Green Articles
Coastal work to begin within 2 years
By Lee Zurik : WWL Eyewitness News : February 15, 2008
Friday morning, the Army Corps of Engineers released how high it will raise the areas defenses against storm surge. By the afternoon, Eyewitness News learned when the levees would be raised.
Over the next three years, the Corps will raise more than a hundred miles of levees in southeast Louisiana. Along the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and southern New Orleans East, the levees could be raised as much as 11-feet higher.
“The project life is a 50-year design life,” Mike Stark, with the Corps, said.
The Corps briefed Eyewitness News on its massive plan to raise the area’s levees, a play they said requires the Corps to design levees to a 10-year-storm level until 2057.
After completion in three years, the project might require some repair work. The Corp’s figuring they might need to re-raise some levees three to four times over 50 years.
“Earthen levees do offer the possibility of coming back in and adding material to those levees to accommodate the settlement of the material,” Stark said.
But the Corps said until 2057, that repair work might not be needed if Louisiana’s coast is properly restored. That’s because a stronger coast will reduce the strength of storm surge on the levees.
In other words, a levee that needs to be 29-feet high now to reach a 100-year level wouldn’t need to be that high with a restored coast.
“There's no doubt that there's a symbiotic relationship between coastal restoration and hurricane protection,” Garrett Graves said.
Graves is Gov. Bobby Jindal’s new Director of Coast Affairs. After years of dedicating only $25 million a year to coastal work, he said the state and federal government will soon make a significant investment.
“My estimation is in the next 4-5 years, we are going to move forward on $18-20 billion on coastal and hurricane restoration projects in the state of Louisiana,” Graves said.
Graves said right now, the state is trying to prioritize the projects. Within two months, they hope to identify four to five in particular.
Among the possibilities – redirecting the lower part of the Mississippi River to create new land, and also building a pipeline to deliver the river’s sediment to other part of the southeast Louisiana.
“We are going to see massive projects start moving forward within the next one to two years,” Graves said.
Louisianans hope those projects begin soon enough in a state that experts said might have less than 10 years left before erosion of the coast becomes irreversible.
Graves said the state also could move forward on some projects without the Corps and could fund that work with money from the offshore oil and gas royalties the state will soon receive.