Axodys

I was just poking around the “Army Corps of Engineers website”:http://www.usace.army.mil/ and I found the following (and apparently recent) FAQ on unwatering New Orleans in Word format. I’m reprinting it here so that it will be more accessible and in a web friendly format.

*Q. How long will it take to get the water out of New Orleans?*

A. We are unsure. A number of factors play into this. First, Lake Pontchartrain is at roughly 4.5 feet above sea level and falling. The city is at a lower elevation so water will continue to flow into it until it equalizes.

Once the breach on the 7th Street Canal is closed, Pump Station 6 can pump 10,000 cubic feet per second.

Once the breaches are closed and all of the pumps are running, the pumps can lower the water level 1/2 inch per hour or about a foot per day. We can get the water level to sea level in four and a half days. The 1/2 inch rate assumes the late is at normal levels. That would create pumping inefficiency, as could trash in drains and canals that feed into the pump stations.

That‚Äôs a “Best Case” scenario. We don‚Äôt know the conditions of all of the pumps. Fortunately most of the pump motors and controllers are at an elevation greater than 5 feet and we hope they weren‚Äôt submerged. There could be other unforeseen problems.

We assume the pumps have not been submerged since most pumps are at an elevation greater than five feet above sea level.

Pumps are operated and maintained by the local sewage and drainage districts.

*Q. Why did the levees fail?*

A. What failed were actually floodwalls, not levees. This was caused by overtopping which caused scouring, or an eating away of the earthen support, which then basically undermined the wall.

These walls and levees were designed to withstand a fast moving category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a strong 4 at landfall, and conditions exceeded the design.

*Q. How many other areas do you need to get water out of?*

A. There are at least five ringed levees (areas surrounded by levees) that need to be emptied. New Orleans and Jefferson; New Orleans to Venice (Hurricane Protection project - Port Sulfur to Venice, LA); Chalmette Loop (lower 9th ward of Orleans Parish and Urbanized part of St. Bernard Parrish ); and, Plaquemines Parish non-federal levees have also been overtopped.

*Q. What will be done to unwater these areas?*

A. The unwatering plan will be used in these areas as well. Crews and equipment will be mobilized to breach the levees at predetermined locations and allow for gravity drainage into Lake Bourgne or other surrounding water bodies.

I just noticed that “http://www.spaceimaging.com/”:http://spaceimaging.com currently has images from August 30 in Mobile, Alabama on their front page (but nothing yet from New Orleans). You can zoom in on the image and move around so I was able to locate and clearly see the bridge where the oil drilling platform floated under it. I’m not familiar enough with Mobile to immediately spot any other effects from Kantrina with just a quick scan of the images. Let me know if there’s anything significant that I missed.

Rob Kline has asked that I point people towards “katrinahelp.info”:http://katrinahelp.info a collaborative Wiki that has been setup to get people information and assistance in dealing with Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. According to the site:

bq. This page is intended to be modeled on the excellent tsunami wiki site that was created around December 26, 2004. Please take a look at the work done there. I am also looking for people to take blog postings and classify them properly on this wiki.

If you’re web savvy and interested in helping out, this looks like a great way to help out from afar.

New Orleans isn’t out of the woods yet by any means, but it looks like the strange course change that Katrina made shortly before making landfall prevented the predicted worst case scenarios from happening. Here are a few different links with more up to date information:

The SuperDome roof didn’t hold up too well as “Wonkin’ in Detroit shows”:http://raywert.blogspot.com/2005/08/superdome-not-so-super.html.

New Orleans Metroblogging has the “best coverage of damage and flooding”:http://neworleans.metblogs.com/archives/2005/08/how_do_you_not.phtml in the various parishes in and around New Orleans.

“Flickr”:http://flickr.com has a “Hurricane Katrina Photo Group”:http://www.flickr.com/groups/45871688@N00/

“Josh Britton”:http://www.joshbritton.com/ has also been doing a ton of posting on Hurricane Katrina (although he just lost power).

“This guy”:paul2.net is running a “photolog”: http://paul2.net/?cat=5 on the hurricane and he’s doing it via cellphone, car battery power and a free dialup AOL account.

And of course “brendanloy.com”:http://brendanloy.com still has a ton of good information as well.

Was anyone else irritated that the bulk of President Bush’s speech was about the Iraqi constitutional process? I walked in on the speech after he was already going on about the situation in Iraq and sat there watching in disbelief until Mary told me that he had actually talked about Hurricane Katrina in the first part. To me it’s completely ridiculous that he spent one iota of time discussing the situation in Iraq when New Orleans is about to get wiped out.

The country and economy that are President Bush’s primary responsibility are about to take a hit that could approach 100 billion dollars by some accounts. Something like a third of the nation’s oil processing infrastructure is going to be affected by this hurricane. This is not just a problem for the people of the Gulf Coast in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. This is a situation that we’re all going to feel the effects of for a long time and it’s extremely disappointing to me that he spent time defending his pet project in Iraq in the face of a looming disaster on U.S. soil.

*Update:* I definitely wasn’t off base. “The Lumberyard”:http://thelumberyard.blogspot.com/2005/08/bush-is-completely-out-of-touch.html did the math and here are the stats:

bq. Entire speech: 1022 words total
Katrina: 203 words
Iraq: 819 words
That’s right, a Category 5 hurricane is poised to hit one of America’s largest cities, and the president only spends exactly 20 percent of his speech on this issue, and 80 percent on Iraq.

I just came across “brendanloy.com”:http://brendanloy.com in my referer logs and it has some really good in depth coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Brendan has put together a ton of highly informative links on possible outcomes and has been beating the evacuation drum since yesterday. I wish that Mayor Nagins had taken things as seriously as Brendan has been because it’s looking really bad at this point. There are going to be a lot of people stranded and the projections for devastation are unbelievable if the worst case scenario comes to pass.

I’ve started looking for weblog posts by various New Orleans and Louisiana residents to get more of a firsthand perspective on the approaching hurricane. Here’s what I’ve been able to come up with so far.

“Electric Mist”:http://www.electricmist.net/archives/001626.html who is located in Baton Rouge comments:

bq. The traffic coming out of New Orleans is insane. No one can find a hotel between here and Houston, and I’ve been told that it’s also pretty booked as far away as Dallas. There’s a lot of advice being bandied about on TV about it being better to head north or east, but the path of the hurricane is going to be north-east when it hits land. At the best, if you can get far enough away, you’re only going to have heavy rains, but if you’re east, you’ll have that a lot longer than those in the west. Hence, most people head west.

The pictures I saw on “cnn”:cnn.com showed a virtual traffic jam on the interstate heading out of New Orleans. I read an estimate somewhere that a complete evacuation of New Orleans would require 72 hours so a lot of people are still going to have to ride this one out.

“Yaddoshi”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/yaddoshi/18693.html seems to think that everyone is taking things too far:

bq. My stance is the same as usual - everyone is overreacting as usual, thanks to the news and the human sheep mentality I watch and am forced to interact with on a daily basis… People are putting plywood on the outside of their windows as usual (morons) and a number of businesses are already shut down.

It will be interesting to see if he has the same attitude a few days from now. It seems to me that it’s better to be over prepared than under prepared.

“Richard at New Orleans Metroblogs”:http://neworleans.metblogs.com/archives/2005/08/katrina_and_her.phtml echoes this sentiment:

bq. Dear Evacuation Monkeys: This one is different. You officially have my permission to freak out.

Brendan83 (who might actually be a classmate of my friend Steve’s since he’s also going to medical school in New Orleans) “writes”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/brendon83/2567.html:

bq. Katrina will probably be a category 3 or 4 when it hits, but we will be long gone before then. I have spent most of today picking up anything that could potentially blow or float away in the yard, helping my dad load his work machinery onto his trailer, and packing up everything that is valuable to me into a small duffel bag and a box. Everything else, its fate lies with the hurricane.

“Michael Homan”:http://michaelhoman.blogspot.com/2005/08/hurricane-katrina.html is going to be sticking it out:

bq. Hurricane Katrina has her eyes set, seemingly, on my fair city of New Orleans. Therese and the kids are either heading to Jacksonville or Purvis Mississippi at 4 AM Sunday morning. Me, the dogs, and various other critters are battin’ down the hatches.

Hopefully he and everyone else staying put will pull through.

*Update 8/30/05:* Rob Kline has asked that I point people towards “katrinahelp.info”:http://katrinahelp.info a collaborative Wiki that has been setup to get people information and assistance in dealing with Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

I “discovered”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/27/tropical.weather/index.html this morning that Hurricane Katrina is going to pass very close to (if not directly over) New Orleans on Monday. While this is pretty big news in and of itself, it especially hits home for me because my good friend Steve Wilhelm and his family just moved down there so that he can attend medical school at nearby Tulane University. I was able to get in touch with Steve this morning via instant messenger and he was already making arrangements to evacuate if necessary. I asked him what the weather was like there at the moment and he said it was a perfectly normal 90° summer day. Just another reason to be thankful for modern weather tracking technology that can give people time to avoid major catastophes like this.

Speaking of weather tracking technology, this “Google Map Plot of Hurricane Katrina”:http://compooter.org/sandbox/code/google/hurricane/atlantic/?year=2005&storm=katrina I just found over at “digg.com”:http://digg.com/science/Google_Map_Plot_of_Hurricane_Katrina definitely suggests that evacuation is going to be the prudent course at the moment. My thoughts and prayers definitely go out to Steve and the all other the people in Mississippi and Louisiana who are going to face the effects of Katrina.

It’s been a long time since I’ve shopped at the “Boeing Surplus Store”:http://www.boeing.com/assocproducts/surplus/index.html, but a “recent post on Cool Tools”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/ jogged my memory. If you like to fiddle around with old computers and electronic equipment it’s definitely a cool place to visit once in a while. Back when I lived in Seattle for a couple months in the late 90s I ran down to Kent a few times and bought a couple used large screen monitors there for a fraction of their original price. If I still lived in that part of the state I’d probably visit at least once a month to see if there were any cool deals. There’s a lot of stuff that could best be classified as junk, but it’s cool junk and there’s usually some good stuff mixed in as well.

Applelinks has some “interesting news related to the new Google Talk and SIPphone”:http://www.applelinks.com/p5/index.php/more/shareware_beat32/#3 (a company with a product similar to Skype only based on the open SIP protocol).

bq. SIPphone has also agreed to expand their network by linking with the newly launched Google Talk network. Gizmo Project and Google Talk users will be able to exchange instant messages and voice calls among each other in future versions. “Our goal is to link the entire world into one giant free dialing directory and joining forces with Google is a great step in that direction,” said SIPphone CEO Michael Robertson. “Gizmo Project users can now call more than two dozen voice networks and 150,000 University phones using GUPS, which makes us the largest SIP based network in the world.”

This is especially good news for Macintosh Users since there is already a free downloadable “SIP”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol client available at “gizmoproject.com”:http://www.gizmoproject.com/.

I think a Google/SIPphone combination is going to be a pretty serious competitor for “Skype”:http://skype.com since their approach is based on a non-proprietary standard. I found a post with some “good comparsion information”:http://www.randomthink.net/archives/2005/07/08/skype-vs-gizmo-project/ between the two services at “randomthink.net”:http://www.randomthink.net.