the gates are added later as an option.  Gates will have some tricky design challenges and are not a panacea.  

More background here from the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation.

_____________________

* There was a letter to the editor by David Vitter (note: dead link) where Vitter slammed the Corps for not building the LaPlace levee that was authorized after extensive study in ~1992.  Umm... The Corps is a creature of Congress.  It does what Congress funds.  The LaPlace levee was authorized in ~1992, but wasn't funded.  Who was in charge of securing that funding?  Maybe a politician that's been there representing Louisiana for a decade plus as a Representative and Senator?

Another sidenote: We also need to kill the whole "blame New Orleans levees for Braitwhite/LaPlace flooding" thing.  This was studied and debunked before the levees were built.  They've gone back and double checked it, and sure enough, the New Orleans levee improvements had negligible effect on levees in LaPlace/Braithwhite. UPDATE- This is the link to the Corps study stating the NOLA Levee improvements had no effect.  More here: New Orleans Levees Hold, and Outsiders Want In.


UPDATE 2- I'll just add the recent Bob Marshall Op-Ed about updating the bird's foot to save the coast and help the port here.  Worth a read.

Head of Passes

I want to tie a few different threads together here.  We have the release of Louisiana's 2012 Coastal Master Plan (Large PDF), the expansion of the Panama Canal, the struggles of the Port of New Orleans during low water levels, the BP spill fines, and Louisiana politics.

Mississippi River levels are now so low, barges are grounding (note: this article talks about barges upriver of Baton Rouge).  You can notice all sorts of other signs: if you drive across the CCC bridge, you'll notice extra barges around Algiers Point for lightening the load of freighters coming up the river.  If you taste the tap water right now, they're putting extra chlorine to combat the low levels.  These ultra-low levels happen about once ever 10 years and they are a pain for the Port of New Orleans.  The fall, for whatever reason, tends to be the busiest time of year.  That's also when river levels are the lowest.  Meanwhile, Congress funds the Corps' dredging and asks them to meet 40' depth (which they almost never reach, due to lack of funds).  They allocate ~$500 million dredging (don't worry too much about cost; it more than pays for itself in commercial activity).  The Port kicks in some extra, but in times like this, they always end up ~$50-100 million short of what they really should have to keep the port completely busy.  The other thing is much of that dredging money isn't spent on Southwest Pass (photo below), but instead at Pass a Loutre (a smaller, shallower channel, that, if you ever did a proper economic analysis, it'd say 'dredge more at SW Pass).


The capacity of the Panama Canal will double when the expansion project is complete.  Sometime in 2014 (or shortly after), ports that want to recieve traffic will need channels at least 50' deep.  After being caught up in Tea Party politics for years (note: dead link), Florida is finally pushing forward with the Deep Dredge project.  The Port of New Orleans had a great opportunity to leapfrog Miami and now their window of opportunity may be closing.  Meanwhile, Boss Hogg's plan to renovate Gulfport into a Superport has fallen apart (note: dead link).  Fortunately, Slabbed has been on the case.

It would be great to kill 3 birds with one stone: restore the coast, promote shipping, and protect New Orleans from hurricanes.  There's coalescing around a plan to abandon the lower Bird's Foot, divert the river, and also have a newer, shorter route to the sea for shipping.  Dr. Renfro's got an article along those lines here (also, congrats on finishing the PhD; I saw her present at a past TEF as just a PhD student).  The diversions will also continue to work, even without constant infusions of major cash (unlike dredging).  So, that's what we NEED to be doing.  What are we doing instead?

Well, first, we're fighting over the BP spill money.  There's also a fight to chip away at the few wetland protection laws there are.  Louisiana Legislators want to raid the BP money for use on their own pet projects instead of spending it on coastal projects.  Fortunately, we seem to be doing OK at beating that idea back.

Fishers and dredgers oppose Coastal Master Plan.  Unfortunately, I see a drift away from the "Engineered Avulsion" idea and towards dredged sediment restoration.  What's so bad about dredged sediment diversion?  Well, first off, what is it?  It's when you dredge a bunch of sediment, put it in a particular place, and it promotes further land growth.  Here's an example:

One of the problems with dredged sediment restoration is that it actually does work.  The reason that's a problem is it's expensive, it's a one-shot thing (you have to do it over and over) and it only works for a limited area.  

Dr. Bahr liked to call the dredging industry, "Louisiana's Military-Industrial Complex."  He has a point.  They donate tons of money to politicos, have a protected market that's not open to free trade, and just sort of sit there and make money with no innovation.  The dredgers love dredged sediment restoration, because it's money in their pocket.  The fishermen love it, because it has no impact on fisheries.  The problem is it's just not going to be enough.  It's a proverbial band-aid on a gunshot wound.  I'd hate to see the initial billions go to dredging, none to restoration, and then having to come up with remaining dough ourselves.

So, we have a fight between doing what's needed to save the state from sliding into the ocean (and making the Port of New Orleans a Superport) or in the short-term putting a few nickels in a politically-connected pocket and continuing with business as usual.  Which way will it go?

UPDATE- gCaptain article about keeping the MS River dredged.

Vermillion Parish seen from Space

Article from Wired.

Must Reads for Engineers

A few articles worth a read, especially for engineers.

Liberating America's secret, for-pay laws « Boing Boing. The title is a bit overly dramatic, but still a fascinating article. In order for an engineer to do his job and meet legal requirements, he needs access to engineering codes that aren't freely available. "Incorporation by Reference" is a way that our public laws are, in a way, kept secret, or so the article argues. I like this quote: (Having spent a lot of time with these documents, we can vouch that many of these standards are very high-quality technical documents. This is important stuff and groups like ASME and NFPA do a great job.)

Mississippi River creates its own diversion. Note that you're going to hear more and more about river diversions as the last, best hope for coastal restoration in Louisiana.

MIT NSE Final Report on Fukushima Lessons Learned. [PDF] Billed as a technical report, it's actually quite accessible and well written.

Coastal Restoration Heads Up - UPDATED

Louisiana just released it's 50-Year Master Plan (the latest in a series of Master Plans... let's see if this one turns some more shovels than their predecessors).

Also, PBS has been airing "Turning the Tide", which is about Louisiana coastal wetlands. It interviews most of the scientists whose abstracts I spent last semester reading. LSU failed at turning one Tide, let's see if Louisiana can turn the more important one.

UPDATE- Just finished watching it on my DVR. Watch it here (upper right corner). Some notes: Wax Lake was open in 1941, not 1942. Also, they hold out hope that the failed BP berms will wind up nourishing barrier islands. That's news to me.

"I'm an oceanographer in water up to my knees" - Dr. Paul Kemp

Think about how important the internal transportation system that the Mississippi river provides is to America's industrial background. No other industrialized country has something as large and as economical as America's barging system. The only country that comes close is China (the #2 global economy; coincidence? doubtful...).

The Repetitive Loss issue with NFIP is problem that just begs for some sort of intervention (buyouts?).

Upcoming airings of Turning the Tide:

• Turning The Tide (Lpb)
• Sunday, January 29, 08:00 pm on LPB2 - READ MORE
• Thursday, February 2, 11:00 am on LPB2 - READ MORE
• 
  ... Buy "Turning the Tide" here.

One note about the Louisiana coastal plan: there was plenty of data from studies of climate change, but no mention of Climate Change itself. Bobby Jindal isn't as dumb as Rick Perry, but is playing to his political base.

We cannot restore the entire coast, but we still do have a chance to save just enough if we act now. The most important thing now is to keep coastal restoration in the conversation. If we do that, funding will follow, and the engineers and scientists can take it from there.

Blum and Roberts 2009 - "Drowning of the Mississippi Delta due to insufficient sediment supply and global sea-level rise"

As I referenced earlier, Blum and Roberts 2009 is an extremely important paper published in Nature that deals with feasibility of rebuilding the coast. Here's a presentation I submitted to class with some notes.

That's a really stark title for an academic paper. No messing around, just going for the jugular.


The drainage basin of the Mississippi. The sediment load basically comes from clastic deposits of material washed down from the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains.

"All these lands are drained by the Mississippi" - Armand St. Martin
Louisiana Frenchman

Problem is, the sediment load is not what it used to be. The main loss comes from the damming of the Missouri River.

Here's a snapshot of a few of the dams. Each one pictured generates several hundred MWe's.

From Blum and Roberts' paper, you can clearly see the dropoff after the dams are completed. This data comes from USGS samples of suspended sediment load. Note that we're also losing the coarsest-grain sediment, which is the best at creating new land.

And, to make matters worse, we don't just have a choked off river and low sediment loads. We have to deal with increasing rates of sea level rise. Historical data indicates a rise of ~1mm/yr for most of the 19th and 20th Centuries. We've been increasing to closer to 1.25-1.5mm/yr since about 1970. Future projections are for a MINIMUM of 2mm/yr. There's quite a bit of disagreement on how quickly sea-levels will rise. Here's some discussion on Dr. Jeff Master's blog.

The biggest culprit in sea-level rise? It's not deglaciation. It's thermal expansion.

So, Blum and Roberts put together a mass balance of the sediment coming down the river and what we'd need to keep up with sea level rise. Even if we blew up every single dam on the Mississippi and unleashed the lower Mississippi, we'd continue to lose prodigious amounts of land.

There are some flaws in their model, though. For one, they couldn't come up with a way to count organic buildup of soils due to plant activity. They (as they pointed out in their own paper) said that since they couldn't come up with a way to quantify it on a macro scale, they just neglected it altogether, but admitted that organic buildup could be significant.

This is from the Times-Picayune writeup of the Blum and Roberts paper. Note the slide shows a "no-action" scenario with a 1-meter sea level rise (over 100 years), which is on the middle-to-upper-end of sea level rise projections.

Quite an ending quote. Note that Dr. Harry Roberts might be THE foremost authority on Coastal Louisiana subsidence. He is also from Louisiana, so it's not like he's some grad student on the other side of the country throwing this out. He's right in our backyard. This paper was also published during a major push for diversions to save the coast and he went and said that diversions were nearly pointless (not what you want when you're trying to drum up political support). The paper was extremely contentious within the scientific community.

Also, an honorable mention to Maitri's coastal retreat costume.

Coastal Geology & "Engineered Avulsions"

So, I'm in grad school now and that's eating up a whole ton of time. I'm going to take one of my projects and post a bit of it on the ole blog because I think it's interesting.

The assignment for a class on coastal geology was to take a scientific paper, write your own abstract and make a presentation to the class. Two of my projects were Blum and Roberts 2009, "Drowning of the Mississippi Delta due to insufficient sediment supply and global sea-level rise" (quite the pessimistic title, especially for a scientific journal). Here's a writeup by Dr. Len Bahr and here's the original paper [PDF] as published by Nature Geoscience.

The second one I did was was Mohrig, Kim, et. al. 2009, “Is It Feasible to Build New Land in the Mississippi River Delta?”. Note that the second paper directly references the first. Here's a writeup from Dr. Bahr and here's the supplemental material from Eos / American Geophysical Union (Thanks, Maitri and Helena on the assist!).

Here are my slides with my presentation notes interspersed. I skipped a couple slides in the middle, but this should be the gist of it.


So, the last time I presented, we went through how screwed South Louisiana is. We went through Blum and Roberts' extremely pessimistic projections for coastal rebuilding efforts. Well, now I'm going to present an alternative scenario.

Mohrig, Kim, et. al. presented their paper shortly after Blum and Roberts presented theirs.

We've all heard the dire predictions. 10,000+ km^2 of land loss over the next century. Look at all the red on that map and of course red = bad.

We should just give up and move to Cleveland, right?
Let's take a closer look at one of those "red" maps. You see a bit of green. The Atchafalaya basin is still growing. One lobe is the main Atchafalaya. The other is Wax Lake, which is actually artificially created.


What is Wax Lake? In 1941, there were big river floods and people were worried about Morgan City being inundated, so the Corps cut a channel (the Calumet Cut) to divert ~30+% of the water away from Morgan City. The Corps cut the channel, Morgan City was saved, and everyone forgot about the cut and left it at that. And then something interesting happened...

(Progression of images of delta building; note Belle Isle Salt Mine)




(Some images omitted for post)

Note that all this delta building took place in an area that WAS affected by oil and gas activity, that WAS affected by major erosion from Katrina/Rita, etc.


So, in the paper, Mohrig, Kim, et. al. constructed a model of delta building based off Wax Lake, then backchecked their results on the actual Wax Lake delta. Here's the model results 1941-2005 (the two sets of lines represent variation in % sediment load captured by Wax Lake vs. main Atchafalaya).


Mohrig, Kim, et. al. then modeled two major diversions in Lower Plaquimines Parish. Note that these diversions are AT LEAST an order of magnitude greater than West Bay, which is the largest diversion project built to date.


So, here are the results. From 2010-2110, considerable land is created. One important note: the diversions are only opened during flood events. During low river levels, the diversions are closed. If you "save" New Orleans, but kill the Port of New Orleans, you've sorta shot yourself in the foot. We can both save the city and keep the river navigable.
Another thing to note: everyone says, "we just gotta blow up the levees" and that will fix everything, right? Well, not quite. Mohrig, Kim, et. al. said that wouldn't give you a deep enough channel (to capture the coarsest-grain sediment) and you don't really have enough control over the river dynamics.

They advocated an "Engineered Avulsion" (*I love this term*), like the Old River Control Structure.

Here's another view of an "Engineered Avulsion"



That's the presentation. There was some nice discussion at the end of the presentation. Gotta run to class now.

UPDATE: Fixed some minor typos.

Here's the full progression of images on the Wax Lake building. Found it via this Field and Stream article: Wax Lake Delta: Accidental Eden in the Atchafalaya. I reformatted the images to make them easier to read, but the raw source has a lot more slides on it.

Here's a presentation on "Optimizing Engineered Avulsions". Once again, I love the term "Engineered Avulsion."

Here's the definition of an "Avulsion": In sedimentary geology and fluvial geomorphology, avulsion is the rapid abandonment of a river channel and the formation of a new river channel. Avulsions occur as a result of channel slopes that are much lower than the slope that the river could travel if it took a new course. (Wikipedia)

West Bay Diversion to close?

West Bay Diversion Project to End. Or at least, that was the headline in early 2010.

Backing up, West Bay was the first diversion project optimized for sediment diversion. It's also WAY larger than either Canarvon or Davis Pond (ea. ab. 10,000 CFS vs. 50k+ for W. Bay). Canarvon and Davis Pond are sometimes called failures, but that isn't really fair, since they were optimized to fight saltwater intrusion only and NOT to carry sediment.

West Bay is located near Head of Passes (scroll down on the link for the maps). Planning started in 1991 and it was the first diversion optimized for sediment diversion. It was opened and petered along for a while, but was considered a disappointment. The Corps, who hated the project from the start (they believed it would be a hazard to navigation or would just plug up), trumpeted the failure and pushed for its closure.

Here's a quote from Dr. Len Bahr about the Corps and West Bay:

Despite its recent construction in 2003, bathymetric surveys in 2009 showed that sediment accretion from the West Bay Sediment Diversion project had exceeded subsidence in parts of the project receiving area for the first time in almost a century. Nevertheless, the public was told that a lack of significant wetland accretion contributed to a decision to shut down this ‘youthful’ sediment diversion project.

They also forced CWPPRA to pay for the dredging of the Pilot Town anchorage, despite modeling that proved West Bay was responsible for 20% (or less) of the shoaling and that the anchorage was built in an area that was prone to shoaling anyway. Here's a presentation from a past Tulane Engineering Forum describing the sediment transport modeling [PDF]. Furthermore, the port people weren't really complaining because the anchorage is hardly ever used (pilots are almost 100% available within a few hours notice at Head of Passes; the anchorage is almost a vestige of the old sailing days).

Enter the 2008 and 2011 Mississippi River floods (both of which were BIG, especially 2011 which was at least a 100-year event). West Bay, which wasn't a total failure like the Corps was making out, but also wasn't lighting the world on fire, explodes in activity and they figure out the missing ingredient: sand and gravel. The normal river flow has almost no sands in it; it's all mud and fine sediment (good for nourishing plants, but not enough of a base for land-creation). In flood events, there's a totally different dynamic. During flood events, sediment load per unit volume of water is at least 50 times larger, with much coarser sediment mobilized. The Corps continues to call West Bay a failure.

There was also an interesting side story that happened about this time: CWPPRA was investigating barging sediment from one area to another and asked the Corps about shortcutting through the West Bay diversion instead of going all the way around to SW pass. The Corps said, 'bah, it'll be too shallow and you'll just get stuck on a sandbar and we know everything there is to know about river dynamics because we've been studying it for 100+ years.' Well, the barging project was shelved because of cost, but they did to a hydrographic survey and the depth of the West Bay channel: 84' (barges draw ~20' or less).

More and more, the science community wants to study West Bay (being wrong in science is a good thing; you learn something new). The Corps is doing what a bureaucratic organization does to something it sees as embarrassing them: kill it with fire. The Corps had finally blackmailed CWPPRA into closing West Bay in 2010 when 2 monkey wrenches were thrown into the mix: the 2011 floods and the shipping people 'stabbed the Corps in the back' (or so that's how the Corps felt, so I'm told). Note that that link is dated October 13th.

My theory behind the objection: the port people know SW Pass is hydraulically inefficient and a pain to keep dredged. They're looking into a new, deeper pass much closer to Venice and see West Bay as an interim solution to accommodate New Panamax-class ships (Panamax=39.5' draft, New=49.9' draft) in a cost effective manner (as opposed to Miami's expensive Deep Dredge Project that's caught up in Tea Party-type stalls). The Port of New Orleans has been doing extremely well with containerized cargo this year (highest ever for NOLA?) and want to get an even bigger slice of that pie going forward.

How will this all shake out? Will the Corps force the closure of West Bay? Will we ever learn how to save the coast? We shall see.

Review: "The Big Uneasy"

I missed the chance to see The Big Uneasy premier at The Prytania and a lot of other opportunities since, but felt it was pretty important to watch it. I downloaded it off Amazon and just finished it and here are some of my thoughts.

The Big Uneasy doesn't cover a lot of new ground that a local that's read the paper won't know, but it's good to know that a lot of it will reach a wider, national audience. It did a great job of some of the more qualitative issues (addressing "Why don't we move New Orleans?" in their "Ask a New Orleanian" segment), but I was a bit disappointed when it came to some of the more technical aspects. I may have had high standards, but I expected more.

One of the things that constantly annoyed me was little glitches. For example, there's a progression where they show land loss from 1932-2010, but the graphic is wrong. They pulled the graphic from Blum and Roberts (or some derivation thereof, like the Mike Schleifstein writeup) and the progression should have ended in 2100, NOT 2010.

There's another screwup where they're interviewing Ivor van Heerden and he's talking about building on sand horizons in the London Ave. Canal and he's talking about water seepage through sand and he says that sand is a bad foundation because it's not strong enough. Well, actually, sand is a pretty good foundation. It can withstand a pretty hefty load without subsiding, when compared to many other layers you'd encounter in South Louisiana. Now, the larger issue that Ivor was talking about is absolutely 100% correct (water seepage through sand) and that was his main thrust of his excerpt; the structural point was sort of an (irrelevant) aside, but because the editor left the whole interview unedited, it sort of makes the subject look (to technical eyes) like he doesn't know what he's doing, when he (at least in this case) does.

I'm probably being nitpicky, but I'm an engineer and that's just what I'm gonna do. One of the things I was really disappointed in wasn't what was in the movie but what was left out. When talking about LSU, Sean O'Keefe's is never mentioned. There was no real mention of the actual structure of the Army Corps of Engineers (military officials that come and go while 90+% of the Corps are civilian engineers, etc.). Dr. Bob Bea is big on organizational issues contributing to disaster, well, wouldn't it be great to ask Dr. Bea (who had worked at the Corps back in the day) about leadership churn at the Corps?

Another issue is the dynamic between Congress and the Corps. They made the point over and over that the Corps is Congress' pet and they had one good example where they went through all the Congressional websites highlighting all the water-resource bills various congressmen have corralled. I would have like to have seen them go a bit further there.

I'll even lay out a great example for somebody to take: dredge companies. I'd love to see someone look into crooked dredge companies. There are examples out the wazoo. For example, on one coastal restoration project, the dredge company was paid per cubic yard of material dredged, but not on what actually made it to the build site, so they could lose all the material they wanted between Ship Shoal and the deposit site and there was no contractual mechanism to penalize them.

The best example of all on how crooked the dredge companies is the River Dredge Wheeler. Wheeler was commissioned in 1982 after being designed from the keel up for one purpose: keep Southwest Pass open. It was a purpose-built tool designed to maximize efficiency and minimize cost for a very specific purpose. Since it's commissioning, it's been almost entirely unused. It sits in "ready reserve" most of the time next to the ACoE headquarters at Riverbend. You see, back in the early 80's, a group of congressmen (including Bob Livingston, you can fill in the rest of the 'usual suspects') got elected and decided that "the government is obviously incompetent and let's let the free market do everything!" Now, they couldn't just lease the Wheeler to a private operator; that wouldn't result in enough political donations to the politicians. So, they decided to let it out to private dredge companies. Then, embarrassingly, nobody bid; it was too big a job for even a consortium of companies. The Corps then went back, sliced and diced the dredge job into small tranches that private dredge companies could tackle (with huge project management staffs to keep track of everything). This highly inefficient system continues to this day. A few years back, a Dutch company wanted to bring in some ultra-modern dredges and do the job much cheaper than the local companies could do with their antiquated equipment. The dredge companies then squealed like stuck pigs for government protection ("GAH! Jones Act! National Security! DEY TOOK ER JERBS!"). The Dutch, who had plenty of work building the Palm Islands in the UAE dropped their inquiry after a while.

On a related note, after Katrina, there were scores of letters to the editor demanding to "privatize the Corps." What would a privatized Corps actually look like? Wouldn't you still have to have some sort of project management staff to oversee the whole mess?

Dr. Bea does make the excellent point that the Corps no longer has as large a technical staff and that lots of personnel are now outside contractors and a lot of those who remain are more project managers than competent technical professionals. That is, frankly, a criticism you could extend to many, many other industries. Contractors and subcontractors and consultants are a major feature of any heavy industry today. I will say this: you can pull up Karen Durham-Aguilera's CV shows a P.E. licence and a technical Master's. The Vicksburg office of the Corps is still a center of excellence in geotechnical engineering. OTOH, I've also had interactions with Corps employees who couldn't set up a free-body-diagram to save their life.

How 'watered down' has the Corps become? I'm not sure I have an answer, but I'll put forward an idea. On projects I've worked on, when there's a really immense challenge and there's no time to argue over budgets or organizational hierarchies and you get the MBA's to just stand out of the way and let the engineers 'do their thing,' you'd be astounded with the results. In virtually every measurable metric (LTI's, delivery time, and {counter-intuitively} cost), these "Apollo-program" projects outperform the day to day engineering jobs we put together. There's total, bottom-up efforts to get it right. It's very similar to Scott Adams' "Bet on Engineers" philosophy (WSJ Op-Ed here).

The Corps is closed to finishing a major effort to get New Orleans' levee system up to 100-year protection as quickly as possible. How did they do along the way? Well, there are some good things they've done and some not so good things. The Ms. Garzino's faulty pump incident is quite worrying (updated letter here). So is the ongoing issue with debris in some of the levees (and what annoys me the most about that is the immediate 'shoot the messenger'-reaction as opposed to 'gee, maybe we oughta enforce these contractual requirements and penalize some contractors'-reaction). There's also the question of workplace atmosphere that was brought up by the Levees.org personal attacks on company time issue. I think a commander of the Corps has more to fear from fostering a workplace environment of, say, sexual harassment, than one where technical competency is valued and a good engineering product is turned out.

In the end, the Corps is a big bureaucratic organization. They're not the only one who's had a major engineering disaster, but we'll have to see how they respond. Do they build a better organization or do they fall into the same old traps? It hasn't been settled one way or the other and the proof will be in the pudding (what gets built and how it holds up). I will say this for the critics of the Corps: they only responds to INTENSE criticism. The Corps doesn't really get tact and nuance. You have to whack them in the head with a sledgehammer to get their attention.

Keep paying attention to Levees.org and Fix the Pumps.

NOTE- Small edits for grammar and spelling.

Notes on the 2011 Tulane Engineering Forum

I got a chance to attend the 2011 Tulane Engineering Forum and the forum continues to grow. This year drew over 600 engineers. The day before I went, one of my coworkers teased me that going to an engineering conference hosted by Tulane was like going to an easter egg hunt hosted by the Ayatollah in Tehran*.

One of the things I've really come to like about the TEF's are that I'll pick up on some really nice phrases/wordplays/sayings. Some of my favorites from this year:
* "Worry Budget"
* "Assumed-Away" (dealing with risk)
* "Science as a contact sport" (engineering as well, sometimes)
* "Compartmentalized engineers" (missing out on the big picture)
* "Dynamic Regulation" (constantly in-flux regulatory rules that are poison for projects that take 10 years to develop) {Another quote from the same guy, "[MMS] served our industry well for a number of years"}
* "Everyone supports it, until you put your finger on a map" (coastal restoration)
* "Engineering meets public health meets Indiana Jones" (Engineers Without Borders)
* And my favorite of the year: "Unavoidable uncertainty in complex systems" (talking about scientists dealing with the public on complex topics)

This year's theme was the Macondo blowout. I attended the Morning Plenary Session (which included a dispersant expert from XOM, a ChemE professor from LSU, an MBA from Tulane, and the head of research for ULL), but ended up attending mostly coastal restoration and infrastructure lectures. My personal favorite lecture of the day was given by Dr. Allisha Renfro who pinch-hit for a presenter who was out. She did a science and engineering postmortem on 3 coastal projects: MR-GO**, the West Bay Diversion, and the Myrtle Grove Pulsed Sediment Diversion (which was held up as a model for future projects).

__________
* Maybe he read this article?

** Even if you ignore all the "secondary" effects (levee failures, wetlands loss, etc.), MR-GO was a MASSIVE failure on its primary objective: serve commerce. Taxpayers ended up subsidizing MR-GO (from its opening in 1968 to its closure recently) by $20,000/vessel, clearly a massive failure in its primary objective (lower transportation costs). There was also plenty of science, engineering, and economic expertise that warned against the project before it was ever begun, but the powers that be pressed on anyways.

Last year's forum notes.

Notes on the 2010 Tulane Engineering Forum

Engineers at 2010 Tulane Engineering Forum
Originally uploaded by Noladishu

Got a chance to attend the 2010 Tulane Engineering Forum yesterday. It's been evolving into the most interesting engineering conference in the city. There's a good chunk of the city's P.E.'s that attend it every year, including lots of business owners. There's also always at least one presentation every year on the state levees. Partly because of the technical proficiency of the audience, you get some extremely in depth and thorough debate.

Last year's introductory session {PDF} was given by the Corps and I'm told they spent the whole time praising all the things that are being fixed up and all the good things the Corps has done. I'm told that there was some interesting back and forth at the end of their presentation, but I don't know the details, so that's all I'm going to say about that for now.

This year's presentation was by Dr. Dalrymple, Dr. Bolard (PE), Dr. Christian (PE), and Dr. Reed. They were a part of the National Research Council's team that worked for the Corps on LACPR, basically the task force that Congress appointed to design "Category 5 Levees."

As we all know, to date, there is no solid plan for Category 5 Levees. The most up to date thing the Corps came up with was a "menu of options" (111 in total) that was slammed when it came out. The Corps, despite billing themselves as the premier coastal engineers in the country, left it up to Congress to make the ultimate determination of what would get done. While there are some political implications (see Oyster's post), the panel went through some of the scientific and engineering challenges that also pose problems.

First to present was Dr. Dalrymple. His main points were the lack of a "sediment budget" for the lower Mississippi River. The loss of sediment load and sedimentation action is the #1 coastal loss issue, according to him. This was one of his slides:

Source

As a side note, if you were to poll the top 100 coastal Louisiana experts on what the biggest problem is, probably 95 would say either canals, primarily for oil and gas exploration, or sediment loss, primarily due to levees confining the Mississippi River. When you have someone from the Corps speak, they tend to play up the canals and when someone from the oil industry speaks, they tend to play up the sediment loss. All four presenters, while nominally affiliated with the Corps, were heavily into the sedimentation camp.

Dr. Dalryrmple went on to comment about to designing a "Category 5 Levee" system. It would be more accurate to describe what New Orleans needs as a 400-1,000 year level of storm protection. No matter what is built, some local cooperation is needed for non-structural mitigation strategies, such as zoning, building codes, and buyouts.

In the end, Dr. Dalrymple held a fairly pessimistic view of the future. When asked what was the NRC's influence on the Corps' plans, Dr. Dalrymple described it as "subtle." The audience of engineers nervously laughed.

Dr. Bolard was the next to present. He once again railed against the failure to take advantage of sediment, both with beneficial use of dredged materials and how we're still directing the majority of the sediment load that comes past the city off the continental shelf into hundreds of feet of water. 125 Million Tons per year of sediment are wasted in this way. Dr. Bolard pointed out that all of the plans from the Corps assume that we'll have basically the same coastline as we do now in 50 years, despite the fact that we lose 24 square miles of coastline per year and that trend has been more or less unchanged for 80+ years! The bulk of Dr. Bolard's remaining presentation was a complicated discussion of the Corps' attempt at using MCDA to whittle down the 111 plans into one or a few actionable items. He described the multiple attempts as failures, for a variety of reasons.

Dr. Christian was next to present and he had by far the best presentation of the group. I'll actually skip over most of his presentation because I want to come back to it in a later post. He mostly talked about the "600-lbs. gorilla in the room: the Corps' performance before during and after Katrina." He started off by listing things that Corps has done into 3 categories: things that have been blamed on the Corps, but aren't really their fault, things the Corps has done well, and thing the Corps has done "not so well."

On the things the Corps gets blamed for, but isn't really their fault, he claimed: split responsibility, Louisiana politics, and a few other minor things. He gave one example of a specific floodgate that has 5 different entities "controlling" it (railroads, roadways, the local levee board, and the Corps). He said that they looked up the operation procedures of each of the organizations and each one assumed that someone else would close the gate in the event of an approaching storm! Also, Louisiana's political scene doesn't do us any favors nationally when hunting for funds to build the levees.

Dr. Christian's list of things the Corps does well were Task Force Guardian, IPET, and the Corps' hydraulics and hydrology understanding. He particularly singled out the Vicksburg office for their understanding of hydrology.

Dr. Chrisian's list of things the Corps does "not-good" was pretty scary. First, he says that all too often you'll have a representative from the Corps, say that the Corps has never had a failure. He says that if you put enough modifiers and adjectives in there, you can get a strictly factual statement, but, in the end, THE LEVEES FAILED!

NOAA via Wikipedia

It's sad to say, but the Corps failed, the Corps failed, the Corps failed. He said it needs to be drilled in that the Corps' levees failed from Katrina's glancing blow under stresses far below their design capacity. The Corps-built levees resulted in the worst civil engineering disaster in American history. Dr. Christian was adamant that that fact not be overlooked in any way.

Dr. Christians other two serious criticisms was the Corps' geotechnical and soils analysis, especially with the New Orleans office is fundamentally flawed. He said that was his professional opinion and that he knew there were lots of people with the Corps that would take strenuous objection to the statement. Note that the debate safe water level in the outfall canals has been extremely contention because of just this issue.

Dr. Christian's last "not so good" Corps procedure was that peer review, while successfully implemented under TF Guardian and IPET, has become a "box-check" and not a real concerted effort. Getting any information out of the Corps is like pulling teeth and there's outright hostility to "outsiders" looking over the Corps' design process.

Dr. Christian made a lot of bold statements, but between the slides and his response to engineers' questions, he seemed to back them up, IMHO.

Dr. Reed was the last one to present. She spoke of the need to manage flood protection, navigation (remember, the reason New Orleans exists), and coastal restoration. We managing the lower delta (where to chop it off) is the big issue for the next 50 years. We don't have the sediment load to preserve everything that exists today, so we need to do some triage. She also mentioned that Mississippi is extremely concerned with any effort to gate the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain because of its effects on Mississippi Gulf Coast storm surges (probably increasing them).

Where does all this leave us? One attendee who saw both plenary sessions (2009 Corps and 2010 NRC/LACPR) described them as presenting "quite a different picture." Currently, we have no plan for Category 5 Levees. The Corps says they'll come out with a plan 'this summer,' but we'll see if/when it comes out and if it's just another "menu" of options. The full presentation will also eventually be uploaded to this page.


NOTE- Minor edits. Also, Dr. Christian praised the Times-Picayune coverage of the situation. He says they've done a better job of informing the locals of the challenges facing the city than anyone has ever given them credit for (and it's not like they've been ignored).

UPDATE- Looks like Mike Schleifstein made it. His article looks along the same lines as mine, but I've got a few more details and he's got a few more links. Also, he caught that the new due date for "Category 5 Levees" is July. I just caught summer.

UPDATE 2 - Presentations Online

UPDATE 3 - The Corps' summer plan is out and it's yet another "Menu of Options"

Flood Protection: Where we stand

At the last Tulane Engineering Forum, Dr. John Lopez gave this presentation on our current level of protection. He concentrated on what HAS been done, instead of what has been AUTHORIZED to do.

Keep in mind, this was presented to more than 100 engineers from all sorts of companies all over Southeast Louisiana. He spoke in between Thomas Jackson, the highly respected head of the Eastern Regional Levee Board, and 2 bigwigs from the Corps. This isn't a "fluff" presentation meant for the sheeple (just wanted an excuse to use that word).

Dr. Lopez used this graphic to visually represent the states of the various protection layers of the city:

Above the line represents improvement. Below the line is deterioration. The line is equal to pre-Katrina levels. The graphic at the bottom represents the various lines.

Here are his results:

Take a long look at that graphic. That's what's protecting this city. Did the Corps representatives raise any objections to the presentation? No, they applauded.

Next time someone says we're "better than we were pre-Katrina," remember that graphic.

Around the Net

Hurricane Drill Canceled. Nobody knew who was responsible for the FEMA parks. This scares me. Those things are tornado magnets. Look at what happened to that poor woman in Gentilly whose FEMA trailer was smashed during that Lakeview tornado.

WE'RE #1! We're #1! #1 most murderous small city in America.

Ethanol Shortage Might Fuel Shortage of Tequila. GOOD!

Hippies turn on gutter punks in Haight-Ashbury. As a former resident of the Marigny and current resident of the Quarter, I sympathize.

More on the Elliot's Bust. Great quote: “It’s like peeing in the Gulf of Mexico,” Scharf said. “Statistically, that strategy in itself is unlikely to have a major impact on violent crime.”

Another one of C. Ray's crazy schemes. Use National Guard choppers to hunt thugs. I'm sure the National Guard loves that idea. Maybe if you quit spending our tax dollars on stupid shit, we could buy our own. Or maybe hire veteran cops who know how to police...

Many Evacuees Still Jobless. Combine this with C. Ray and Jefferson, and you get the "let the fuckers drown" mentality that is so prevalent around the country. Also, you burn through all the money that was allocated without making any permanent repairs.

Great article about coastal restoration programs at UNO. Are you listening, Tulane? Cowen? Altiero? Anybody?

Fans go Nuts for Jericho. Go get 'em! I love Jericho and was pissed when it was canceled. CBS stands for 'Cancel the Best Show.'
UPDATE- 25 TONS OF NUTS!
UPDATE 2- VICTORY!

Houston Oil Companies Encouraging Employees to Bike to Work. I'm (mostly) an oil worker. I bike to work. I wish my company would enact some of these benefits. I get SO much crap for biking to work. Just about everyone else has a crew cab pickup truck. They give this one Cooper-Mini-driving engineer a bad enough time. When they learned I biked to work, it's been nonstop razing ever since.

Our Coast to Fix - or Lose

By John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide. Great article and a must-read. Forward it to as many out of towners as you can.

Local Idea for Cat 5 Levees

From someone with many years experience building oil platforms.

Via the Daily Kingfish.



Jim Boudreaux's page.

Wetlands and Marshes and Bloggers, oh my!

Look at what rising sea levels will do to the coastlines around the world. It starts off over in Europe, but scroll over to see Louisiana's coast. Time to start buying beachfront property in Baton Rouge!

Oh yeah, and the US is spending 100 million to restore Iraqi marshes. They've also got plans and are taking action. They're not studying it to death. It's an old headline, but I figure I'd bring it up again.

Great article about bloggers, libel, and the evolution of the 4th Estate (PDF).