It's a perfect storm: soft soils, rising water levels, and rapid settlement could see the Army Corps of Engineers needing to perform costly levee lifts around New Orleans a lot sooner than planned.
Media partner WWL-TV reports the Corps has put Congress on notice they may need $800-million quickly to start work on a new round of levee repairs, just to keep the levees certifiable.
A levee lift is will require adding tons of clay and fill dirt to the tops of earthen levees to shore them up and bring them back to the required height to make sure the Mississippi River stays in its channel and doesn't overtop a sagging area and start inundating New Orleans.
Levee lifts are planned for and needed, every ten years the Corps initially scheduled after spending $14.6-billion to rebuild the levee network. Ivar Van Heerden, a former LSU scientist said sections of levee along the upper Industrial Canal were observed before Katrina sinking at a rate of about 2 feet over 20 years.
But four years after declaring the levee project finished, it's back with a dire warning: some areas of the levee have already subsided four feet since the Corps project completed.
“I would think the typical citizen would expect it to last longer,” Roy Arrigo told WWL-TV. His home along the 17th Street Canal levee is just a few hundred feet from where the floodwall breached in 2005.
The Corps of Engineers warns the levee system “will no longer provide (the promised) 1% level of risk reduction as early as 2023.”
To get the money for the levee lift means campaigning Congress to spend nearly another billion dollars on top of what was invested to rebuild the levees the first time. And to make matters worse, the levees will need this work done as soon as possile to ensure they can be certified to protect the region. Without that certification financial firms could refuse to underwrite loans, mortgages and investments in the area due to the threat of flooding. In other words, economic armageddon.
