Shortly after the New Orleans flood, some newspaper windbag--I think it was either David Brooks or Charles Krauthammer--wrote something about how the disaster showed that Americans had simply become dependent crybabies prone to run to the federal government instead of helping themselves because of federal flood insurance, as opposed to Britain where flood insurance is mostly private; and that it just went to show that government solutions weren't the answer. I immediately looked up the Thames Barrier project and determined that it had been built with public funds. Maybe they need to dynamite it before they all succumb to the moral hazard.
Priceless... Literally. The cynic in me hopes someone will do a study of cost per whatever unit of protected land. I think we (.nl) spent some godawful amount of money ((half) a trillion or so? Most of it when money was still worth something) to protect not all that much land, and even we are still wondering if perhaps the numbers aren't a but optimistic and are we really as well protected as we think? Scale that up to the potentially affected area of the US and I wonder if it isn't just cheaper to occasionally drop a hundred billion here or there on cleanup and damages.
To be fair, it's my understanding that the Venice system is being held up by political squabbling in the Italian national government, and who knows when it'll actually be built. Wikipedia's entry about the MOSE Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSE_Project) links to an article about the issue.
Political squabbling in Italy? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
At least the Italians have grand plans. Meanwhile, some Americans are still talking about the rebuilding of New Orleans not being worth it. Do we have any grand plans for NO's new levee system?
Supposedly the governor of Louisiana and 40 underlings of hers are in the Netherlands looking at their levees. (Except none of the underlings are engineers. So apparently the decisive factor in deciding what technique to use is how cool it looks to the layperson. Hey, that fits well with this web page, too.)
As the picture shows, the levees were crap. The near-miss by Katrina was less severe than the Category 3 they were allegedly designed for. I started on a rant, but I'll leave it to the qualified people.
More money could have made a difference, but in the short term it would not have -- the money wasn't earmarked for the precise problem they had, because they didn't realize they had it.
The floodwall on the 17th Street Canal levee was destined to fail long before it reached its maximum design load of 14 feet of water because the Army Corps of Engineers underestimated the weak soil layers 10 to 25 feet below the levee, the state's forensic levee investigation team concluded in a report to be released this week.
That miscalculation was so obvious and fundamental, investigators said, they "could not fathom" how the design team of engineers from the corps, local firm Eustis Engineering and the national firm Modjeski and Masters could have missed what is being termed the costliest engineering mistake in American history.
It's worth reading the whole article, even though it doesn't explain how the engineers got the wrong answers. I had assumed it was a bureaucratic issue -- that qualified engineers never looked at the project in the first place -- but I was wrong. Still, I wonder how much time and experience the inspectors had.
The army says the levees were build as designed, some witnesses say they weren't, but if they were, then the design must have been flawed, because the levees didn't hold the amount of water they were supposed to.
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syntheid
no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 12:24 am (UTC)Scale that up to the potentially affected area of the US and I wonder if it isn't just cheaper to occasionally drop a hundred billion here or there on cleanup and damages.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 12:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 12:45 am (UTC)At least the Italians have grand plans. Meanwhile, some Americans are still talking about the rebuilding of New Orleans not being worth it. Do we have any grand plans for NO's new levee system?
no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 05:28 pm (UTC)http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1133336859287360.xml
More money could have made a difference, but in the short term it would not have -- the money wasn't earmarked for the precise problem they had, because they didn't realize they had it.
The floodwall on the 17th Street Canal levee was destined to fail long before it reached its maximum design load of 14 feet of water because the Army Corps of Engineers underestimated the weak soil layers 10 to 25 feet below the levee, the state's forensic levee investigation team concluded in a report to be released this week.
That miscalculation was so obvious and fundamental, investigators said, they "could not fathom" how the design team of engineers from the corps, local firm Eustis Engineering and the national firm Modjeski and Masters could have missed what is being termed the costliest engineering mistake in American history.
It's worth reading the whole article, even though it doesn't explain how the engineers got the wrong answers. I had assumed it was a bureaucratic issue -- that qualified engineers never looked at the project in the first place -- but I was wrong. Still, I wonder how much time and experience the inspectors had.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-21 08:56 pm (UTC)http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1512890/11032005/id_0.jhtml
and
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10454903/
The army says the levees were build as designed, some witnesses say they weren't, but if they were, then the design must have been flawed, because the levees didn't hold the amount of water they were supposed to.