When the levee breaks, I got no place to go
Led Zeppelin,
When the Levee Breaks
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has invited his people to return though hurricane season is only six months away and there isn't a levee in sight. President George W. Bush has promised the levees will be rebuilt by hurricane season, though a bunch of critics think that's a fantasy. Which means the people Nagin is inviting home might end up flooded out again. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, whom some blame for the failure of the levees in the first place, says otherwise. Is anyone else asking themselves what's going on?
President Bush has a severe image problem in New Orleans. He stayed on vacation and toured other states while New Orleans flooded (Though he found the will to fly home immediately to keep Terri Schiavo on her feeding tube). He promised everything would be back to normal soon the day after the levees failed. "Brownie' was doing a 'great job' sending out memos telling FEMA workers to roll up their sleeves so it would look like they were working. The combined effect strongly suggested the President truly didn't give a hoot about New Orleans.
Unfortunately for the President's approval ratings the rest the country did care, and thought the President of the United States ought to do something when one of his major cities is practically wiped out. Bush himself may not care about New Orleans, but he does care about the polls, and so the best way to fake caring is to make promises. So the President made a promise to get the levees rebuilt before the next season in order to shore up his own popularity.
The question is can the levees be rebuilt by the next hurricane season? I've built a lot of buildings but not one levee, as levees just don't require much electricity. They're relatively simple in construction and work primarily on mass. You build a tall, thick, really honking thick earthwork and let pure mass do its thing.
Many of the critics claim that won't work because that much mass needs time to settle in order to firm up properly. They say you build a strong levee in layers, to give each layer time to settle before adding more stuff. This makes sense to me. While I haven't built a levee, I have done some excavating. Fill dirt settles, and it settles a lot. We back-fill our trenches with gravel first to reduce sag. If you back-fill with dirt you'll be way below grade almost overnight. And the sagging isn't done. Even after adding gravel I overfill with dirt, leaving a small mound so the dirt will look good next year. Until the sheer mass presses matters down the loose dirt cannot be so strong as it will be. If you don't think so try driving across a newly filled trench. I know because I've done it and it took a backhoe to pull the truck out. What the critics fear is that some of the sub layers may not compress correctly, leading to a zone of weakness.
But the spokesmen for the Corps of Engineers disagrees. Of course he works for the President and the Bush Administration has made itself a reputation for punishing people who say what they do not want to hear. Just ask the three generals the Administration fired (excuse me, retired) before the war in Iraq. On the other hand, the Corps may be right. There is a thing called calculus. Shrink can be calculated with reasonable confidence so long as large safety measures are observed. It may be possible to build a levee capable of lasting before the next hurricane season. But that may be with the proviso that nothing near the size of Katrina comes by for a few years as the levee settles into full strength.
That may be a good bet. No city gets plastered every year, and it seems likely that New Orleans won't catch it for a while. In that case the levee may serve as the security blanket people need to rebuild and re-populate what is one of America's cultural treasures. By the time a big storm strikes again the levee may be an adult and up to its job.
But if the bet turns sour and lightning does strike twice, then the Corps will take the blame for building a crappy levee rather than an immature one.