Levee repair work has yet to begin

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

Federal engineers said Wednesday that water from Lake Pontchartrain has stopped pouring into New Orleans over hurricane-damaged levees but acknowledged nothing has been done so far to fill the mammoth breaches.

And, while insisting they are not acting in desperation, they announced plans to intentionally breach other levees in the city to drain some of the floodwaters.

In an afternoon conference call, a half-dozen officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provided the first official damage assessments and repair plans since the levees ruptured under the massive storm surge from Katrina.

“At this point in time, we believe that the flow into the city is not happening,” said Walter Baumy Jr., the Corps’ chief engineer for the New Orleans district. Observations earlier Wednesday found Pontchartrain to be about 3.2 feet above sea level and receding toward its normal 1.5 feet above sea level, Baumy said, equalizing pressure between the lake and the flooded tracts of the city, much of which lies below sea level.

That marked a great improvement over the previous 24 hours when the lake crested some feet higher and dumped millions of gallons over the 25-year-old levee at 17^th Street and other flood walls, inundating dozens of neighborhoods after residents thought they had escaped the worst of Katrina’s fury.

But Baumy and his colleagues acknowledged, despite media reports to the contrary, that not a single shovel of sand or other fill material had yet been dumped into the 17^th Street breach.

Greg Breerwood, a Corps deputy district engineer from New Orleans, said officials were hoping repair work would begin later Wednesday with Army Chinook helicopters dropping 15,000-pound bags of sand into the 300-foot wide break in the levee. “We have a few of them on the ground now, trying to get them hooked up to the bags,” Breerwood said.

About 200 bags already had been filled with “sand, gravel, pea gravel, anything we can grab,” Baumy said. “We’ll just continue to drop bags as long as it takes.”

Helicopters provide access
Helicopters were to be used because the site can’t be reached by land or barge.

“We have not done this before,” Breerwood said. “We are looking at any option available to stop this breach. Our goal is just to get as much into the breach as fast as possible.”

Ironically, as they were plotting to repair the 17^th Street levee and more breaches to the east, Corp officials were saying that they’d need to intentionally rupture levees elsewhere in the New Orleans area to drain water behind them that is standing higher than lake level.

“Three obvious areas need to be breached in my opinion,” Baumy said, in Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. He said heavy equipment would be used to create 100- to 200-foot wide gaps in levees in those areas, let the water out and then restore them.

But there was no timetable on when that work would begin. “We have to get a contractor on board for that,” Baumy said, or find available military or Corps resources. “Whatever we can get there quickest.”

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