Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
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Tripping the light fantastic, and whatnot
NEW ORLEANS — The Sewerage and Water Board reports some pumps went offline during Monday's storms. The utility says two pumps on Interstate 10 near the Metairie Road exit were "tripping offline."
A spokesperson with the Sewerage and Water Board says the operators were able to turn these pumps back online, and the water has now receded. This comes as Orleans Parish is under a flash flood warning until 6:15 p.m.
The pumps have had enough of our abuse and are starting to turn against us.
Part of the West End area of Lakeview flooded Wednesday when a Sewerage & Water Board pump worked in reverse, sucking water from Lake Pontchartrain and pumping it into the streets of the residential area, according to our news partners at WWL-TV.
The pump was working in reverse for nearly an hour before it was fixed, WWL-TV reported, citing information from S&WB officials.
We always suspected this day would come.
The annual maintenance cost for the permanent pumps is estimated between $4 and $5 million. (Assuming they really are rust-proof this time.) It's not clear to me exactly how that's going to be funded now. In an unrelated but similar matter, the West Bank Authority has a millage proposal on the April 28 ballot in Jefferson Parish to help it take care of the infrastructure over there.Now all the pumps at the mouths of the outfall canals in New Orleans use stainless steel, corps spokesman Ricky Boyett said.That came just in time for the corrosion-resistant replacements to be irrelevant, as the temporary pumping stations will be shut down and disassembled when the permanent ones start up.
The permanent stations, which employ bigger, sturdier pumps, will be operated by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East. That agency is in charge of the rest of the complex network of levees, floodwalls, floodgates and other structures protecting the metro area.
MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps. And Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians, the vast majority of it to the Republican Party, since 1996, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.The Bushes really set the tone for the neo-liberal rebuild of New Orleans early on. People with short memories like to pretend we only entered the kleptocratic phase of our crumbling empire the day Putin followed them on Twitter or whatever. But, really, this is the normal story of our entire lifetimes. And, on most days, you don't have to go very far past your own flooded street to see it.
MWI has run into trouble before. The U.S. Justice Department sued the company in 2002, accusing it of fraudulently helping Nigeria obtain $74 million in taxpayer-backed loans for overpriced and unnecessary water-pump equipment.
The Army Corps of Engineers paid $4 million in June 2013 to one of four losing bidders for the contract to build permanent pump stations on New Orleans canals -- a public expense Corps officials didn't mention in the project's announcements.On the one hand, $4 million seems like a lot to pay out just to get a project underway. On the other hand, it is kind of an important project. Every hurricane season we go without those pump stations is another season of catastrophic risk for everyone. Guess you just have to credit Bechtel for understanding their position, right?
The payment was intended in part to get the company, Bechtel Infrastructure Corp., to drop a new challenge of the selection of a winning contractor, Bechtel officials confirmed this week.
Spokesman Ricky Boyett, in a statement, said the payment was made to Bechtel "for submitting a satisfactorily rated Phase II proposal for the above mentioned solicitation, in order to settle and amicably resolve all differences, to avoid the uncertainties and expenses of litigation associated with the filing of its agency protest and any other litigation arising out of or related to the solicitation, and for and in consideration of the assignment of all data rights in and to its proposal submissions under the solicitation."Maybe there's stuff going on that I don't quite get. That does happen on a regular basis. But I swear it looks here like Bechtel had been holding the city's safety hostage and the Corps finally decided just to pay the ransom. But, again, this is all complicated engineering stuff and maybe I don't quite get it.
The $4 million payment was first reported by corps critic Matt McBride in an online post criticizing the federal agency for paying millions of dollars to unsuccessful bidders at a time when New Orleans area residents were still recovering from flood damage caused by failure during Hurricane Katrina of corps-designed and corps-built levees and floodwalls in 2005.
When intersected with high-resolution LIDAR-based digital elevation models, the 2010 Census data show that residents of metro New Orleans shifted to higher ground by only 1 percent compared to 2000 (Figure 1). Whereas 38 percent of metro-area residents lived above sea level in 2000, 39 percent did so by 2010, and that differentiation generally held true for each racial and ethnic group. Whites shifted from 42 to 44 percent living above sea level; African Americans 33 to 34 percent, Hispanics from 30 to 29 percent, and Asians 20 to 22 percent.So, yes, some moved from low to high ground. I'm not sure if that's explained by "the trauma of actually flooding" or the headaches associated with rebuilding in place. Maybe it's both.
Clearly, elevation did not exercise much influence in resettlement decisions, and people distributed themselves in vertical space in roughly the same proportions as before the flood. Yet there is one noteworthy angle to the fact that the above-sea-level percentage has risen, albeit barely (38 to 39 percent): it marked the first time in New Orleans history that the percent of people living below sea level has actually dropped.
What impact did the experience of flooding have on resettlement patterns? Whereas people shifted only slightly out of low-lying areas regardless of flooding, they moved significantly out of areas that actually flooded, regardless of elevation. Inundated areas lost 37 percent of their population between 2000 and 2010, with the vast majority departing after 2005. They lost 37 percent of their white populations, 40 percent of their black populations, and 10 percent of their Asian populations. Only Hispanics increased in the flooded zone, by 10 percent, in part because this population had grown dramatically region-wide, and because members of this population sometimes settled in neighborhoods they themselves helped rebuild.
The differing figures suggest that while low-lying elevation theoretically exposes residents to the hazard of flooding, the trauma of actually flooding proved to be, sadly, much more convincing.
New Orleans — A $614 million project to build permanent canal closures and pumps to keep storm surge out of New Orleans’ three outfall canals is expected to begin this fall, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.Hurricane Season 2013 begins in less than a month. Time just flies, doesn't it?
Until that work is finished, interim closure structures built in 2006 will continue to be used to protect the Orleans Avenue, London Avenue and 17th Street canals from a 100-year-level storm surge.
The work will take 45 months to complete, according to the corps, meaning New Orleans will go through several more hurricane seasons with the temporary pumps and structures, which the corps has said have a limited lifespan.
Level gauges show the water levels in the canal were between 2 and 3 feet, well below the supposed canal Safe Water Elevation of 8 feet. Thus the only reason to cut back on the water going in the canal is because the Corps couldn't pump it out fast enough. This puts the lie to the Corps' Accardo when he said his pumps could stay ahead of the S and WB. They obviously couldn't.
But things would get even worse later that morning. At 9:40 AM, the log reported:
"Donald Constantine w/C.O.E. reported a Fire w/C.O.E pump"You read that right.
At least one of the Corps' pumps Caught On Fire During Hurricane Isaac.
“We’ve never had to close the (Orleans Avenue) gates during a storm. Not even during Ike, not even during Gustav,” he said. “So the threat of these pumps being down and causing any problems is extremely remote. There is hardly any threat to City Park or Mid-City. “We are not where we want to be at Orleans currently. I would like to be a little higher, but it is not something people need to be worried about,” he said. “My standard is to have as many pumps functional at all times.”
"No other American city has anything like it," perhaps, but is what we have anything like what we actually need? The article, to its credit, admits that it isn't.When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city’s hurricane protection system became a symbol of America’s haphazard approach to critical infrastructure. The patchwork of walls and levees built over the course of 40 years was still far from complete when the storm came, and even the Army Corps of Engineers admitted that this was “a system in name only.” Flood walls collapsed, and earthen levees built from sandy, dredged soils melted away.What has emerged since could come to symbolize the opposite: a vast civil works project that gives every appearance of strength and permanence. No other American city has anything like it. “This is the best system the greater New Orleans area has ever had,” said Col. Edward R. Fleming, the commander of the New Orleans district of the corps.
The new system was designed and constructed to provide what is informally known as 100-year protection, which means it was built to prevent the kind of flooding that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. That standard is used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to determine whether homeowners and businesses must buy flood insurance to qualify for federally regulated or insured mortgages.New Orleanians who have spent nearly seven years following the contentious process which gave rise to the new defenses are well aware that their inadequacy is baked in to the design limits imposed by Congress. No doubt the national audience for the NYT piece will be confused about that by the breathless description of the $14.5 billion project "too vast to take in at once, except perhaps from space." As impressive as those figures are, the truth is they may end up being a massive investment in failure if further action isn't taken.
But New Orleans has seen storms far more damaging than the 100-year standard. Katrina is generally considered to have been a 400-year storm, and rising seas and more numerous hurricanes predicted in many climate-change models suggest harsher conditions to come.
“It’s what the country will pay for; it’s what FEMA insures for,” Mr. Doody said. “But our thought and belief is that we all need to be behind protection that’s greater than that.”
Baton Rouge -- Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed legislation that will direct money Louisiana receives from the Deepwater-Horizon-BP oil spill to coastal protection and restoration programs. Jindal's office said late Thursday that he signed House Bill 838 by Rep. Simone Champagne, R-Jeanerette, one of the last bills passed in the waning hours of the legislative session that ended June 4. The bill became effective when Jindal signed it.The new state law anticipates passage of the so-called "RESTORE Act" as part of a federal transportation bill creeping its way through Congress.
Champagne's bill calls for any money the state receives from the federal government as a result of fines imposed under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, associated with the April 20, 2010 spill, to be placed in the state treasury and used for "integrated coastal protection efforts, including coastal restoration; hurricane protection and improving the resiliency of the ... coastal area affected" by the spill.
Both House and Senate bills include language that would return 80 percent of the fines BP will ultimately be required to pay for violating oil spill provisions of the Clean Water Act to the Gulf Coast states for coastal restoration purposes. Fines could potentially run as high as $20 billion, meaning after the first $2.7 billion is taken off the top and returned to the oil spill liability trust fund to replenish funds withdrawn during the initial cleanup, almost $14 billion would be set aside for the Gulf Coast.For Louisianans who have argued for years that, as the parties most responsible for eviscerating our coastal wetlands, energy companies like BP should be made to pay to cost of repairing them, this bill represents only a late and modest nudge in that direction. Just how modest is yet to be determined, by the way, as BP continues to fight to minimize the size of the amount in damages they'll ultimately have to pay the feds.
Coincidentally, $14 billion is precisely the amount of annual losses the Gulf Coast faces today as a result of extreme weather events, according to a report from America’s Wetland Foundation and the energy company Entergy.
BP hopes the U.S. Justice Department will accept less than $15 billion to settle the government's civil and criminal claims for the 2010 Gulf oil spill, the Financial Times reports. Citing an unnamed source "familiar with the discussions" between the oil giant and government negotiators, the London-based newspaper said "negotiations were accelerating" but the amount BP is seeking is far shy of the $25 billion in fines and environmental damage claims the Justice Department wants.It's beyond shameful that it takes a megadisaster like the 2010 Macondo oil gusher to spur the Louisiana legislature, the US Congress, and BP to make even this slight movement toward ensuring the future of our coastal population. In this regard, we see a direct echo of the events that brought about the flood countermeasures profiled in the New York Times as the article linked at the top of this post observed.
And so the question now becomes, what kind of disaster will it take to get the funding we actually need?More important, Congress voted the $14.5 billion —nearly three times the annual civil works budget for the agency — up front instead of the usual incremental dribbling out of appropriations. “Full funding of the program gave us lots of flexibility,” said Michael F. Park, the chief of Task Force Hope, the special corps entity created to oversee the projects.Mr. Wagner, who lost his home as did other family members in Katrina, said with chagrin, “It feels terrible to say, but it takes a disaster to get that kind of funding.”
These only represent what was found at the sections into which they dug. Are we seriously supposed to believe that the sections of levee untouched by this project are pristine after reading this stuff? 10'x12' stumps and concrete light pole foundations do not make for reliable levees.In the event of a major storm, even with the giant surge gates closed and all the new expensive hatches battened down, the city will still depend on the temporary pumps to clear the outfall canals of rainwater and on the floodwalls to hold it back until they do.
The Army Corps of Engineers announced today that it will close floodgates in the London Avenue Canal when the elevation of Lake Pontchartrain at the canal's mouth hits 2.5 feet and is still rising -- even during heavy, non-tropical rain events -- a major policy shift in operation of the gates built after Hurricane Katrina.
Three days after Austin Penny was named a top director in Mayor Ray Nagin's next-generation recovery bureaucracy, a city spokesman confirmed Thursday that Penny is poised to leave city government, setting up another leadership transition in New Orleans' ongoing rebuilding effort.More like re-generation recovery bureaucracy, thought I. Today we see this process continues unabated.
Meanwhile, Kenya Smith, a former top advisor to Nagin who quit last year to run for Congress, is returning to City Hall as a recovery manager and may replace Penny in the high-profile post, spokesman James Ross said.
A federal whistle-blower continues to claim that temporary hydraulic pumps in New Orleans outfall canals aren't properly tested and contain potentially fatal flaws that could cause them to fail catastrophically in a hurricane.
Since late 2006, California resident Maria Garzino has repeatedly lodged these complaints against some of her Army Corps of Engineers co-workers, mostly in New Orleans, and the Florida company that manufactured the 40 pumps in question.
The administration's request for proposals, or RFP, says it wants proposals "for an alternate adaptive use of this historic structure" and its operation "as a long-term economic commercial business enterprise."Beyond, "well at least we aren't knocking it down" what the hell does this even mean? Does "incubator for the next generation digital media entrepreneurs" mean we're building a warehouse where we can lock these people away? Because, yeah that would actually be pretty awesome.
The document says the city is interested in turning the still mold-infested building into "a world-class state-of-the-art multi use sound and video production facility for . . . the creative media industry and other traditional uses while creating an incubator for the next generation digital media entrepreneurs."
It says the redevelopment plan "should incorporate a vibrant mix of uses that are sensitive to and fully integrated into the surrounding historic Armstrong Park and Treme community." The plan must also respect the building's architecture and "historical significance."
The Times Picayune puts it a bit more delicately, but make no mistake about it this proposal (variations of which have been around for as long as there have been private, for-profit hospitals in Louisiana) is an ideology-driven attempt to tear the last vestiges of Long-ism (read that "paying attention to the needs of working people") from Louisiana.
Were that all there was to this, it would be a hell of a fight. But, the proposal being floated by these healthcare executives — and, by the Bush administration in the months immediately following Katrina/Rita, by the Public Affairs Research Council (PAR), and the Blueprint for Louisiana group — comes to the fray with the additional burden of having been discredited in other states where similar approaches have been talked about and even tried — primarily Massachusetts.
The core issue is shutting down the LSU Health Science Center hospitals, formerly known as the Charity Hospital System (also known as the safety net hospitals). And, then "letting the money follow the patient" — right into the coffers of the very people who have made healthcare and health insurance too expensive for all but the wealthiest among us: the for-profit hospitals and the insurance companies.
