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from the always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life dept.
After a $14-Billion Upgrade, New Orleans' Levees Are Sinking:
Sea-level rise and ground subsidence will render the flood barriers inadequate in just four years
The $14 billion network of levees and floodwalls that was built to protect greater New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was a seemingly invincible bulwark against flooding.
But now, 11 months after the Army Corps of Engineers completed one of the largest public works projects in world history, the agency says the system will stop providing adequate protection in as little as four years because of rising sea levels and shrinking levees.
The growing vulnerability of the New Orleans area is forcing the Army Corps to begin assessing repair work, including raising hundreds of miles of levees and floodwalls that form a meandering earth and concrete fortress around the city and its adjacent suburbs.
"These systems that maybe were protecting us before are no longer going to be able to protect us without adjustments," said Emily Vuxton, policy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental group. She said repair costs could be "hundreds of millions" of dollars, with 75% paid by federal taxpayers.
"I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans," Vuxton said.
The protection system was built over a decade and finished last May when the Army Corps completed a final component that involves pumps.
The agency's projection that the system will "no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023" illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana.
Could never have seen that coming.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @06:37AM
Start by reinforcing the inner side of the outer walls with a few foot thick layer of geopolymer, the ocean side being reinforced to reduce erosion with a combination of geopolymer, roman concrete, or ceramic tiles held together/in place by basalt fiber ropes.
Now, while this sounds, and is, stupidly expensive, there is a greater reason for this: This initial 'stonewalling' as it were gives time to begin the ACTUAL New Orleans reconstruction project: The movement of new orleans historic buildings onto geopolymer barges, which can be built using standardized frameworks for the majority of the city. As historic buildings are raised and placed on barges we will collectively as a nation be gaining the engineering knowledge necessary to more cheaply and efficiently relocate housing along the majority of coastlines which will be receding in the near future, and more importantly offer a new and compelling way to indebt more island nations to us instead of the Chinese, Russians, or other interested and financially savvy parties as their islands sink under the newly raised seas.
The problem of course is that America as it sinks today is incapable of the sort of long term thinking necessary to make both the financial and ideological commitment to such a project necessary for it to not only succeed, but come in under budget, and have the resulting product licensed to anyone willing to pay the standardized royalty costs or provably be headquartered and only employee domestic (US) laborerers for all projects foreign or domestic utilizing the technique. If we could do that, this project would pay for itself many times over as we help elevate foreign nations out of the swamps of our collective making.
Food for thought.