NEW ORLEANS — Just three years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans confronts a new threat from Gustav and a stark question: Will the partially rebuilt levees hold?
Despite $2 billion in improvements, including 220 miles of repaired, raised and replaced floodwalls, 17 new pump stations and more flood-resistant pump stations, nobody can say for sure the city won’t be swamped again. And if it is, could it ever recover?
“It’s scary, man,” said Robert Russell, a 63-year-old plumber whose house in Gentilly Woods is close to floodwalls on the Industrial Canal that are so suspect the Army Corps of Engineers is buffering them with large baskets filled with sand.
“They say it’s not up to code,” he said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Levee experts and the Army Corps insist New Orleans is safer than before Katrina flooded more than 80 percent of the city on Aug. 29, 2005.
Yet the system still has severe shortcomings, including flood barriers meant only to withstand medium-strength storms, hidden layers of weak soil, and navigation channels that inadvertently funnel storm surge into the city.
“The positive thing about having any storm hit you, it will reveal any kind of frailty in the system,” said J. David Rogers, a University of Missouri-Rolla engineer who has tracked the construction. “And we shouldn’t be surprised if there is frailty.”
Experts estimate the system is only a third of the way to where the corps wants it by 2011 — strong enough to protect against what scientists call a 100-year storm. That type of hurricane has a 1 percent chance of occurring each year.
By comparison, the corps says Katrina was a 396-year storm. The agency has not classified Gustav, which was spinning Thursday near Jamaica.
In the past two years, the corps has been scrambling to finish its work. But levees, floodwalls and floodgates remain in various states of completion.
In Jamaica, residents, tourists and oil workers fled as Gustav swamped the island, leaving 59 people dead in its wake.
At least 51 people died in Haiti from floods, mudslides and falling trees, including 25 around the city of Jacmel, where Gustav first struck land Tuesday. Eight more people were buried when a cliff gave way in the Dominican Republic.
Forecasters said the storm could grow to a hurricane before slamming into Grand Cayman tonight.
Oil prices spiked above $120 a barrel before settling below $116 in a session made volatile by fears that the storm could affect production in the gulf area. Analysts said the storm could send U.S. gas prices back over $4 a gallon.
Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Hanna formed in the Atlantic, but it was too early to predict whether it could threaten the U.S. East Coast. Forecasters cautioned that Gustav’s path remained equally uncertain.
Political storm
