infrogmation | Entries tagged with army corpse of engineers

Some post Isaac analysis on one of the essential New Orleans blogs, "Fix the Pumps". Yipes. In short, nope things ain't fixed yet, some preventable serious close calls, and if you think of the Surge & Watabode as bumbling, the ACOE who we now rely on to keep from flooding make the S&WB look like Nobel Prize winners.

Fix the Pumps: Isaac in New Orleans - what we know so far

The Gulf oil slick is just the tip of the iceberg:

New York Times: Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf.

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water”

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Meanwhile here in the city, remember something about the Army Corps of Engineers having this project to fix up flood control?

Fix the Pumps: The lakefront hydraulic pumps are rusting to bits, and have been since they were installed. Some have already fallen apart. The Corps was warned all of them would do the same thing "imminently" in mid-2009, and did next to nothing for nearly the entire 2009 hurricane season.

Read the whole post if you can stomach it.

I'd really like to be able to stop calling them the "Army Corpse of Engineers". Really, I would.

(And remember ACOE has chosen not to use an existing local pump design with a long term proven track record of being high efficiency, low maintenance, and incredibly long lasting and resistant to extreme conditions. There are no inherent technical problems in designing the pumping system that weren't already solved back before World War I.)

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Since my recent posts have been harbingers of doom and gloom for South East Louisiana, here's something more cheery.

YouTube: Circa 1968: This is New Orleans! Sleepy by day. Psychedelic by night.

Recent Ruling Shows True Tragedy of Katrina was Federal Government's Creation of the Disaster Itself. HuffingtonPost article by Sandy Rosenthal. You might have heard the story before, but might have missed some of the juicy details here.

Thailand is 'in network'? Employers and insurers embrace medical tourism. DailyFinance article on more U.S. citizens going abroad for health care.

Murals found at Mexican excavation depict everyday life of the Maya. Washington Post article on cool recently discovered ancient murals at Calakmul, with a few pix.

Some background to illustrate a point relevent to my previous post.

New Orleans hundreds of years of history has multiple examples of floods from semi-tropical downpours, hurricanes, and levee failures.

What happened in 2005 was radically different.

( More illustrated history )

In short:

There's a difference between a flood that gets your feet wet in the street

And one that drowns you in your attic.

Heck of a job, MRGO.

"It has been proven in a court of law that the drowning of New Orleans was not a natural disaster, but a preventable man-made travesty," the attorneys said in a statement. "The government has always had a moral obligation to rebuild New Orleans. This decision makes that obligation a matter of legal responsibility." -- CNN story

Here in Greater New Orleans, where people routinely talk about "the Federal Flood" and refer to the MRGO Canal as "the Hurricane Highway", the news isn't the facts of the case, but rather the judge finding legal liability.

If I understand the ruling correctly, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has legal immunity from being sued for damages from the failure of their mis-designed and mis-built levees, but not for the fact that the MRGO Canal channeled deep sea storm surge right into the heart of the city. This point alone is enough to make them culpable for the majority of the flooding of the Greater New Orleans area in 2005.

Times-Picayume story

On Bloomberg

On UPI

WDSU, with link to PDF of lawsuit

For those interested in details of what happened and why concerning the great flood, I reccomend the book Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow. It also makes the point that rather than Greater New Orleans being unique in vulnerability, bad decisions by political and business interests have created no shortage of other engineering disasters waiting to happen.
YouTube video of one of the co-authors and members of levees.org at a reading/discussion at Octavia Books.

The words "levee break" and news footage of cities under water certainly has a dread familiarity for those of us greater New Orleans. Our hearts go out to our countrymen in the Mid-West.

Midwest Flood News

Red Cross.org

Just a "natural" disaster?

"Authorities knew the aging levee near Birdland, a working-class, racially diverse neighborhood, was the weakest link among the city's levees. A 2003 Corps report called for nearly $10 million in improvements across Des Moines, but there wasn't enough federal money to do all the work." Des Moines Levee Fails (hat tip to jdquintette)

But of course we can't afford 10 million here and 12 million there to defend America when we have a 2.4 Trillion dollar war to take care of. (And Bush wants another 178 billion, saying "our men and women in uniform and their families deserve better". Indeed, so do we all.)

Besides, it's cheaper (not for the country, of course, but for BushCo) to just let citizens die and start a PR campaign to blame the victims.

I'm not saying defending Americans isn't on BushCo's list of priorities at all. It's probably somewhere down their list as a subset of potential public relations problems. Right around the note to make sure Dear Leader doesn't start massaging female foreign leaders when there are media cameras around.

Edit:
Is 'Mother Nature' Really To Blame for the Midwest Floods? article by Georgianne Nienaber. More on levees, politics, and Army Corps of Engineers follies.

Current Mood: ranty

Condolances to our countrymen in Wisconsin.

Made the mistake of presuming the US Army Corps of Engineers were more competent than the Three Stooges? We in South-East Louisiana can identify.

Be prepared to have your state denounced as inherently UnAmerican and the population idiots for living there.

St. Bernard Parish new levees expansion joints filled with.... newspaper

Quote: “That should be criminal”

SHOULD BE?!?

The professional organization for engineers who build the nation's roads, dams and bridges has been accused by fellow engineers of covering up catastrophic design flaws while investigating national disasters.

Local Newman High School produced a short video for Levees.org about the US Army Corps of Engineers investigation. The American Society of Civil Engineers has objected to it; Times-Picayune article.

Hm. I liked it.

Watch the 1 minute video on YouTube

I guess I owe an apology for my recent post comparing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to the Three Stooges.

The United States would be safer in the hands of the Stooges.

Fix the Pumps Blog: Oh. My. God.

Did our government outsource US Army Corps of Engineers work to some firm that specializes in theatrical backdrops? If not, why do they keep spending money on stuff that looks like something, but doesn't actually work?

First, flood walls that won't hold back floodwater. Now, pumps that don't pump.

After the USACOE admitted responsibility for what's been assessed as "the largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States", one might think they'd want to show that they can actually do something right.

Apparently not.

Rather than using a tried, robust, reliable design for pumps they were installing on drainage canals, they used an untried design. And kept installing more of these pumps after they knew the things didn't actually work.

Oh, and one more detail: The defective pumps are made by a company with connections to the Bush family and previous allegations of fraud committed with taxpayer money.

( Read more, if you can stomach it )

Current Location: New Orleans

US Army Corps of Engineers: How the hell did the organization that built the Panama Canal become something run by the Three Stooges?

The flooding of New Orleans was caused by: Incompetent design by the Army Corps of Engineers.

From article in today's Times-Picayune:

"This is the largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States. Nothing has come close to the $300 billion in damages and half-million people out of their homes and the lives lost. Nothing this big has ever happened before in civil engineering."

"That miscalculation was so obvious and fundamental, investigators said, they "could not fathom" how the design team [...] could have missed what is being termed the costliest engineering mistake in American history."

So. It wasn't that the storm was worse than the city's protection system was supposedly designed to deal with.

It wasn't that some corrupt SOB local contractor or politician massivley skimped on mateials to line their own pocket (which had been my guess).

It was that the ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS screwed up the design from the start.

Somehow, I thought they had some idea of what they were doing, and could get it done. Isn't this the organization that built the Panama Canal? Built logistical support under the most extreme conditions allowing victory in WWII?

Or are people more familiar with the Corps than I unsurprised at this massive level of incompetence?

One of the sub-groups of the Krewe du Vieux is going as the "Coprse of Engineers" this year, outfits a combination of Engineers and Grim Reapers.

( full Times-Picayune article text mirrored )

Current Music: Flood Blues

Saturday I helped with a volunteer clean-up along Bayou St. John.

Today I happened to drive down Mirabeau, pulled over to look at the lower London Avenue Canal breech. Despite massive Army Corps of Engineers fill, it's still leaking water at what looked to me to be at least the rate of a couple of fire-hydrants at full blast.

I've been taking lots o'pix with the handy-dandy digital camera I picked up in Austin.

I'll upload a batch more the next time I have high-speed internet access, but I've uploaded a pair related to the above to the here on the nola photos community.

Current Music: Bessie Smith: Muddy Water Blues

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Page Summary

Isaac in New Orleans - what we know so far
Louisiana Links: More Bad News, plus a Palate Cleaner
Links: Federal Flood, Medical Meanderings, Maya Murals.
Floods in New Orleans: What Hath MRGO Wrought
Judge: Feds liable in Federal Flooding of Greater New Orleans
Today's News in the United States of Atlantis
On Wisconsin
Heck of a job?
catastrophic design flaws
Newman High ACOE video generates controvercy
!
Corpse of Engineers Pumps
"The Incompentent We Do Immediately. The Corrupt Takes A Little Longer."
Worst Engineering Ever
It's the best of cities, it's the worst of cities...

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The Information Super-Frog

Your cyber-pal way down yonder in New Orleans

Entries tagged with army corpse of engineers

Isaac in New Orleans - what we know so far

Louisiana Links: More Bad News, plus a Palate Cleaner

Links: Federal Flood, Medical Meanderings, Maya Murals.

Floods in New Orleans: What Hath MRGO Wrought

Judge: Feds liable in Federal Flooding of Greater New Orleans

Today's News in the United States of Atlantis

On Wisconsin

Heck of a job?

catastrophic design flaws

Newman High ACOE video generates controvercy

!

Corpse of Engineers Pumps

"The Incompentent We Do Immediately. The Corrupt Takes A Little Longer."

Worst Engineering Ever

It's the best of cities, it's the worst of cities...