broadmoorimprovement.com

[Seeker]

Perhaps members of the Flood Advisory Group are aware of the Congressional efforts to discuss reform in the Flood Insurance Policy and its related issues. They are discussed in today's "Times Picayune" EDITORIAL: Reactionary reform

The intro reads: The hole Hurricane Katrina punched in the National Flood Insurance Program is spurring reform, and Congress should consider changes that keep the program financially viable and nudge people toward making wiser choices about where they live.

As the article discusses various issues such as extending the coverage areas, making it more cost effective, reducing subsidized rates, and reducing repetive claims (something while only experienced by 1% represents 30% of the damage payments), our neighborhood is mentioned in the astute words of:

[jmuskratt]

You know, I'm getting so tired of seeing Broadmoor mentioned in national newspapers.

[startrekchess]

[Seeker]

From the sources of New Orleans City Business, the following link http://www.neworleanscitybusiness.com/uptotheminute.cfm?recid=4970&userID=0&referer=dailyUpdate gives you Mr. Vitter's cover letter to George Bush in which he takes the Corps to task for their path to fail and working against the rebuilding efforts.


In regards to Starkrechess request for Ray to come down from his tower, hope may be at hand. From the June 10? annals of the Times Picayune, we find these words of encouragement: "...hiring a top-notch spokesperson will be a priority if Nagin is to retain the public's confidence and City Hall is to keep residents informed about the city's recovery....The new hire is expected to be on board by next month." Well next month is almost here. Only time will tell if the official spokes person will speak in Ray speak terms. One also might wonder why a spokesman is needed since once wasn't used as appeals were issued for votes. Since it's time for Jay speak, which is more enlightening, I'll say no more.

[startrekchess]

Seeker, I'm not sure that C Ray having a spokesperson will do any good unless content is involved. But Monsieur Vitter might like to check into what can be called the Greenhouse effect, should he run into any further problems.

[jimzak]

Click on the links on the right side of this page to see what happens to your neighborhood with 3, 6, or 9 inches of rain and closed floodgates:

http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/tfg/inundation_maps.htm

It's not a pretty picture.

[jmuskratt]

The thing is, the map doesn't tell us how deep it gets. I can live with some minor street flooding...but ...
_________________
Adolph "Duffy" Voigt

[startrekchess]

Page two of the PDF claims a difference of one foot of rainfall flooding, to be cut in half by Sept 2006 at current planned pumping capacity. Of course, the Corps has gone back and forth so much on what that present planned capacity is to be, it's hard to know what they intended at the time of writing the particular PDF copy. Nebulous enough?

Thing is - I only had time to look at one map, everyone's trying to d/l it would seem... and so I went biggest natch - it doesn't look to me from my non-engineering standpoint like IPET incorporated SELA into their model. Had they done so, the data field for Broadmoor would not have paralleled the data field for Old Metairie.

Matt, are you here?

Whatever it is, it is public, and I can use it therefore. If it's their mistake or miscalculation, all the better for my purposes. As a study to indicate the level of deep need for prioritized funding - a letter writer in today's T-P compared NOLA to Baghdad, but where does the real funding go? - Monsieur Vitter can also use this to bulldog the powers that be.

And if C Ray comes back from his California dreamin' anytime soon, perhaps he will recognize the ludicrousness of a design which allows the federal government to determine how and when to flood its citizens.

[McBride]

I asked the head of the interior drainage team on the IPET investigation three months ago whether the Napoleon Ave. and S. Claiborne Ave. canals were included in their model. He confirmed they were. SELA is only meant to guard against 10 year rainstorms, not the gullywashers represented in these maps (that is, the 6" and 9" in six hour models)

The maps are a crock. Here's why:

1) The Corps deliberately left off depths. Go to the IPET website https://ipet.wes.army.mil/ and click on the Technical Appendices to Vol. VI. Scroll to pages 112 thru 114 to see outputs from the same drainage model as that which produced the new inundation maps. Notice the IPET maps have depths. For our purposes, I would use the map on page 112 as reliable guidance for flooding when the gates are closed, but only for the western half of Orleans. The eastern half of the parish in that map is modeled with overtopping from the Industrial Canal, which, let's hope, won't happen again.

I recommend that map because it's the only one I've seen that shows conditions based on actual pumping, not 100% pumping like the new inundation maps. By the way, the explanation for what those maps are starts on page 107 of the same document.

2) The maps assume 100% pumping during a tropical storm. This is silly. We know that 60 Hz pumps will likely be lost during high winds over 30 mph. PS#1 lost 60 Hz power six hours before Katrina landfall. Scroll down to page 519 in the Vol. VI appendices to see the pump log for PS#1, and scroll to p. 642 to see PS#6's log. You'll see exactly when power was lost. In fact, there wasn't a station in the city that didn't lose 60 Hz power before Katrina's landfall. This happens all the time with Entergy's grid, and is more likely to happen now that they've lost a slew of backup systems. So assuming those 60 Hz pumps will be available is foolhardy.

By the way, the specific stations affected by loss of 60 Hz power on the east bank, west of the IHNC are: PS#1 (here in Broadmoor, two 1200 cfs pumps), PS#4 (in Gentilly on the London Ave canal, two 320 cfs pumps), PS#6 (on the 17th St. canal, two 1100 cfs pumps and four 250 cfs pumps) and PS#7 (at the foot of the Orleans Ave. canal, one 1000 cfs pump). None of these stations have backup generators for their 60 Hz pumps. The Corps will be hooking up generators at PS#6 by October 7th, after they promised in May to have it done by mid-July.

3) The maps don't take into account the safe water level of five feet at 17th St and London Ave. and nine feet on Orleans Ave. This safe water level could constrict the pumping conditions leading to modeling of the yellow area, meaning more flooding.

4) The maps don't take into account the fact that many 25 Hz pumps are down for maintenance for rewinding throughout the summer.

5) The maps don't account for the I-10 underpass being kept clear while neighborhoods are flooded. Considering how little pumping capacity there is available at the 17th St. gates, this is a major concern. In all practicality, if I-10 is kept clear, PS#1 will nearly be down to zero.

Put all that together, and these maps are not the worst case. They're actually the best case. The actual flooding will be more extensive and deeper than this model reflects (or would reflect if we knew the damn depths).

My guidance is if you are even near (not covered by, but just near) the purple or light blue areas, believe that you too will get flooded with at least a foot, even though the map says you stay dry. I wouldn't feel comfortable unless I was along the river or one of the ridges (Metairie, Gentilly, or Esplanade). In addition, if you are in Old Metairie, don't count on the Jefferson Parish improvements to help you out - there's too many ways that plan can fail. Plus it is untested.

Our advice remains the same: park your car near the river (not on the Napoleon or Claiborne neutral grounds), preferably south of Constance Street, and pray for continued drought. For proof of what will happen, I point you to the localized street flooding and underpass flooding in Gentilly about a week and a half ago. That's but a small taste of what we could face when those gates go down, or even if they stay up and the pumps are not allowed to exceed the safe water level in the canals. Sorry folks, but it's all bad news.

By the way, make no mistake that the timing of the map release was not accidental. The Corps slipped it under everyone's radar by doing a classic Friday afternoon document dump, with the bonus of it being the Friday before July 4. Bravo Corps! Your dedication to the continued marginalization and destruction of our city is truly impressive.

Matt

[startrekchess]

Clearly SELA means nothing with the pumps turned off or otherwise incapacitated, but if the T-P linked maps are supposed to indicate 100% pumping capacity at any future point, the reservoirs under Napoleon, in conjunction with PS#1, would cause less street flooding under 'optimal' conditions whether it was a gullywasher or a 10-year rainstorm. No? Going partly by my own experience, I didn't have problems pre-K. 'Course, now it's hard to know what to expect anywhere, with the previous damage to the drainage infrastructure still largely unassessed.

Just sayin', I wouldn't just go by what the head of the interior drainage team said three months ago. He may not have been the ultimate road map designer. (Remember that other map's green 'dot' that some knew about and others didn't, in accounting terms.) Layman's logic says there's something amiss.

But I agree with you on the crockpot stew and I remarked particularly on the timing myself when talking with a neighbor earlier today. They aren't fooling anybody. And that's also particularly why the Corps cannot be trusted to determine when to lower the floodgates.

Basically, you don't design a system to 'spare' a city by sealing it off before ensuring the 'seal' is not going to create the very conditions it is supposed to prevent. That's 1984 in practice. Don't give me that bs about the 17th street levee area being 'a very small space' in which to work. Even the Time Warner Katrina book I bought at NOMA today has a map showing Lakeview is lower than Broadmoor in terms of elevation. Lowering floodgates and shutting off pumping helps them at Uptown/Gerttown/Carrollton's and our expense. Now is that racial or political, I don't know, but those nice white folk out east who got recently flooded seem to have a different government than us out here in this 'part of the world'.

You armor the levees and canals before you erect a floodgate, unless you're only working for show. And I don't mean the poor guys out there breaking their backs 24/7, they're just labor to the purveyors of The Two Minutes' Hate whenever poll numbers (or leaks) slip. And it doesn't take much brains to figure out you can build pumps elsewhere and bring them in, even to setting them on a barge. No, something is seriously smelling foul in all this (tell Cooper it's not the air or the water) and like the FEMA/Red Cross blame games early on, it smacks of more than decentralized planning.

[prwalter]

Thanks, Matt, for the reference to the maps on IPET. I don't understand why they did not release this info. It seems to indicate that with the gates closed and with the "average" past performance of the pumps, if we were to get another Katrina, with similar pumping capacity in place, they would still expect much of Broadmoor to have 2 - 4 feet of water in the streets, at least briefly. It is interesting that BFE is about 5 feet above the street level (gutter) in much of Broadmoor. The one thing that actually looks positive in the IPET maps is that Broadmoor actually fares BETTER than a lot of Lakeview and a LOT of Gentilly -- I guess partially b/c of SELA, and partially b/c overtopping would effect us less. Granted, we are at some real risk between now and July 2007, or even later, if the Corps has additional "unexpected" delays. Let's hope we can luck out for the next couple of hurricane seasons and that they can get what they promise in place for Summer 2007. Then if they really can get the permanent pumps at the lake by 2010, that would be great. But the history of the Corps does not give me a huge amount of faith in that. We would all be wise to consider having as much living space above BFE as possible. Although it is unlikely that we will see 8 feet in the street again, it seems reasonable to be planning for 3 or 4 feet at the gutter (while he hope and pray against it). If we can get our houses 4 feet off the ground and plan on getting our cars over by the River during tropical storms (as Matt recommends), we should be able to manage this. Hopefully in a couple of years we will be rounding the corner.

[startrekchess]

[prwalter]

I want to add a couple of things: First, if one were to believe the Corps, "the gates would only have been closed 3 times in the last 65 years". To some extent I am sure that this is a PR mantra, that has been spoon-fed to the media, and they repeat it over and over. If you take it at face value, it means that there is a relatively small chance that the temporary gates would even be closed prior to the completion of the permanent pumping stations. If you believe they are telling the truth about when the gates would be closed, and if you believe they are telling the truth that the permanent pumps would be in place by 2010, then there may be only about a 18% chance or so that the temporary gates will ever be closed. I think that is probably a bit overly optimistic, AND we DO need to be all over them to make sure that the gates are never prematurely or unnecessarily closed under policitcal pressure from Lakeview or whomever, say when the projected storm surge will be 3 or 4 feet, and not 5 feet. I think this scenario may be our biggest danger, that is that the Corps gets trigger happy -- under pressure -- to close the gates when their own protocol does not even call for it. Say for a slow moving Cat 1 or something, with lots of rain. Ouch. So we need to be all over them about that. Plus we need be all over them about procedures for getting the gates open as quickly as possible after surge goes down. (BTW, the Orleans Canal gates can be done LAST, b/c they do not hamper pumping like on the other two major canals.) Lastly, as Matt has repeatedly pointed out, the electrical power issues have to be addressed. The lack of redundancy is a joke, and I would not depend on Entergy for ANYTHING. These pumps should have the same level of power backup that a computer data center has. If anyone wants a free quote that you can use for comparison, here is one: "Many critical computer centers have on-site generators to provide several days of backup power. The replacement for Charity Hospital is expected to have on-site generators to provide power for 10 days if needed. How can it be that the pumps that protect the very lives and property of all of New Orleans do not have on-site generators that can power them for just a couple of crucial days, so that they are not dependent on the less-than-redundant Entergy or S&WB power grids?"

[Seeker]

In using Matt's referral to the Technical Assistance Manual, once they loaded, I found the maps interesting. With the size of the file 42.3MG and possibly some who may be using older machines or may not have a library system to fall back on, is it possible to aid such viewers for any of our resident computer whizzes to provide a link giving only the maps?

[prwalter]

Seeker,

It could be done if someone with BIA can lend some space on a website other than the Corps' website, and then we copied the maps to that site, and then put a link. It is a question of whether someone has personal website that they can copy the maps to, or if perhaps the BIA webmaster can assist with this using BIA space...

Rodney