Just look at that grille. And when you open the hood? Why, there's enough space to put in a bowling alley! And how about the push-button, Power-Glide™ transmission? You hardly feel like you're driving at all:
Weather data showing the need to raise the height of levees to defend New Orleans against stronger hurricanes was not incorporated in Army Corps of Engineers designs, even though the agency was informed of the new calculations as early as 1972, government records show.
The heights of floodwalls and levees now being rebuilt by the corps are based on research for a likely worst-case storm done in 1959. When new weather service research in the 1970s increased the size and intensity of that storm and its projected surges, the corps stuck to its original design specifications when work began in the 1980s, including for structures that failed during Hurricane Katrina.
Corps headquarters officials in Washington did not respond to requests for comment. New Orleans District engineers now involved in reassessing the area's hurricane protection system said the lack of changes in the past probably can be traced the corps' legal restriction to building only what Congress authorizes.
"I can only guess, but what I think you'll find is that since the authorization (in the legislation) never changed, then the people involved felt they couldn't change" design specifications, said Janis Hote, a corps engineer who, like most of the local staff, was not involved in those earlier projects.
Had the changes been incorporated in corps planning starting in 1972, they almost certainly would have resulted in higher or stronger structures in some areas, hurricane researchers said. Though the project was authorized in 1965, financing problems and court battles delayed much of the construction until 1982, and the designs for many structures that failed during Katrina were not completed until the late 1980s and early '90s.
In 1965, Congress authorized the corps to develop a system to protect the New Orleans area from "the most severe meteorological conditions that are considered reasonably characteristic of the region," giving birth to the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project.
Limited range of storms
To determine what those conditions were, the corps relied on a study of worst-case hurricanes developed by the Weather Bureau -- today the National Weather Service -- for the East Coast and the Gulf Coast. The Weather Bureau looked only at storms that occurred between 1900 and 1957 for the New Orleans area.
That search produced the hypothetical standard project hurricane for New Orleans, which was adopted by the corps, with some revisions, as the basis of its levee and floodwall designs. It had a central pressure of at least 27.6 inches of mercury, maximum sustained winds of 100 mph in a radius of at least 30 miles, and a forward speed of between 4 and 28 mph. And it had a 1 in 200 chance of occurring in any year.
Wonder if the new levees will have cool tail fins...?
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