Look out, Iraq. Has the US Army Corps of Engineers arrived in Baghdad yet to tame the Tigris and Euphrates rivers?
Better take care. Iraq’s in a desert. But American riverbank engineering could make you very, very wet. And very, very sorry.
Has The Army Corps built this special thing for you yet? They keep calling it a “levee.” But it’s not. It’s a floodwall, and it will kill more people and destroy more property than any of Al-Qaeda’s infamous land mines and mortars.
Here in New Orleans, the Army Corps and their contractors built us a floodwall along the London Avenue Canal, which burst and flooded my solidly middle-class neighborhood (in addition to the poorer areas Time magazine keeps photographing). The Corps keeps calling it a levee, and calling it destiny. But what they built, and what broke, was not a levee.
It was a floodwall. A floodwall designed by somebody and made by somebody and inspected by somebody. And paid for by somebody.
Who exactly? Officials and the media have been remarkably silent.
The Army Corps took over perfectly good earthen levees all over town, and replaced them with deadly floodwalls. The London Avenue floodwall that split apart half a block from my family’s Lake Terrace home was made of flimsy metal sheets and cement panels barely as thick as a highway divider, bolstered by rebar rods so narrow it boggles the mind. Original plans for the 17th Street Canal a few miles away required its floodwalls to be sunk 17 feet below sea level. New reports indicate the Corps sank them 17 feet, yet they still broke, causing catastrophic flooding at every point.
Contractors billed millions of dollars. Independent engineers like Ivor Van Heerden explain that the Corp’s floodwalls were doomed because simple laws of physics and elementary mechanics require floodwalls to be driven two or three times deeper than the individual canal’s bottom.
Floodwalls were buried 17 feet? If a canal’s 18 feet deep, as many in New Orleans are, this means the Army Corps should have driven the floodwall down 54 feet.
Levees are different. They are cheap. Dirt cheap. Because dirt’s what levees are all about.
Dump trucks haul in stones, gravel and dirt. Engineers tell the drivers where to dump it, machines pat everything down nicely and then a surveyor grades it. Topped with sod, it all makes a beautiful verdant hill upon which kids roll down and fly kites, folks walk their dogs, and people jog.
And they hold fast as long as you keep dumping dirt on them, year after year. None of these earthen levees broke in urban New Orleans proper. Every one of them held fast and kept us safe, as they have for hundreds of years.
What broke? What flooded the city and destroyed over 70 percent of it? Newly constructed floodwalls of metal and cement. Had the Army Corps kept up the earthen levees they replaced, the entire city would have been safer.
Structures built from stone and dirt endure. Thousand-year-old Indian mounds still dot America’s landscape. Heck, think of the pyramids and ziggurats. Dirt and rock endure.
You say uptown New Orleans is dry? Well, check out their levee! It’s a huge stretch of lateral hill built of rock and dirt sprawling from the French Quarter almost to Baton Rouge. Dirt’s the answer.
Dirt’s a New Orleans tradition. Everyone in New Orleans dumps dirt. We have rain erosion and sit below sea level, so our ground sinks a bit every year. To remedy this, many homeowners simply pull out the Yellow Pages, look under “Dirt,” and order some.
My last dump truck-full cost $100. They dump it in your driveway, and you take out a shovel and spread it across your lawn.
The break wall by my house is pretty amazing. Flimsy metal and concrete newly-constructed barriers are creased, cracked and collapsed, exposing splits in fragile plastic seams that tore open weak cement panels, revealing jokingly thin rebar and weird fillers.
Just feet away, the earthen levee also forming the London Avenue Canal’s protection — the remaining levee contractors had not yet ripped up and topped with a deadly, useless floodwall — did not flood. It stayed tight and dry all the way down to Lake Pontchartrain. Someday an engineer will explain it.
But one thing’s amazingly clear — wherever floodwalls broke, the only way the Army Corps stopped the water was to do what they should have been doing in the first place: Build a levee. Dump rocks, gravel and dirt.
They took helicopters usually reserved for “work” in Iraq, and dumped rocks, gravel and dirt by the ton. They built dirt-cheap levees atop their million-dollar floodwalls.
Iraqis, go ahead and write constitutions and hold your elections. Hold up blue fingertips and smile. Do everything Americans tell you. Have patience. Iraq will soon belong to you again. America ‘s leaving. Even Bush says so. He just won’t say when.
It’s been three months since the floodwalls cracked open and deluged New Orleans. The lights went out, and in over 70 percent of the city, they haven’t come back on. We have no electricity where I live. No schools. No hospitals, stores, restaurants, laundromats, gas stations, or businesses of any kind. No food. Nobody’s drinking the water. Fifty years ago, this would be unheard of. If America’s empire’s not over, it’s definitely on the fritz.
America will leave behind many things in Iraq. But if the Army Corps builds you a floodwall, you’ve been warned. Dump some dirt on it as soon as you can.
Dump dirt, and live.
