Bad news - Good News

From the Times-Picayune:

In June, the Army Corps of Engineers proudly announced that new gates and levee repairs meant residents returning to Lakeview and Old Metairie would see floodwaters reduced by up to 5 1/2 feet if the city were hit by a 100-year hurricane.

They were off by 5 feet.

The reason? The Lakeview data got fouled up when somebody put a minus sign in a calculation that called for a plus sign, Ed Link, leader of the corps-sponsored Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, said Friday. The Old Metairie errors stemmed from faulty assumptions about the way water would move into and out of the neighborhood from surrounding areas, Link said.

The result? There's been hardly any improvement at all in flood protection.

Minus signs instead of plus signs and "faulty assumptions about the way the water would move" will definitely affect flood projections. That's why when the US Corps of Engineers said that New Orleans was safer than before Katrina and the federal flood, I did not believe them.

Link blamed the rush to get as much information out to the public as quickly as possible for the release of the inaccurate draft maps in June, as well as the failure to correct them until this week.

The blame falls on "the rush" and "the failure". Isn't it convenient that actual people don't have to take responsibility for mistakes due to "the rush" and "the failure"? It just happened.

But wait!

Indeed, the report has not yet undergone peer review by the National Academy of Science.

So the projections could still change. What are people to do, if they want to move ahead with rebuilding?

Now I come to the good news part of the post, but it's of the "closing the barn door after the horse gets out" and "project far into the future" variety.

Also from the Times-Picayune:

The Army Corps of Engineers will recommend to Congress that the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet be closed with a rock dike at Bayou la Loutre, a project that would cost $24.7 million and could be completed 170 days after the start of construction.

"Thank goodness," said Sidney Coffee, chairman of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. "This is what the state has advocated for quite some time."

The Corps completed the MR-GO channel in 1963, in order to shorten the trip to the mouth of the Mississippi for shipping, but the channel silted up and widened until it was three times its intended width. The Corps spent millions over the years dredging the channel, only to have to repeat the process over and over, as the channel continued to silt up. Recently, less than one ocean-going ship a day traveled the channel, which costs about $13 million a year to maintain.

The recommendation is only the first step in what looks to be a long process. There will be public hearings, Congress must appropriate the money for the closing, etc., etc., etc., as the king of Siam would say. It could be a long time before the project winds its way through many levels of bureaucracy and any actual work begins on closing the channel.

MR-GO has caused severe damage to the adjacent wetlands.

A separate corps study, Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration, aimed at providing protection from catastrophic hurricanes will also recommend a variety of efforts to restore wetlands and other features in the area along MR-GO.

Again, despite the studies and plans, I fear that it will be well into the future before any actual restoration work is done.