Hurricane Isaac has hit Louisiana and is headed to New Orleans. As I discussed yesterday and today, the pumps are defective. On Monday it was reported that:
[O]ne of three key Army Corps of Engineers pumping stations that help drain the city during a storm is only at partial capacity. . . Two of the 10 pumps at Orleans Avenue experienced "some type of hydraulic failure" last month, were removed, and are . . . scheduled to be reinstalled in mid-September.
(The Orleans Avenue Canal is one of the 3 main drains for the city.) Early today, Army Corps of Engineers spokeswoman Rachel Rodi says a pumping station at the 17th Street canal in New Orleans — which was built at the site of a levee that breached during Hurricane Katrina — briefly went down, but operators were able to manually get it working again.
Officials pronounced New Orleans ready, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers' $14.5 billion flood protection system. But no one in either political party has addressed an independent evaluation by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) in 2009 that there are serious safety and reliability issues with hydraulic pumps that were installed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. A tenacious whistleblower and former client, Maria Garzino, is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ("the Corps") mechanical and civil engineer who revealed the inadequate state of New Orleans' floodwater pumps built by the Corps after Hurricane Katrina. The disclosures, which both the Department of Defense Inspector General’s (DoDIG) office and the Corps fought for years, showcase how New Orleans residents are still in great danger if flooding occurs again. (Also captured vividly in the film The Big Uneasy.)
As the OSC told President Obama in 2009:
There appears to be little logical justification for: (1) restricting the emergency pumping capability . . . to only the untested hydraulic pump systems, (2) not requiring the installation of a reliable pumping system which would adequately protect New Orleans, (3) spending hundreds of millions of dollars to install forty MWI hydraulic pumps which are scheduled to be replaced at a cost of $430 million within 3-5 years. . .
(MWI is owned by J. David Eller, once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps.)
As with so many things done for so much money in the name of "disaster preparedness," we see once again how these measures have done a lot to enrich contractors and not enough to keep people safe.
In February 2011, Garzino wrote a letter to President Obama detailing how the Corps knowingly installed equipment that cannot adequately protect the city of New Orleans from flooding; duplicated work that cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars; and deliberately deceived Congress as to the nature of and reason for this work.
At Isaac lumbers toward New Orleans, officials are making confident statements on the city's ability to bear up. As Mayor Mitchell Landrieu said,
We know now, based on the latest information, which is always subject to change, that we are going to have a hurricane that is going to hit New Orleans . . . [T]here's nothing this storm will bring us that we are not capable of handling.
I HOPE HE IS RIGHT.
After Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, the Corps made deceptive and dangerous public pronouncements that pumps had been battle-tested. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel hired an independent expert to evaluate the pumping system, and the expert criticized this assertion because it fails to mention that the pumps were run at low operating speeds and pressures, intermittently, and for short periods during the hurricanes. The Special Counsel’s report and the "black box" information showed that the hydraulic pumps were not utilized when canal water levels were highest at the beginning of each storm, not allowed to run at full operating speeds and pressures, and not allowed to run for extended periods of time. Instead, they were relegated to an "also pumped" status that was then turned into a straw man for hydraulic pump performance that was offered up to the highest levels of the Army Corps.
This information lies buried many clicks deep on the Office of Special Counsel website. I think the roughly 311,800 people currently living in New Orleans deserve to know if "fixes" still pose a danger while they are being told to "shelter in place."