During the early stages of a catastrophic event, as with war, the first reports are often woefully incomplete or simply wrong. Yet from the beginning, something didn't stack about the reported pattern of flooding in New Orleans after Katrina, when measured against the dire predictions about tens of thousands of residents possibly drowned.
The Tuesday reports spoke of two and possibly more breaches in the levees that caused water levels inside the city to rise at the rate of one foot every half hour. Attention centered on the smaller breach at the 17th Street Canal. Reports about the larger breach, in the eastern industrial section, were sketchy.
Then, on Sunday, ABC Nightly News carried a report, "The Lower Ninth Ward," which spoke of a wall of water, 20 feet or higher, surging into the Ninth Ward and other areas of the eastern industrial section. There were anecdotal accounts of thousands drowned. The camera showed part of a wrecked barge that had seemingly sliced through part of a flood wall and/or levee.
From another Sunday television report -- CBS 60 Minutes -- the floodwalls were not high or thick enough to withstand a powerful storm surge.
Anyone caught in the surge in the eastern section would have drowned. Those who sought refuge in an attic -- tried climb above the flood -- would have baked to death if not rescued very quickly. The 90+ degree temperature outside would have put the temperature in attics at 150 degrees or higher.
Then, on Monday, a lengthy front page report in The Wall Street Journal started to put the pieces together. The details explain why failure to evacuate the lowest-lying sections of New Orleans ahead of Katrina would virtually guarantee a high death toll. Drowning would have been virtually instantaneous for thousands trapped in the eastern industrial section. Here is a part of the report:
Hurricane Force
Anatomy of a Flood: 3 Deadly Waves
Canal, 2 Lakes Swamped
Eastern New Orleans
As Storm Tore Through
Mr. Mullet's Fight to Survive
By JEFF D. OPDYKE, EVAN PEREZ and ANN CARRNS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 7, 2005; Page A1
NEW ORLEANS -- On Aug. 29, as Hurricane Katrina brought chaos to this city, three massive waves of water poured largely unseen into the eastern section of town and neighboring St. Bernard Parish.
One surged west, off a churning Lake Borgne. Another came across from Lake Pontchartrain in the north. That sent a steel barge ramming through the Industrial Canal, a major shipping artery that cuts north to south through the city, possibly scything a breach that became 500 feet long, letting waters pour into nearby neighborhoods.
The waves inundated the mostly working-class eastern districts, home to 160,000 people. In some places, the water rose as fast as a foot per minute, survivors say.
Until now, the world's attention has focused on the levee system protecting the city's central districts, and on the near-anarchy in the storm's aftermath.
But a complete reckoning of the damage and death toll will likely focus on an entirely different event, hitherto overlooked: the devastating swamping of the eastern sections of New Orleans, hours before the central flooding began.
The final tallying of the dead across the city will be substantially dictated by how many residents of these neighborhoods got out alive. [...]
For the rest of the city, and the investigators piecing together the puzzle, the floods in eastern New Orleans suggest a more complicated explanation for the disaster, one that raises new questions about how it was devastated and what must be done to make it secure.
In particular: Why were the levees lining the Industrial Canal and parts of Lake Pontchartrain to the east lower than in other parts of the city? Should residents near Lake Borgne have been more clearly warned that the lake could rise so furiously?
Are the levees outside the city limits sufficient to protect parts of the city that few tourists ever visit? Should shipping companies be required to do a better job of securing barges and vessels?
[...] According to engineers, scientists, local officials and the accounts of nearly 90 survivors of Katrina interviewed in recent days, the first of the three waves swept from the north out of Lake Pontchartrain. How high the wave reached hasn't been determined, but the surge poured over 15-foot high levees along the Industrial Canal, which were several feet lower than others in the central areas of the city.
About the same time, a similar wave exploded without warning across Lake Borgne, which separates Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico. It filled the lake, engulfed its surrounding marshes, raced over levees and poured into eastern New Orleans.
As Lake Borgne swallowed those neighborhoods from the east, a separate catastrophic wave rose from the other side, possibly caused by the flying barge.
Trapped between three cascades of water were the neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward, where nearly 14,000 African-Americans lived, a third of whom owned no vehicle and a third of whom had physical disabilities, according to U.S. Census data.
Next door, just outside the city limits, were the virtually all-white areas of St. Bernard Parish -- Arabi, Chalmette and Meraux -- home to more than 50,000 people as well as oil refineries, docks and a fishing boat in what seemed like every other yard.
Within a few hours of Katrina's arrival, those areas sat under as much as 15 feet of water, according to witnesses.
To the north, water poured through black and Vietnamese neighborhoods closer to Lake Pontchartrain, where another 96,000 people lived. [...]
A Crucial Waterway
On normal days, the 5½-mile-long Industrial Canal hums with barge and ship traffic, moving between a lock at the Mississippi River on the southern end of New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain in the north. It is a crucial waterway for vessels carrying petroleum products, industrial chemicals and oil-field pipes because it connects the river to the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which in turn leads to the Gulf of Mexico.Beside the canal is the Lower Ninth Ward, which was originally a cypress swamp prone to flooding. In recent decades, its white residents largely left for neighboring St. Bernard Parish and other suburbs. A third of those who remain live below the poverty line.
The Industrial Canal has been the area's defining presence since it was built in the 1920s. Time and heavy use have taken a toll on the canal, now operated and maintained mostly by the federal government. Barges and ships were routinely delayed because of growing traffic levels and the lock was "literally falling apart at the hinges" in 1998, according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report, which called it an "antique" and recommended replacing it.
A $600 million lock-replacement project didn't get very far. Lower Ninth Ward residents complained about noise and launched a legal fight that bogged down the work.
The levees along the Industrial Canal's eastern side are supposed to stand at a height of 15 feet, according to the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Joseph Suhayda, a retired Louisiana State University coastal oceanographer, suspects the levees aren't actually that tall, partly due to sinking of the land beneath them. Mr. Suhayda now consults for a maker of flood-protection barriers. If he's right, that would mean the levees weren't high enough to handle even a Category 2 or 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Category 4.
The Corps of Engineers concedes some of its levees in the area "have settled and need to be raised to provide" the level of protection for which they were designed, according to a fact sheet on the Corps's Web site dated May 23, 2005. But federal budget shortfalls in fiscal 2005 and 2006 "will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs.
"Hurricane Katrina's storm surge -- the wave of water pushed ahead of a hurricane by its furious winds -- raced across Lake Pontchartrain. As it did so, the canal became the delivery vehicle for the first wave that would destroy the Lower Ninth Ward. Just before the water began rising, a surge hit the mouth of the Industrial Canal. The Corps of Engineers says a lock operator reported seeing water from the lake pouring over 15-foot walls on each side of the canal. Corps officials believe the flood scoured away a portion of the flood wall near the northern end of the Lower Ninth Ward.Much worse was also to come.
As storms approach New Orleans, owners of ships, tugboats and freight barges that populate the city's port and waterways attempt to secure their craft. Barges -- typically about 200 feet long, 35 feet wide and capable of hauling three million pounds of cargo -- are lashed with cables and kept in position with tug boats, according to Edward Peterson, executive director of the Louisiana River Pilots Association. Removing the barges from the area entirely is impossible.
"There is nowhere to go," Mr. Peterson says.
As the hurricane rolled into New Orleans, scores of boats broke free or sank. In the Industrial Canal, the gush of water broke a barge from its moorings. It isn't known whose barge it was. The huge steel hull became a water-borne missile. It hurtled into the canal's eastern flood wall just north of the major street passing through the Lower Ninth Ward, leading officials to theorize that the errant barge triggered the 500-foot breach. Water poured into the neighborhood.
When the storm was over, the barge was resting inside the hole. "Based on what I know and what I saw, the Lower Ninth Ward, Chalmette, St. Bernard, their flooding was instantaneous," said Col. Rich Wagenaar of the Army Corps.
It didn't help that the Mississippi River, which runs along the southern border of these neighborhoods, rose 11 feet between Sunday and Monday mornings. Coastal experts say that could have worsened flooding by limiting the water's escape route.
As the water roaring out of the Industrial Canal turned the streets of eastern New Orleans into rivers, the same areas were hit from the other side by the storm surge coming off Lake Borgne. Engineers say the estimated 20-foot surge also appeared to overflow levees just north of St. Bernard Parish. [...]
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