With a 300-foot section of an earth-and-concrete levee on New Orleans' 17th Street Canal gushing water into Jefferson Parish yesterday, civil engineers and the Army Corps of Engineers faced the daunting task of stopping the leak, then cleaning up the water and the mess left behind.
Plans were to use a giant Chinook helicopter to drop rocks or containers filled with sand as a stopgap measure to close the levee break.
The federal government stood poised to bring in high-volume pumps to help drain the city, thousands of mobile homes to house its residents and front loaders and dump trucks to haul away mountains of debris to be buried or burned.
Even after the levee break is repaired, and the area is slowly pumped dry, property owners will face months of hardship trying to put things right again.
`Really horrible'
"I've seen some flood damage, and it's really horrible," said Steven L. Stockton, deputy director of civil works for the Corps of Engineers.
When the enormity of it all sinks in, the question might become whether enough was done to ensure the integrity of the 17th Street Canal levee, not to mention the 15,000 miles of levees elsewhere around the country, experts said.
"The infrastructure is aging," said Gerald E. Galloway, professor of civil engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. For seven years he was a member of the Mississippi River Commission, overseeing the Corps of Engineers' work on the lower part of the river.
`Wake-up time'
"I would guess in the next couple of months we're going to see rapidly increasing attention to the levee issue," Galloway said. "New Orleans says it's wake-up time."
But New Orleans was under water yesterday, and water from Lake Pontchartrain was still gushing through a breach in the 17th Street Canal levee about halfway between the historic French Quarter and the lake.
Homes and businesses in Jefferson Parish were inundated. But the Corps Engineers said the levee break does not threaten the entire city.
The city's levees, canals and pumps are divided into sectors that operate somewhat independently, "so if one floods, they don't all flood," said Edward J. Hecker, chief of the Corps of Engineers' homeland security office in Washington.
The break was not the "worst nightmare" many have feared. That would have been a break in the 27-foot levees that hold back the Mississippi, which flows by at a million cubic feet per second.
