Shifting Currents
Biloxi, New Orleans, and life after Katrina
The street lamps create a brilliant cocoon of daylight punctuated by neon accents. The Canal Street trolley whirrs into motion; this, its final run to the depot before winding up service for the night. A dozen youthful musicians enthrall a crowd at the corner of Bourbon and Canal Streets as they storm through a brass band rendition of “The Love You Save,” the Jackson Five hit from the 70s. The Philadelphia Eagles and thousands of their fans are in town, for the first time since the storms, to celebrate the next day’s contest against the New Orleans Saints. A young woman steps out from the crowd and pantomimes as band leader. She drops a donation into the cardboard box at the players’ feet and dances her way back through the crowd and down the street. Soon, the box is nearly overflowing with cash. A thunderous barrage from the drummer concludes the selection, and the crowd bursts into a wave of applause. A little more than a year before, a different kind of wave engulfed New Orleans.
A Very Different City
On August 29, 2005, a series of levee breaches caused by storm surge from Hurricane Katrina allowed the waters of Lake Pontchartrain to flow into New Orleans, leaving 80% of the city underwater. In the French Quarter, where flood damage was considered minimal, a mottled streak of grime indicating the high-water mark can still be seen on shop windows and doorways, just a few inches above curb level. Within walking distance, however, oily stains on lamp posts and walls of homes and shops offer silent testimony to waters that rose to depths of well over 5 feet and stayed there for weeks, leaving streets navigable only by swimmers or by boat.
Still, a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated this city, the stories of survival are to be heard everywhere. But much of the city is now sparsely populated and surrealistically silent. In some neighborhoods, the occasional sighting of a pedestrian or two along the roadside can itself seem disquieting. Stacks of freshly milled lumber stand adjacent to structures overrun by wildly prolific vines, forcing their way through walls, windows, and rooftops. Here and there trailers or RVs parked in driveways bear witness to determined homeowners returning to rebuild their shattered lives. Whether waiting for an overdue bus or waiting for their favorite grocer to reopen, residents display unusual patience. It will take time. Nevertheless, in a city transformed by disaster, a recovery is under way.
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Damage to a Biloxi-area fishing bridge |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Biloxi, MS, lost all but a few of its trucks. |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Debris left after the flooding destroyed buildings. |
Major Overhaul
Marcia St. Martin, executive director of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans (S&WB), says in the aftermath of the storm the agency had effectively drained the city by September 19. Since that time, she says, the S&WB has been taking a methodical approach to permanent repairs. “The system has been restored. We are constantly taking pumps out, rewinding motors, and rebuilding systems. The pump stations are fully operational—fully functional.” The major overhaul, she says, “will continue through spring 2007.”
St. Martin says the goal is to serve the community at pre–Hurricane Katrina levels and to implement mitigation so that “if there is an event like Katrina in the future, the devastation to our infrastructure will not be as great.” To date, the S&WB has been able to repair and maintain a sufficient quantity of pumps to effectively drain the city. In this regard, she says, “We have achieved 100% service level to the community.”
Looking for Workers
Bob Moenian, chief of pump station operations for the S&WB, says one of the ongoing challenges the board has been facing is the recruitment of staff. “We knew a lot of consultant firms in town whose staffs were depleted. We even lost engineers who got back and have gone over to work for private firms.”
He says meeting staffing needs, even at the lower-skilled levels, has been difficult. “We’re operating at staffing levels less than half of what we were before the storm.” But he says there is a shortage of low-skilled workers in the New Orleans area. The workers who are here, he says, are finding higher wages in the private sector for less-demanding work. “We need young people, right out of high school, but what they are looking for is money.” He says there is a need to find resources to bring the right kinds of people, at all levels, on board. “We are lacking plumbers, mechanics, electricians—who are all hard to come by—because these are the same people everyone needs right now, for their home repairs.”
St. Martin echoes his assessment. “Every industry is experiencing a shortage of personnel. This work is demanding and challenging. Nature doesn’t decide that it’s going to rain between 5 a.m. and 6 p.m. It requires a significant level of commitment on a 24-hour schedule.”
A New Level of Preparedness
“The idea is more than getting us back to normal, but getting us storm proof,” says Moenian.
Gordon Austin, chief of environmental affairs for the S&WB, amplifies this point. “We’ve made dramatic progress since November 2005, when we still had employees in tents. Many city residents that were displaced are now back at home sites and well into the recovery process. The greater challenges for this city below sea level,” he says, “have been those of the [US Army] Corps of Engineers to better drain the city and to integrate drainage with the developing plan.”
The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has made the decision to install a temporary gated structure at the outfall of the 17th Street Canal to Lake Pontchartrain to block storm surges from the lake before they can damage the infrastructure of the canals.
Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the larger pumping stations were situated 3 to 4 miles from the lakefront on high ground along the river on the alluvial plain. Normally, Pump Station Number 6 and a number of feeder stations move stormwater through the 17th Street Canal toward the lake with the capacity to discharge at a rate of 10,000 cubic feet per second. St. Martin says during a tropical storm or hurricane, the gates will be closed to prevent a storm surge from entering the canals and threatening the city. However, the temporary pumps installed at the gate have a combined capacity equal to only 4,000 cubic feet per second.
According to St. Martin, the USACE philosophy is to construct over time permanent pump stations at the lakefront levees themselves. She says, “The Corps of Engineers has received Congressional authorization and partial funding to build pump stations at the lake that have the capability of that 10,000 cubic feet per second, or equal to what our capacity is today. The objective is to have that in place by 2010.”
St. Martin says the primary source of funding for stormwater in New Orleans is the USACE. “Though the corps has received an allocation from congress of about $530 million to build the new pump stations, as they work through the design there may be a need for the corps to approach Congress for additional funding.”
Until the more powerful new pumps are installed at the lakefront, the imbalance in pumping capacity between the S&WB pumping stations and the temporary pumps installed by the USACE at the gated lakefront structure may still result in some flooding during a storm. “Not catastrophic, but at a nuisance level,” Austin says. “We’re lucky, with storm drainage, to have the corps available with their budget and expertise.”
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| The Hurricane Katrina Memorial |
Tons of Paperwork
“Under the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] rules,” Austin says, “you have to identify storm-related damage to receive reimbursement. The process is time consuming. Hurricane Andrew is just wrapping up; it took 14 years.” He says the S&WB has received only about 20% of its expected reimbursement funding since Hurricane Katrina.
“It’s a tremendous recordkeeping process. There are daily meetings with FEMA. Our biggest handicap was the loss of our entire clerical staff.” In fact, Austin says the staff person previously responsible for environmental compliance has become the de facto point person in the FEMA process.
Complicating matters, he says, is that in the beginning some FEMA contractors were themselves unfamiliar with the agency’s documentation requirements and had provided some inaccurate information.
“We will have to rework many estimates that were not high enough because of the initial assumption that a placeholder number would have been sufficient until more precise damage figures became available.” Though that assumption proved incorrect, Austin says, “It’s impossible to accurately evaluate storm damage to a drainage system until you can get down there to inspect the damage,” which he says was not practicable at the time. Though time has been lost, he says FEMA does allow a provision to go back and write a revised version of these assessments.
Common Goals
“When you have a disaster like Katrina,” Austin notes, “there is an opportunity to reorganize around common interests and common goals.”
“Comprehensive restoration plans are under way for the Gulf Coast, which include elements of water-quality improvement,” says Carlton Dufrechau of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit organization that coordinates citizen input and provides linkages with policymakers concerning environmental issues in the Lake Pontchartrain region. Dufrechau characterizes one of the foundation’s goals as “restoring the plumbing of the Gulf region.
“Katrina,” he says, “made it tragically clear that levees alone are not enough to provide hurricane protection.” The hurricane levee system was constructed in response to Hurricane Betsy in 1965, according to Dufrechau. He says Betsy tracked on a storm path that should have made it more damaging to New Orleans than Katrina was.
“But,” he says, “the majority of the city, including the uptown area and the Lakeview area—both areas hard hit by Katrina—made it through Betsy without a scratch.” Dufrechau was nine years old when Betsy struck. “We had little levees that were basically no taller than I was. Now, we’ve got levees not 4 feet high as they were then, but 17 feet high, and Katrina resulted in damage an order of magnitude more severe.
“The big difference was the demise of our coastal wetlands,” he continues; he says over 40 years this land loss has been accelerating. “Levees that survived the storm were the ones that had a degree of wetland buffer in front of them. The ones that were exposed to open waters and took the high waves were the ones that washed away.”
Dufrechau believes it is possible to provide an additional level of protection from hurricane damage by restoring lost wetland buffers along the Gulf Coast.
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Katrina devastated more than 1965's Betsy. |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Remembering the most catastrophic storm in United States history |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Businesses were destroyed as fas away as Biloxi, MS. |
Swamp Revival
According to Austin, in the early 1960s the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet was dug through the marshes surrounding Lake Pontchartrain in order to provide a shortcut to the Gulf for shipping. “Right now it’s a mud puddle,” he says. Oceangoing traffic that sliced through the marshes promoted the intrusion of salt water, and wave action generated by ships created conditions unfavorable to the wetland’s viability. This increasingly saline environment proved inhospitable to once-prolific cypress marshes and has contributed to their demise. Without the vegetative growth and root systems of the large trees, huge swaths of coastline have simply been washed away.
During the 1990s, Dufrechau says, St. Bernard Parish diverted treated stormwater and wastewater from the Gore pumping station, which drained a small basin southeast of New Orleans and discharged it into freshwater swamplands that had previously been cypress swamps. He says nutrients contained in the water have helped restore the vitality of these marshes. “That little project has become a model for a larger project envisioned to help restore the City of New Orleans’s natural buffer to storm surge.”
Austin says that around the state there are 10 or 12 similar wetland assimilation projects, in which effluent from waste treatment plants, instead of being discharged into a river in the traditional manner, is discharged into a marsh environment. The practice, he says, “takes advantage of the fresh water and nutrients contained in the effluent with its other beneficial components, and as an end result you end up with a thriving, healthy marsh area.” Austin says the S&WB has partnered with St. Bernard Parish, the Sierra Club, and others in a project aimed to divert fresh water from the Mississippi River to the marshes to counteract the saltwater intrusion. Additionally, the S&WB, as part of a planned expansion of its East Bank Sewage Treatment Plant, plans to divert nutrient-rich effluent from this plant into the marshland to help reinvigorate vegetative growth. “The unique thing about the project will be the scale,” says Austin.
“We initially considered restoring about 5,000 acres of wetland.” He says St. Bernard Parish, which is planning to consolidate its wastewater treatment into one plant, has shown an interest in the project. By joining forces with that parish, he says, “We now see the opportunity of restoring in excess of 27,000 acres, which is exactly the amount of marshland out there that is degraded and not providing the storm buffer.”
Austin says the plan has received initial funding approval from the Delta Regional Authority, and the project is being encouraged by financial support from the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources through its Coastal Improvement Assistance Project.“I would love to see the marshes restored and for the surrounding neighborhoods to have access to them,” Austin says. He says the wetlands project “turns a waste into a resource” and is “the right way to deal with plant effluent.”
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| US Route 90 bridge, post-hurricane |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Properties along Route 90 were lost at sea. |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| What is the future of the famous Gulf Coast? Chances are a storm will strike again. |
Biloxi, MS
A steady wind carries showers inland over Biloxi Bay. Water birds at the surf’s edge struggle to keep their footing. Dune grasses sprout from sands deposited among scattered fragments of concrete and block. In the distance, a strand of twisted pines tops a barrier island providing the only demarcation between the gray sky and the colorless sea. Like the ruins of some ancient enterprise, abandoned on the verge of completion, the shattered span of the Highway 90 bridge from Ocean Springs to Biloxi ends abruptly some hundreds of yards from shore. Only an orderly row of storm-scarred support columns jutting from the bay indicates the location of this once busy thoroughfare. Hurricane Katrina crashed ashore here, visiting devastation on the entire Gulf Coast region.
All Hands
Before the waters in Hurricane Katrina’s wake had fully subsided, Richard Sullivan, director of the City of Biloxi Public Works Department, and a number of key employees reporting for duty were shocked to discover several feet of water covering much of the city. The Public Works Department warehouse itself was under 4.5 feet of water, and most of the department’s service vehicles—which would be needed to repair storm damage—had been destroyed.
“What saved us is that we have on-call personnel who take equipment home in case of an emergency, and they came down with their trucks,” Sullivan says.
Immediately after the storm, he says, “You couldn’t get down any road. The hard thing was trying to get the roads open so emergency personnel could get through and perform search and rescue. We even had some of our own people with equipment out there trying to search for people.” He says the city had contracted out for a 72-hour push to get the roads cleared, but even then it was a massive effort. “The employees and even the military were out there all pushing debris off-road. You wouldn’t believe how much debris there was.” He says every road on the point was obstructed. “I’d never seen it that bad, not even with [Hurricane] Camille.”
Employees worked around the clock. Many, he says, came to him saying that they had lost everything but were determined to keep working and asked only that they might sleep in the department warehouse when they were tired; and many did.
Communications were lost, says Sullivan: “Radio, phones, everything went down. Our people had to shuttle back and forth by truck to let each other know what was going on.” According to Sullivan, the one provider that restored service quickly after the storm was Cellular South.
“They brought in substations, antennas, and repeaters, and we’ve made arrangements with them that in case of a future hurricane they’ll give us one of their phones to use.
”Recovery operations were further imperiled, Sullivan says, by the difficulty in obtaining fuel. “I had backhoes, dump trucks, everything out there just to try and start getting things cleaned up, and you didn’t know if you were going to have fuel delivered that day or not. But of course, the police and fire department had to have fuel as well. Finally the government stepped in and we got fuel from Keesler Air Force Base to run our equipment. It was a struggle for a little bit.”
The City of Biloxi and nearby Ocean Springs councils, recognizing the role Public Works had played by opening the roads for first responders, passed a resolution officially designating the Public Works Department, along with police and firefighters, as first responders themselves. “That’s been a big morale booster,” says Sullivan. In addition, he says, it allows the department to qualify for certain targeted grant support.
A Hungry Ocean
Biloxi’s famous oceanfront mansions and historic landmarks, some dating back to the 18th century, are gone, swallowed by the Gulf. Little remains of them but crumbling concrete slabs and rows of masonry staircases leading nowhere. Entire housing complexes and commercial properties along US Route 90, the coastal highway, have vanished as well, along with Biloxi’s formerly substantial maritime industry and offshore casino barges.
Despite all this devastation, Sullivan says, water quality in the Gulf was not seriously compromised. Before the hurricane, he says, there was a general impression that the Gulf was polluted. “I met with a couple of heads of the DEQ [Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality] after the storm who said the Gulf’s not polluted anymore, because the storm surge washed it away. But our rivers are bad.” The surge, the officials said, had washed the pollutants up into the rivers. Nevertheless, Sullivan says that with their extensive sampling programs, the “DEQ found the water quality after the storm turned not as bad as everybody was thinking it was going to be.”
There were beach closures, but these, Sullivan says, were due to debris. “I was talking with somebody from Bureau of Marine Resources who was out there in his boat patrolling in the Gulf, and he hit a roof of a house that had been washed out into the bay.”
More Work to Be Done
Cleanup and rehab work continues. Among the assets the department lost in the initial flooding were the city’s two vacuum trucks. However, Sullivan says the department has received funding approval for two replacement trucks, and he is awaiting their delivery. In the interim, Public Works has contracted an outside firm to begin cleaning the lines, manholes, and storm drains. In addition, he says a variety of agencies have contributed to clearing out Biloxi’s storm drainage system to lesser or greater effect: The “EPA came in with two vac trucks to try and help out. They stayed one day, and then pulled them out and went somewhere else. The Highway Department came through after the storm with about a dozen vac trucks to clear the drains along Highway 90, but further back here toward the city of Biloxi, we still have a ways to go.” He says the majority of the clogged drainage systems are concentrated in low-lying areas that were hit by storm surge. “What we’ve been trying to do is spot areas where after a rain there’s evidence of flooding and trying to clear those up first. Now we’re having to drop back and catch everything else. It’s going to be a long process.”
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Downed lamps show the storm's great strength. |
He says the department has a couple of people dedicated to storm drains, performing inspections and reporting on the conditions they find. For the time being, he says, “We are using outside firms to clear the drains until our trucks come in.” Sullivan anticipates continued inspection of storm drainage infrastructure may reveal an ongoing need for outside help for some time to come.
Picking Up the Pieces
The department lost 12 pumps on sewage lift stations and four lift stations that were completely washed out. An engineering firm assessed the damages at around $7 million. “It was a really big task trying to get things back to normal,” Sullivan says. Because of the large number of wells damaged or destroyed, one of the first things the department tried to do was restore water service. “We were able to do it in two days. We were using right-angle drives on our wells, so that helped.”
The labor shortage that plagues New Orleans also affects Biloxi. “One thing that’s hurt is that we lost so many employees. We had 165 employees, now down to 120 and 12 temps. We lost a lot of utility personnel and labor force,” Sullivan says. The government provided a grant to hire temporary workers, but he says as those funds have been expended, the workers have moved on to seek employment elsewhere. “We’re competing with the casino industry raising pay scales to $18 an hour.”
However, he believes the prospects for staffing are improving. He believes casinos will soon be fully staffed, and debris removal work will also soon be complete. “When I last checked, I noticed we have had quite a few applicants,” he says. “We’re beginning our interview process next week.”
New Elevations
With the historic coastal homes and longtime landmarks obliterated and populations shifting inland, Sullivan says Biloxi will probably never be what it was. He believes FEMA regulations for this area will require much higher flood elevations than the current 16-foot elevation enforced by local code, and he feels the expense of rebuilding to these higher elevations will likely be prohibitive for many returning homeowners.
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Public awareness is one positive result of the natural disaster: evacuate or risk your life. |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| The Biloxi Department of Public Works |
However, Sullivan says developers have been arriving daily with plans. He says the city has invested over five years to come up with its own comprehensive plan. He says the Public Works Department is also prepared to deal with development when it comes, whatever form it takes.“I’ve got an engineer who’s strictly dedicated to stormwater and two others that are strictly health enforcement. When plans come in for building and developing, they make sure the developers follow the stormwater guidelines.” He says developers are also taking a proactive approach. “What we see now is developers are over-engineering their projects to make sure that they’re not in any kind of violation. They’re making their retention ponds bigger and being careful to size their storm drains correctly.”
More Storms Predicted
In the aftermath of Katrina, Public Works employees were often the first to discover the bodies of people killed by the storm. “It was one of the most heart-wrenching things,” Sullivan says. Professional counselors volunteered to help provide emotional support, and many workers availed themselves of the service, he says.
“Incredibly, there were people who ignored the warnings and tried to ride out the storm,” says Sullivan. “Maybe they were thinking of Camille” (a hurricane that hit the area in 1969). “This storm was worse than Camille.” He says others who were disabled or who could not afford transportation found themselves unable to evacuate. He says the city now has a program to address this: “If a person wants to evacuate, they can call in and put their name on a list to get a bus.”
Sullivan doesn’t believe there is much that can be done to prevent a storm surge from striking this area in the future. “It’s going to happen again,” he predicts. “You can’t build levees around the entire peninsula. We had areas with 28 feet to 30 feet of storm surge. When you get to the low-lying areas, that puts it even deeper; that’s what happened along the bay.”
But he says there is one thing that is essential. “People need to pay attention to what’s coming. When you’ve got a 25-foot storm surge coming toward you, you have to leave.”
No Textbook
Hurricane Katrina may not have been a purely natural disaster; nor could it be said to have been a purely manmade disaster. According to Carlton Dufrechau, “If Hurricane Katrina has a positive outcome, it is in terms of public awareness, of the relationship between the built environment and the natural world. People here are now keenly aware of simple things: that trash dropped from a car window will eventually wash into the Gulf. Awareness is not universal, but it’s getting to the majority of people.”
The process set in motion by the most catastrophic storm in US history affects us all. There are many lessons still to be shared. Perhaps there will be many different answers. It may be that Brenda Thornton, public affairs officer for the S&WB, says it best: “There is no textbook on what has happened to us. We are writing the textbook.”
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May 2007
Shifting Currents
Biloxi, New Orleans, and life after Katrina
The street lamps create a brilliant cocoon of daylight punctuated by neon accents. The Canal Street trolley whirrs into motion; this, its final run to the depot before winding up service for the night. A dozen youthful musicians enthrall a crowd at the corner of Bourbon and Canal Streets as they storm through a brass band rendition of “The Love You Save,” the Jackson Five hit from the 70s. The Philadelphia Eagles and thousands of their fans are in town, for the first time since the storms, to celebrate the next day’s contest against the New Orleans Saints. A young woman steps out from the crowd and pantomimes as band leader. She drops a donation into the cardboard box at the players’ feet and dances her way back through the crowd and down the street. Soon, the box is nearly overflowing with cash. A thunderous barrage from the drummer concludes the selection, and the crowd bursts into a wave of applause. A little more than a year before, a different kind of wave engulfed New Orleans.
A Very Different City
On August 29, 2005, a series of levee breaches caused by storm surge from Hurricane Katrina allowed the waters of Lake Pontchartrain to flow into New Orleans, leaving 80% of the city underwater. In the French Quarter, where flood damage was considered minimal, a mottled streak of grime indicating the high-water mark can still be seen on shop windows and doorways, just a few inches above curb level. Within walking distance, however, oily stains on lamp posts and walls of homes and shops offer silent testimony to waters that rose to depths of well over 5 feet and stayed there for weeks, leaving streets navigable only by swimmers or by boat.
Still, a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated this city, the stories of survival are to be heard everywhere. But much of the city is now sparsely populated and surrealistically silent. In some neighborhoods, the occasional sighting of a pedestrian or two along the roadside can itself seem disquieting. Stacks of freshly milled lumber stand adjacent to structures overrun by wildly prolific vines, forcing their way through walls, windows, and rooftops. Here and there trailers or RVs parked in driveways bear witness to determined homeowners returning to rebuild their shattered lives. Whether waiting for an overdue bus or waiting for their favorite grocer to reopen, residents display unusual patience. It will take time. Nevertheless, in a city transformed by disaster, a recovery is under way.
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Damage to a Biloxi-area fishing bridge |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Biloxi, MS, lost all but a few of its trucks. |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Debris left after the flooding destroyed buildings. |
Major Overhaul
Marcia St. Martin, executive director of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans (S&WB), says in the aftermath of the storm the agency had effectively drained the city by September 19. Since that time, she says, the S&WB has been taking a methodical approach to permanent repairs. “The system has been restored. We are constantly taking pumps out, rewinding motors, and rebuilding systems. The pump stations are fully operational—fully functional.” The major overhaul, she says, “will continue through spring 2007.”
St. Martin says the goal is to serve the community at pre–Hurricane Katrina levels and to implement mitigation so that “if there is an event like Katrina in the future, the devastation to our infrastructure will not be as great.” To date, the S&WB has been able to repair and maintain a sufficient quantity of pumps to effectively drain the city. In this regard, she says, “We have achieved 100% service level to the community.”
Looking for Workers
Bob Moenian, chief of pump station operations for the S&WB, says one of the ongoing challenges the board has been facing is the recruitment of staff. “We knew a lot of consultant firms in town whose staffs were depleted. We even lost engineers who got back and have gone over to work for private firms.”
He says meeting staffing needs, even at the lower-skilled levels, has been difficult. “We’re operating at staffing levels less than half of what we were before the storm.” But he says there is a shortage of low-skilled workers in the New Orleans area. The workers who are here, he says, are finding higher wages in the private sector for less-demanding work. “We need young people, right out of high school, but what they are looking for is money.” He says there is a need to find resources to bring the right kinds of people, at all levels, on board. “We are lacking plumbers, mechanics, electricians—who are all hard to come by—because these are the same people everyone needs right now, for their home repairs.”
St. Martin echoes his assessment. “Every industry is experiencing a shortage of personnel. This work is demanding and challenging. Nature doesn’t decide that it’s going to rain between 5 a.m. and 6 p.m. It requires a significant level of commitment on a 24-hour schedule.”
A New Level of Preparedness
“The idea is more than getting us back to normal, but getting us storm proof,” says Moenian.
Gordon Austin, chief of environmental affairs for the S&WB, amplifies this point. “We’ve made dramatic progress since November 2005, when we still had employees in tents. Many city residents that were displaced are now back at home sites and well into the recovery process. The greater challenges for this city below sea level,” he says, “have been those of the [US Army] Corps of Engineers to better drain the city and to integrate drainage with the developing plan.”
The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has made the decision to install a temporary gated structure at the outfall of the 17th Street Canal to Lake Pontchartrain to block storm surges from the lake before they can damage the infrastructure of the canals.
Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the larger pumping stations were situated 3 to 4 miles from the lakefront on high ground along the river on the alluvial plain. Normally, Pump Station Number 6 and a number of feeder stations move stormwater through the 17th Street Canal toward the lake with the capacity to discharge at a rate of 10,000 cubic feet per second. St. Martin says during a tropical storm or hurricane, the gates will be closed to prevent a storm surge from entering the canals and threatening the city. However, the temporary pumps installed at the gate have a combined capacity equal to only 4,000 cubic feet per second.
According to St. Martin, the USACE philosophy is to construct over time permanent pump stations at the lakefront levees themselves. She says, “The Corps of Engineers has received Congressional authorization and partial funding to build pump stations at the lake that have the capability of that 10,000 cubic feet per second, or equal to what our capacity is today. The objective is to have that in place by 2010.”
St. Martin says the primary source of funding for stormwater in New Orleans is the USACE. “Though the corps has received an allocation from congress of about $530 million to build the new pump stations, as they work through the design there may be a need for the corps to approach Congress for additional funding.”
Until the more powerful new pumps are installed at the lakefront, the imbalance in pumping capacity between the S&WB pumping stations and the temporary pumps installed by the USACE at the gated lakefront structure may still result in some flooding during a storm. “Not catastrophic, but at a nuisance level,” Austin says. “We’re lucky, with storm drainage, to have the corps available with their budget and expertise.”
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| The Hurricane Katrina Memorial |
Tons of Paperwork
“Under the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] rules,” Austin says, “you have to identify storm-related damage to receive reimbursement. The process is time consuming. Hurricane Andrew is just wrapping up; it took 14 years.” He says the S&WB has received only about 20% of its expected reimbursement funding since Hurricane Katrina.
“It’s a tremendous recordkeeping process. There are daily meetings with FEMA. Our biggest handicap was the loss of our entire clerical staff.” In fact, Austin says the staff person previously responsible for environmental compliance has become the de facto point person in the FEMA process.
Complicating matters, he says, is that in the beginning some FEMA contractors were themselves unfamiliar with the agency’s documentation requirements and had provided some inaccurate information.
“We will have to rework many estimates that were not high enough because of the initial assumption that a placeholder number would have been sufficient until more precise damage figures became available.” Though that assumption proved incorrect, Austin says, “It’s impossible to accurately evaluate storm damage to a drainage system until you can get down there to inspect the damage,” which he says was not practicable at the time. Though time has been lost, he says FEMA does allow a provision to go back and write a revised version of these assessments.
Common Goals
“When you have a disaster like Katrina,” Austin notes, “there is an opportunity to reorganize around common interests and common goals.”
“Comprehensive restoration plans are under way for the Gulf Coast, which include elements of water-quality improvement,” says Carlton Dufrechau of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit organization that coordinates citizen input and provides linkages with policymakers concerning environmental issues in the Lake Pontchartrain region. Dufrechau characterizes one of the foundation’s goals as “restoring the plumbing of the Gulf region.
“Katrina,” he says, “made it tragically clear that levees alone are not enough to provide hurricane protection.” The hurricane levee system was constructed in response to Hurricane Betsy in 1965, according to Dufrechau. He says Betsy tracked on a storm path that should have made it more damaging to New Orleans than Katrina was.
“But,” he says, “the majority of the city, including the uptown area and the Lakeview area—both areas hard hit by Katrina—made it through Betsy without a scratch.” Dufrechau was nine years old when Betsy struck. “We had little levees that were basically no taller than I was. Now, we’ve got levees not 4 feet high as they were then, but 17 feet high, and Katrina resulted in damage an order of magnitude more severe.
“The big difference was the demise of our coastal wetlands,” he continues; he says over 40 years this land loss has been accelerating. “Levees that survived the storm were the ones that had a degree of wetland buffer in front of them. The ones that were exposed to open waters and took the high waves were the ones that washed away.”
Dufrechau believes it is possible to provide an additional level of protection from hurricane damage by restoring lost wetland buffers along the Gulf Coast.
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Katrina devastated more than 1965's Betsy. |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Remembering the most catastrophic storm in United States history |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Businesses were destroyed as fas away as Biloxi, MS. |
Swamp Revival
According to Austin, in the early 1960s the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet was dug through the marshes surrounding Lake Pontchartrain in order to provide a shortcut to the Gulf for shipping. “Right now it’s a mud puddle,” he says. Oceangoing traffic that sliced through the marshes promoted the intrusion of salt water, and wave action generated by ships created conditions unfavorable to the wetland’s viability. This increasingly saline environment proved inhospitable to once-prolific cypress marshes and has contributed to their demise. Without the vegetative growth and root systems of the large trees, huge swaths of coastline have simply been washed away.
During the 1990s, Dufrechau says, St. Bernard Parish diverted treated stormwater and wastewater from the Gore pumping station, which drained a small basin southeast of New Orleans and discharged it into freshwater swamplands that had previously been cypress swamps. He says nutrients contained in the water have helped restore the vitality of these marshes. “That little project has become a model for a larger project envisioned to help restore the City of New Orleans’s natural buffer to storm surge.”
Austin says that around the state there are 10 or 12 similar wetland assimilation projects, in which effluent from waste treatment plants, instead of being discharged into a river in the traditional manner, is discharged into a marsh environment. The practice, he says, “takes advantage of the fresh water and nutrients contained in the effluent with its other beneficial components, and as an end result you end up with a thriving, healthy marsh area.” Austin says the S&WB has partnered with St. Bernard Parish, the Sierra Club, and others in a project aimed to divert fresh water from the Mississippi River to the marshes to counteract the saltwater intrusion. Additionally, the S&WB, as part of a planned expansion of its East Bank Sewage Treatment Plant, plans to divert nutrient-rich effluent from this plant into the marshland to help reinvigorate vegetative growth. “The unique thing about the project will be the scale,” says Austin.
“We initially considered restoring about 5,000 acres of wetland.” He says St. Bernard Parish, which is planning to consolidate its wastewater treatment into one plant, has shown an interest in the project. By joining forces with that parish, he says, “We now see the opportunity of restoring in excess of 27,000 acres, which is exactly the amount of marshland out there that is degraded and not providing the storm buffer.”
Austin says the plan has received initial funding approval from the Delta Regional Authority, and the project is being encouraged by financial support from the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources through its Coastal Improvement Assistance Project.“I would love to see the marshes restored and for the surrounding neighborhoods to have access to them,” Austin says. He says the wetlands project “turns a waste into a resource” and is “the right way to deal with plant effluent.”
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| US Route 90 bridge, post-hurricane |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Properties along Route 90 were lost at sea. |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| What is the future of the famous Gulf Coast? Chances are a storm will strike again. |
Biloxi, MS
A steady wind carries showers inland over Biloxi Bay. Water birds at the surf’s edge struggle to keep their footing. Dune grasses sprout from sands deposited among scattered fragments of concrete and block. In the distance, a strand of twisted pines tops a barrier island providing the only demarcation between the gray sky and the colorless sea. Like the ruins of some ancient enterprise, abandoned on the verge of completion, the shattered span of the Highway 90 bridge from Ocean Springs to Biloxi ends abruptly some hundreds of yards from shore. Only an orderly row of storm-scarred support columns jutting from the bay indicates the location of this once busy thoroughfare. Hurricane Katrina crashed ashore here, visiting devastation on the entire Gulf Coast region.
All Hands
Before the waters in Hurricane Katrina’s wake had fully subsided, Richard Sullivan, director of the City of Biloxi Public Works Department, and a number of key employees reporting for duty were shocked to discover several feet of water covering much of the city. The Public Works Department warehouse itself was under 4.5 feet of water, and most of the department’s service vehicles—which would be needed to repair storm damage—had been destroyed.
“What saved us is that we have on-call personnel who take equipment home in case of an emergency, and they came down with their trucks,” Sullivan says.
Immediately after the storm, he says, “You couldn’t get down any road. The hard thing was trying to get the roads open so emergency personnel could get through and perform search and rescue. We even had some of our own people with equipment out there trying to search for people.” He says the city had contracted out for a 72-hour push to get the roads cleared, but even then it was a massive effort. “The employees and even the military were out there all pushing debris off-road. You wouldn’t believe how much debris there was.” He says every road on the point was obstructed. “I’d never seen it that bad, not even with [Hurricane] Camille.”
Employees worked around the clock. Many, he says, came to him saying that they had lost everything but were determined to keep working and asked only that they might sleep in the department warehouse when they were tired; and many did.
Communications were lost, says Sullivan: “Radio, phones, everything went down. Our people had to shuttle back and forth by truck to let each other know what was going on.” According to Sullivan, the one provider that restored service quickly after the storm was Cellular South.
“They brought in substations, antennas, and repeaters, and we’ve made arrangements with them that in case of a future hurricane they’ll give us one of their phones to use.
”Recovery operations were further imperiled, Sullivan says, by the difficulty in obtaining fuel. “I had backhoes, dump trucks, everything out there just to try and start getting things cleaned up, and you didn’t know if you were going to have fuel delivered that day or not. But of course, the police and fire department had to have fuel as well. Finally the government stepped in and we got fuel from Keesler Air Force Base to run our equipment. It was a struggle for a little bit.”
The City of Biloxi and nearby Ocean Springs councils, recognizing the role Public Works had played by opening the roads for first responders, passed a resolution officially designating the Public Works Department, along with police and firefighters, as first responders themselves. “That’s been a big morale booster,” says Sullivan. In addition, he says, it allows the department to qualify for certain targeted grant support.
A Hungry Ocean
Biloxi’s famous oceanfront mansions and historic landmarks, some dating back to the 18th century, are gone, swallowed by the Gulf. Little remains of them but crumbling concrete slabs and rows of masonry staircases leading nowhere. Entire housing complexes and commercial properties along US Route 90, the coastal highway, have vanished as well, along with Biloxi’s formerly substantial maritime industry and offshore casino barges.
Despite all this devastation, Sullivan says, water quality in the Gulf was not seriously compromised. Before the hurricane, he says, there was a general impression that the Gulf was polluted. “I met with a couple of heads of the DEQ [Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality] after the storm who said the Gulf’s not polluted anymore, because the storm surge washed it away. But our rivers are bad.” The surge, the officials said, had washed the pollutants up into the rivers. Nevertheless, Sullivan says that with their extensive sampling programs, the “DEQ found the water quality after the storm turned not as bad as everybody was thinking it was going to be.”
There were beach closures, but these, Sullivan says, were due to debris. “I was talking with somebody from Bureau of Marine Resources who was out there in his boat patrolling in the Gulf, and he hit a roof of a house that had been washed out into the bay.”
More Work to Be Done
Cleanup and rehab work continues. Among the assets the department lost in the initial flooding were the city’s two vacuum trucks. However, Sullivan says the department has received funding approval for two replacement trucks, and he is awaiting their delivery. In the interim, Public Works has contracted an outside firm to begin cleaning the lines, manholes, and storm drains. In addition, he says a variety of agencies have contributed to clearing out Biloxi’s storm drainage system to lesser or greater effect: The “EPA came in with two vac trucks to try and help out. They stayed one day, and then pulled them out and went somewhere else. The Highway Department came through after the storm with about a dozen vac trucks to clear the drains along Highway 90, but further back here toward the city of Biloxi, we still have a ways to go.” He says the majority of the clogged drainage systems are concentrated in low-lying areas that were hit by storm surge. “What we’ve been trying to do is spot areas where after a rain there’s evidence of flooding and trying to clear those up first. Now we’re having to drop back and catch everything else. It’s going to be a long process.”
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Downed lamps show the storm's great strength. |
He says the department has a couple of people dedicated to storm drains, performing inspections and reporting on the conditions they find. For the time being, he says, “We are using outside firms to clear the drains until our trucks come in.” Sullivan anticipates continued inspection of storm drainage infrastructure may reveal an ongoing need for outside help for some time to come.
Picking Up the Pieces
The department lost 12 pumps on sewage lift stations and four lift stations that were completely washed out. An engineering firm assessed the damages at around $7 million. “It was a really big task trying to get things back to normal,” Sullivan says. Because of the large number of wells damaged or destroyed, one of the first things the department tried to do was restore water service. “We were able to do it in two days. We were using right-angle drives on our wells, so that helped.”
The labor shortage that plagues New Orleans also affects Biloxi. “One thing that’s hurt is that we lost so many employees. We had 165 employees, now down to 120 and 12 temps. We lost a lot of utility personnel and labor force,” Sullivan says. The government provided a grant to hire temporary workers, but he says as those funds have been expended, the workers have moved on to seek employment elsewhere. “We’re competing with the casino industry raising pay scales to $18 an hour.”
However, he believes the prospects for staffing are improving. He believes casinos will soon be fully staffed, and debris removal work will also soon be complete. “When I last checked, I noticed we have had quite a few applicants,” he says. “We’re beginning our interview process next week.”
New Elevations
With the historic coastal homes and longtime landmarks obliterated and populations shifting inland, Sullivan says Biloxi will probably never be what it was. He believes FEMA regulations for this area will require much higher flood elevations than the current 16-foot elevation enforced by local code, and he feels the expense of rebuilding to these higher elevations will likely be prohibitive for many returning homeowners.
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| Public awareness is one positive result of the natural disaster: evacuate or risk your life. |
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Photo: Barbara Hesselgrave |
| The Biloxi Department of Public Works |
However, Sullivan says developers have been arriving daily with plans. He says the city has invested over five years to come up with its own comprehensive plan. He says the Public Works Department is also prepared to deal with development when it comes, whatever form it takes.“I’ve got an engineer who’s strictly dedicated to stormwater and two others that are strictly health enforcement. When plans come in for building and developing, they make sure the developers follow the stormwater guidelines.” He says developers are also taking a proactive approach. “What we see now is developers are over-engineering their projects to make sure that they’re not in any kind of violation. They’re making their retention ponds bigger and being careful to size their storm drains correctly.”
More Storms Predicted
In the aftermath of Katrina, Public Works employees were often the first to discover the bodies of people killed by the storm. “It was one of the most heart-wrenching things,” Sullivan says. Professional counselors volunteered to help provide emotional support, and many workers availed themselves of the service, he says.
“Incredibly, there were people who ignored the warnings and tried to ride out the storm,” says Sullivan. “Maybe they were thinking of Camille” (a hurricane that hit the area in 1969). “This storm was worse than Camille.” He says others who were disabled or who could not afford transportation found themselves unable to evacuate. He says the city now has a program to address this: “If a person wants to evacuate, they can call in and put their name on a list to get a bus.”
Sullivan doesn’t believe there is much that can be done to prevent a storm surge from striking this area in the future. “It’s going to happen again,” he predicts. “You can’t build levees around the entire peninsula. We had areas with 28 feet to 30 feet of storm surge. When you get to the low-lying areas, that puts it even deeper; that’s what happened along the bay.”
But he says there is one thing that is essential. “People need to pay attention to what’s coming. When you’ve got a 25-foot storm surge coming toward you, you have to leave.”
No Textbook
Hurricane Katrina may not have been a purely natural disaster; nor could it be said to have been a purely manmade disaster. According to Carlton Dufrechau, “If Hurricane Katrina has a positive outcome, it is in terms of public awareness, of the relationship between the built environment and the natural world. People here are now keenly aware of simple things: that trash dropped from a car window will eventually wash into the Gulf. Awareness is not universal, but it’s getting to the majority of people.”
The process set in motion by the most catastrophic storm in US history affects us all. There are many lessons still to be shared. Perhaps there will be many different answers. It may be that Brenda Thornton, public affairs officer for the S&WB, says it best: “There is no textbook on what has happened to us. We are writing the textbook.”