[Dialogue] They knew it was coming

[LAURELCG@aol.com]

>From a friend, at Louisiana State University.  Do not believe anything said 
by govt. officials about having no idea such catastrophe could occur.

 ____________________

Foresight is 20/20


Selected Excerpts

Presidents' Forum on Meeting Coastal Challenges

Sponsored by LSU Systems Office, Louisiana Sea Grant, and the LSU AgCenter.



Preface: The speeches below are from two of 20 featured speakers who met at 
Louisiana State University on January 25th 2005 for the Presidents' Forum on 
Meeting Coastal Challenges.  The purpose of  firstforum was to provide 
scientists, policy makers, and local officials with a "no holes barred" opportunity for 
a candid discussion on the harsh realities associated with the historic and 
predicted coastal land loss facing Louisiana's citizens.  Please note that 
these excerpts are from transcripts and thus represent comments as spoken.  A 
second forum will be held on the campus on October 17, 2005 and the theme is 
coastal land use and safer growth.  For additional details about the initial forum, 
including the full 255 page transcript and downloadable presentations, go to:


http://www.laseagrant.org/forum/index.html 

http://www.laseagrant.org/forum/01-25-2005.htm 



The University Perspective

Dr. Ivor van Heerden

Center for the Study of Public Health Impact of Hurricanes

Louisiana State University


One of the realities of Louisiana is that the coastal land loss that we are 
experiencing is exacerbating and enhancing the impacts of tropical storms. I 
think everybody recognized that Hurricane Ivan, if it had come into Louisiana, 
would have been very devastating. As a consequence of a program involving a 
number of universities and campuses, including the Vet School, the LSU Medical 
School in New Orleans, we developed some tools to try and look at the realities 
of a hurricane impact, and this is not a gloom and doom story. This is to say 
we have tools that we can utilize to better understand what the impacts could 
be and also to sell the need for Louisiana's coast to be restored. This is a 
diagram of the major hurricanes, Category 3 and above, in the last 50 years, 
and if you go back further, you will see in the last hundred years we have had 
12 major hurricanes impact Louisiana. That's on average of about once every 
eight

years. 


The reality is that Louisiana is prone to major hurricane impacts. This is a 
computer animation generated by our team using the LSU supercomputer. What 
would have happened basically if Hurricane Ivan had come in over Fourchon and 
then passed west of Lake Pontchartrain. The little black arrows here are the 
winds, and this gives you a scale of about a hundred miles an hour. This is the 
water level, the surge above sea level. As you will see, the eye is approaching 
the coast, and you will see the winds coming in, and we now see before it even 
makes landfall the building up of the surge against the artificial levees 
that protects us from river floods, and one of the things we are learning is that 
these artificial levees, while they are very beneficial for river floods, 
actually enhances storm surges. You will notice in terms of New Orleans there we 
are starting to flood the Bonne Carre Spillway. There's not a levee along the 
gulf, and drawdowns are occurring in these areas. In fact, the drawdown in 
some of these navigation canals is 11 feet. So any marine interest in there will 
have real problems with docking a vessel in terms of protecting it from the 
surge. 


While it enhances, you will see the storm building up so that we have almost 
24 feet of water here in Plaquemines and St. Bernard, and then the water 
crosses the levee and starts flooding the westbank by going right over the river. 
So people in this area who perhaps thought they were safe at that time would 
go. You will notice that New Orleans now has a lot of water. The water enters 
from this corner at the Industrial Canal, as well as close to the airport. 
Before it floods into New Orleans, it floods in highly industrialized areas. It's a 
very high probability that those waters will be very contaminated.


The surge pushes all the way up into Interstate 12, so literally nobody in 
this part of the state escapes it. This is what would have happened -- this is 
the reality if Ivan had come into Louisiana September of last year. Now on top 
of that there is flooding associated with rainfall. This is an example of an 
event associated with a major hurricane in 1940. If you consider any of our 
bowl cities, Houma, New Orleans, any of our cities surrounded by levees, you can 
imagine what 30 inches of rainfall would do, especially if the pumps were not 
operable. 


Now, this is a prediction from some early work by the Corps of Engineers. 
It's a land loss by 2040. I really want to direct you to this area where 
Barataria Bay used to be. What you see is the only land contained within the hurricane 
levee. This is a wonderful funnel for the surge to come in and really flood a 
large part of Louisiana. No matter where you look, we have these funnel 
shapes. So the potential impacts of a certain storm increases every single year. 
The reality is a Category 3, 4 and 5 hurricane striking the greater New Orleans 
area or any other major inhabited area off the coast would be a disaster of 
cataclysmic proportions. 


Damages and associated reconstruction will exceed a hundred billion dollars. 
This is not numbers we sucked out of our thumbs. This is what we believe to be 
real numbers. Just looking at New Orleans, if Ivan had come through in 
September, the city would have had 14 to 17 feet of standing water, assuming the 
levees didn't fail. The whole area would be shut down. Over 300,000 people we now 
know would have been stranded. There is this potential of petrochemical and 
hazardous material releases, not only into the waters entering the city but 
within the city. Most of the fuel storage facilities in New Orleans are above 
ground. They are not bolted down. 


Obviously major problems with shelter, economic. Over a million people would 
be homeless. We would have to create tented refugee camps, probably in the 
Florida parishes. This here is a number we are still working on, but the American 
Red Cross have estimated that up to 100,000 people would lose their lives, 
and our initial models is indicating that that number is not far off. So this is 
a serious reality. In addition, there is the potential of releases of 
chemicals into the air, and this is a model that looks at some potential releases, 
and what you see is that the curving nature of the hurricane means that those 
releases cover a very large area. So even if you are not in the impact zone, 
even if you are in north Louisiana, you could feel those impacts. 


And some of the medical stuff -- and I will go over this very quickly, but 
it's extremely alarming. Number one, we are going to have to have a major effort 
to get the survivors out of the flooded areas. How do you rescue 300,000 
people? We are going to have problems with diseases. Some spreading very rapidly 
because of contaminated water. Some have death rates over 50 percent. Mosquito 
control, vaccines for various communicable diseases, infectious diseases. 


The list goes on and on, and it gets scarier and scarier. Just in case those 
of you from western Louisiana think that you're safe, this is what would have 
happened if Hurricane Lili had come in as a Category 4. You see the flooding 
extends almost all the way to Lafayette. I will run it again very quickly. You 
can see the eye coming in, and this is what would have happened. We are very 
fortunate that that storm didn't impact. So the conclusion then is that coastal 
Louisiana is very vulnerable to catastrophic storm surge impacts. The values 
of some of the studies coming out of LSU universities is that we can use these 
realities in future planning. 


We can look at the models, and some have already been used very heavily by 
emergency managers, and then there is the whole thing of what emergency managers 
would call mitigation or the rehabilitation. Just two ideas. One is -- and 
this has been brought up before - a passive structure across the Rigolets along 
the Interstate 10 bridge to reduce the cross-sectional area of those flood 
waters, those surge waters, entering Lake Pontchartrain. Another idea is if we 
could put 50 percent of the Mississippi into the Breton Sound area. This would 
obviously mean the shutdown of MRGO, but we would create up to 10,000 acres a 
year at the high, and these sediments would then evict into adjacent marshes 
and hopefully rejuvenate those,

again, creating a platform to protect us from these surges. One would have to 
look at navigation changes, such as a new channel down into the Mississippi 
bottom. So this is not doom and gloom. These are new tools we are developing at 
Louisiana universities, and they are there for the parishes and others to 
utilize as they were. Thank you.



A Local Government Perspective

MR. JUNIOR RODRIGUEZ

Parish President, St. Bernard Parish



Thank you. Good afternoon, Brothers and Sisters. I refer to you as brothers 
and sisters because I kind of feel like I'm preaching to the choir. We have 
these meetings and we continually bring our problems to each other, and that just 
seems as far as it goes. Whenever I'm invited to a meeting of this sort, when 
I get up in the morning I sort of have a little feeling that maybe this is 
the day, this is the day that I will get

something I want to hear that is going to be good for St. Bernard Parish. I 
refer to St. Bernard first because that is my parish, and I hoping it's good 
for all the coastal parishes. 


Usually I go back home and I'm frustrated. I think all you parish presidents 
and parish representatives out here today know the feeling. I think today is 
another one of those days that I'm going to go back home frustrated. I 
appreciate having the opportunity to come here, and I appreciate listening to 
everyone, and I have heard some things here today which I will just elaborate on a 
little further later on, but I will give you a quick scenario about St. Bernard 
Parish. It's a very small parish, 480 square mile. Of that 480 square miles, 
I've got 67,000 people that live behind 26 square miles that is protected by 
levee. That's a ridge, not a very large ridge. Ninety-five percent of our area is 
water. 


We live on that 26 square miles. The rest of the area is inundated by water 
and tidal fluctuation at least two to three times every week. So we are in a 
very precarious situation, but to make matters worse, we were given a golden 
opportunity in 1963, or so they lied and told us about it, an economic boom, so 
they told us, called MRGO, Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. You know the saying 
if somebody wants to give you something, don't take it. Believe me, this was a 
gift. Like everything else, it has got to do with economics. Not the economics 
of St. Bernard Parish. The economics of the nation, the benefit of the nation 
they tell me and the benefit of Orleans Parish, and I can understand that 
because when it comes to what is best for Orleans and the nation, St. Bernard is 
on the bottom of the pole and we are subject to go. They proved that in 1927. 


We've got a history of being devastated for the city of New Orleans and the 
economy, but you know what? One of these days -- it's not a matter of if. It's 
a matter of when -- New Orleans is going to be another Galveston because when 
St. Bernard goes and Plaquemines goes and Jefferson's coast lines recede, 
Orleans is going to be the one to flood, and they are not going to be able to get 
the water out. 


Then what are they going to do with the economics? But it's like everything 
else. What really concerned me here today is we've got a lot of experts now. 
We've got more experts than we've got problems. Benny brought up about studies. 
Well, Benny, I tell you what, I would like to have the studies that they put 
together. I could take the paper and probably close up the MRGO and have enough 
left for you to build some marsh on the outside of your properties, outside 
of your levee. If we had brought one bucket of sand every time we had a meeting 
about the MRGO, believe me, we could have closed this thing by now, but we 
didn't.


But for me to come here today and to hear somebody tell me that they want to 
know my problems, I'm a little insulted, and I feel a little bad because maybe 
I wasn't talking loud enough or somebody can't hear. If we haven't been 
telling you about our problems -- and I'm not just saying St. Bernard's problems. 
I'm looking at people in this room that every time there is a meeting that we 
go to concerning coastal erosion, coastal problems, they are there. I see the 
same old familiar faces there every time. This scenario up here, we are a prime 
example. The MRGO devastated St. Bernard Parish. We could be considered a 
disaster area. We used to have freshwater, brackish water, saline marshes. We had 
over a hundred square miles of swamp, of cypress. Today we have nothing. You 
can count the cypress on your hand. That's what happens now. That's not a 
scenario. That's a fact when nothing happens. Let me tell you what this boils down 
to. It boils down to money. It boils down to politics. 


If you come here and ask me to tell you to do some more studies, I can't 
support studies. If you tell me that you want to do some studies to get us some 
money, I'll jump up and holler yeah. I have been fooled so many times, that 
don't happen. It's politics and money, and I can tell you this because I'm an 
independent, I'm not a republican or a democrat. Let me tell you something, boys. 
We just got through with a national election. I heard the republicans tell us 
how great they were going to be and what they were going to do, and I heard 
everyone that came to St. Bernard talk about what they were going to do for 
coastal erosion. Boys, you republicans need to go talk to the cowboy up there. You 
need to get some of this money back along the coast. Somebody has got to 
remind the cowboy that he's going to lose the back end of his horse. You need to 
get it up there. It's not the democrats. We need money. You get us the money, 
we'll get the job done. We don't need any more studies. I appreciate the 
opportunity to talk to you.