|

Advocate staff photo by Travis Spradling   New Orleans residents Jude Hamilton and Catherine Bastian walk down the hurricane protection levee on the lakefront in New Orleans. The levee is designed to protect the city from a Category III hurricane, with winds of 111-130 miles per hour. If a larger hurricane hit the city from the right direction, it could push Lake Pontchartrain over the levee and into the city, most of which is below sea level. The LSU Hurricane Center is leading a $3.5 million, five-year study to look at how the city and other areas could recover from such a catastrophic flood. Hurricane season begins June 1.

Imagine what a disaster it would be if a hurricane-driven storm surge up to 20 feet high swept into New Orleans or another Louisiana coastal city.

That's exactly the type of thing a team of Louisiana scientists will be thinking about over the next few years. Their task is to come up with such scenarios and try to figure out both what would happen and how best to recover.

The Louisiana Board of Regents recently approved a $3.7 million grant for the five-year study. The money comes from the state's share of the national tobacco lawsuit settlement.

Ivor van Heeden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, will head the effort.

The coastal wetlands that protect New Orleans and other coastal cities in Louisiana are shrinking, making people more vulnerable to hurricanes.

Even a slow-moving category 3 hurricane, which has sustained winds of 111-130 miles per hour, could flood New Orleans, van Heerden said.

"If you flood it completely, you are going to have 13 to 17 feet of water in the city. That forces people to get up on their roofs," van Heerden said. "There would be upwards of 400,000 people trapped because a large number will not evacuate, a large number don't own motor vehicles, some are disabled or street people."

One idea on how to rescue those people is what van Heerden and his associates call "Operation Dunkirk." Private boats from the North Shore would be used to reach people in New Orleans, van Heerden said.

The name comes from the World World II evacuation of Dunkirk, where a flotilla of private boats shuttled across the English Channel to rescue Allied troops who were trapped by the Germans in France.

Van Heerden said authorities would obviously use helicopters too, but noted that an inundated New Orleans "would stress every resource we've got."

The health of people stranded on their roofs would also be a concern.

"Typically, they don't take clothing, food, water and, particularly, medicines," he said.

Getting the stranded people out of the city would be just one of many difficult aspects of post-storm recovery. Pumping all the water out of New Orleans, most of which lies below sea level, could take up to nine weeks, he said.

"The flood waters are going to contain a myriad of chemicals, in additional to animal corpses -- be they wild animals or pets -- or even human," he said.

"We could have fairly large and widespread disease outbreaks, and not just one disease," he said.

Dengue fever, West Nile or some other type of encephalitis and cholera are just a few of the potential illnesses, van Heerden said.

Houston's experience with Tropical Storm Allison last year showed buildings would have to be decontaminated, a time-consuming task, he said.

"Maybe we will have 700,000 people homeless," he said. "We will have to build tent cities. Where are we going to build them? When you concentrate people like that, the disease potential goes up enormously. ... This would be a catastrophe, a national catastrophe, and the economic impact would probably exceed $50 billion."

To answer such questions, scientists will create computer programs that help them sharpen planning. The grant will pull together engineers, computer experts, public health workers, veterinarians and other scientists.

The goal is to recommend what steps should be taken to recover from a major flood. While some results should be available within two years, the project will run for five.

In the fourth year, the LSU Hurricane Center plans to host an international conference on the public health impact of big floods.

"This whole concept has generated enormous interest outside the state of Louisiana," van Heerden said. "The value of this is beyond flooding. You can look not only at natural disasters, but also man-made disasters and terrorism. We are basically developing models on how to deal with a large disaster."

And with hurricane season starting June 1, such a disaster could happen in several months.

New Orleans has already had one close call.

In 1998, Hurricane Georges was on what forecasters call the "critical path," pushing water into the Lake Pontchartrain basin and eventually over the tops of the hurricane protection levees.

Evacuees endured trips of 10 or more hours to get from New Orleans to Baton Rouge.

Luckily, Georges didn't wreak the havoc forecasters feared. It weakened on the approach to land and veered into the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

But the near miss wasn't dismissed by disaster planners, who realized there were few blueprints on how to best react to such a storm. Georges was the inspiration behind the grant, van Heerden said.

Top of page