Upgraded metro New Orleans levees will greatly reduce flooding
Replica Bags Metro New Orleans approaches the busiest period of the 2013 hurricane season with the best flood control system of purse replica handbags any coastal community in the Wholesale Replica Bags United States: A $14.5 billion network of levees, floodwalls and pumps that nearly eliminates flooding for most so called 100 year Wholesale Replica Bags events and substantially reduces flooding from much larger hurricanes. Replica Bags
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KnockOff Handbags Key engineers involved replica bags in the design of the improved levee system have good replica handbags china and even better news: Replica Designer Handbags The massive system offers near complete protection from flooding from so called 100 year storm surge event, one with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. Army replica handbags online Corps of Engineers. KnockOff Handbags
Yet Replica Bags Wholesale corps and emergency preparedness officials high quality replica handbags are discouraging complacency. They renewed their warnings that levee improvements are replica handbags online aimed at protecting property and not people. Damage from winds could cut off electricity for days, and a worst case hurricane could still cause significant flooding, making the area inside the new levee system uninhabitable for days.
Replica Designer Handbags “Make sure you listen to local officials,” said Pat Santos, deputy director of the Governor’s replica handbags china Office of Homeland Security and Fake Designer Bags Emergency Preparedness. “If they issue replica Purse an evacuation recommendation, please heed that advice and leave. Don’t be a statistic; be a survivor.” Replica Designer Handbags
replica Purse Today’s levee system is a far cry from the cheap replica handbags flawed structures that failed during Hurricane Katrina, devastating much of the region and killing hundreds of people. The new Replica Bags system was designed using better engineering, more advanced computer modeling and better construction materials. Just as important, it was designed to be a true system, and not just a system in name only as its predecessor. replica Purse
wholesale replica designer handbags As a result, engineers said the improvements in the last eight years provide state of the art protection to east bank segments of New Orleans and St. Charles, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes and to West Bank segments of Jefferson, northern Plaquemines and eastern St. Charles parishes and all of Algiers. wholesale replica designer handbags
Replica Bags Wholesale The results are obvious in much better protection, reflected on a map produced by the corps to assess the risk of flooding inside the new levee system from a suite of 500 year surge events. Replica Bags Wholesale
According to the map, most property inside the cheap replica handbags levees would remain dry or see minor flooding, even if half the interior pumping stations failed. Most remaining floodwaters within the levee system Replica Handbags would reach Fake Handbags less than 2 feet deep.
By contrast, vast areas of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish Replica Bags were submerged under 8 feet of water or more after Katrina.
Some problem areas still remain, however. Pumping systems across the metro area will still be unable to keep up with the rainfall delivered by a 500 year storm, which could be more than 13 inches in 24 hours. That’s the amount of rain in the New Orleans area by an average 100 year rain only event.
Some locations could also see limited levee overtopping, including areas just south of the natural levee of the Mississippi River in English Turn and Algiers, replica handbags online which could flood from overtopping of the river levees by surge traveling upriver. Hurricane levees in parts of St. Charles Parish could also see overtopping.
Traditional low spots in New Orleans also are likely to see some flooding from rain, including Broadmoor and the Lower 9th Ward. On the West Bank, the risk map indicates areas just north of a new levee segment adjacent to Lake Cataouatche, mostly farmland, could see significant flooding. Even in those areas, most locations would see much less than 8 feet of water, dramatically less than the 10 feet to 20 feet that occurred during Katrina in parts Replica Bags of the metro area.
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Designer Replica Bags Lewis “Ed” Link Jr., a University https://www.whhandbags.com of Maryland senior research engineering professor, also warned that there’s still a chance that the unexpected or unknown could increase the potential for flooding. Designer Replica Bags
replica handbags china “There’s still replica handbags china a chance we haven’t considered all possible sources of uncertainty, and that means there’s still a chance of being surprised,” Link said. “The chance is much lower than it used to be, but we’re never going to grow out Fake Designer Bags of it. We have to continue to be aware that risk cheap replica handbags remains.” replica handbags china
high quality replica handbags To understand how metro New Orleans’ flood control system was transformed after Katrina requires comparing how engineers designed levees before and after the 2005 storm, said Link. high quality replica handbags
Wholesale Replica Bags A former director of research and development for the corps, Link chaired the corps sponsored Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force that conducted a two year forensic evaluation of how and why levees and floodwalls failed during Katrina. The task force used those lessons to assist the corps in developing new rules for building levees in the New Orleans area and nationwide. Wholesale Replica Bags
Designer Fake Bags The design of levees starts with assumptions about the kinds of replica handbags china hurricanes they will be built to withstand. For the pre Katrina levees, the corps used a so called “standard project hurricane,” one that engineers felt had a reasonable possibility of occurring. Such a storm had a specific set of features: the low pressure in its center, the storm’s forward speed, and how far maximum winds KnockOff Handbags extended from Replica Bags Wholesale the storm’s center. Designer Fake Bags
Fake Designer Bags It’s low Replica Designer Handbags pressure in a hurricane’s central area that “pulls” Gulf water upwards, and the storm’s forward speed combined with the high winds closest to its center that create a water bulge known as storm surge. Fake Designer Bags
replica handbags online Using that simple set of numbers, engineers determined the height of surge and waves such a storm would bring to any given levee segment from a few basic directions: south to north, southeast to northwest or southwest to northeast. replica handbags online
Replica Handbags The engineers used Replica Handbags conservative measures to make up for the simplified equation, adding a foot or two of height to levees and walls as “freeboard.” They also designed the model storm as a 200 year or 300 year event, based on their understanding of hurricanes in the late 1950s, which also resulted in higher levees to block the higher surges. Replica Handbags
Handbags Replica But that equation KnockOff Handbags was based largely on storms that preceded the large, Category 3 Hurricane Betsy, which caused major flooding in New Orleans in 1965. The equation used also came before the compact, but extremely strong Category 5 Hurricane Camille devastated parts of Plaquemines Parish and the Mississippi coast in 1969. Handbags Replica
Engineers adjusted most Replica Designer Handbags levee heights in the New Orleans system to take into account Betsy’s unprecedented surge. However, they were not Replica Designer Handbags adjusted for Camille’s even greater surge heights in Mississippi, the Link led forensic study and congressional replica handbags online investigations found.
After Katrina, the engineering community abandoned the standard project hurricane idea as outdated.
Modeling storms, from 25 year events to 5,000 year monsters
cheap replica handbags In place of the Designer Fake Bags old standard, engineers combined modern meteorological understanding of the potential for hurricanes to occur in the Gulf with sophisticated risk based computer modeling. Instead of just looking at past hurricanes, designers created a computerized sample of 152 possible storms. They ranged from relatively common 25 year to 30 year events, to those believed able to occur less than once Designer Replica Bags in 5,000 years, such as a monster storm replica handbags china that hit Bangladesh in 1970, killing more than 300,000. cheap replica handbags
Fake Handbags Using the same supercomputers used by the Army to run the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the engineers designing New Orleans’ new levees tested each storm along a wide variety of paths, at different forward speeds and accompanied by varying amounts of rainfall. They added in the effects of waves accompanying the surge. As a result, more than 62,000 model runs were used to develop the overhauled levee system. That meant that a larger hurricane will likely cause some overtopping, but the levees, floodwalls and other structures were supposed to remain in place Fake Handbags.