|
Environmental suit stopped building of floodgates to protect New Orleans
According to a dynamite article by Michael P. Tremoglie and Ben Johnson today at FrontPage Magazine, the Army Corps of Engineers had sought in the 1970s to construct two floodgates that would block the narrow channels connecting the Gulf of Mexico with Lake Ponchartrain and thus protect New Orleans from a disastrous rise in the level of the lake in the event of a major hurricane. Environmental groups successfully sued to kill the project, based on the idea that it would harm wetlands. I’ve been thinking about those floodgates since last week, when I came upon a set of recommendations to protect New Orleans written some years ago. The recommendations included just such floodgates, and I wondered why they had never been constructed, as it seemed a relatively simple and inexpensive measure compared to the much vaster step of building up the entire Lake Ponchartrain levee to withstand a category 5 hurricane, a project so expensive that no one had had the political will to push it through. And here’s the answer: the Army Corps of Engineers did try to construct such floodgates, and was prevented by environmental groups and a federal judge.
However, based on my incomplete understanding of these issues, floodgates between the lake and the Gulf, while extremely helpful, would still not have protected the entire city from catastrophic flooding. As I learned from a fascinating article in yesterdays’ Wall Street Journal, catastrophic flooding occurred in eastern New Orleans prior to the breach of the Lake Ponchartrain levee that devastated central New Orleans. The article said that the flooding of eastern New Orleans came from Lake Borgne. But as can be seen from a map, Lake Borgne is not a lake but simply a bay of the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore it’s hard to see what measures could ever protect eastern New Orleans from a sea surge in the Gulf. At the same time, it does seem that the flooding of the central part of the city, the main focus of the Katrina disaster, could readily have been prevented by the floodgates. Considering the death sentence the city was under in the event of a category 4 or 5 hurricane, a fact that all concerned parties have understood for decades, it is inconceivable that the floodgates were not built. Let’s thank the environmentalists, for whom preventing theoretical damage to wetlands was more important than preventing the destruction of the city of New Orleans. Email entry |