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Katrina vs. Tsunami - I'm skeptical.

Pump failure answers...

RedNova
Some flood-control pumps were broken, choked by excess water or storm debris. Others were lacking power needed to run. Roofs were reported collapsed on at least two pumping stations. Without the pumps, much of the flood water will have nowhere to drain in this city cradled in a bowl, an average of 6 feet below sea level.
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Well, they started pumping earlier today and have already made a bit of progress.

I wonder about the logic of these pumps if they don't have their own reliable power source and more secure buildings. They are critical items, after all.

It just seems like the most basic common sense that you will have mains power failures around the time you need these pumps, so you have to have alternate power for them.

Incidentally, you have to be careful not to pump the water out too fast or you can cause levee failure all over again.
 
Well, that's good news, at any rate. Regarding the pumps - I couldn't find any specific details on them, but I believe CNN said they were designed and built many years ago - and by many, I mean over 50.

But like I said, I can't find anything to prove/disprove that.
 
You have to pump the water out slowly enough to give the saturated levees time to drain. If you go too fast, you will have a very weak saturated levee trying to hold back the water.

I hope that politics does not trump safety.
 
Sorry, I wasn't challenging your point about pumping speed - the way I wrote my post, I can see where the confusion came from. :)

I was speaking about my comment concerning the age of the pumping system and how I couldn't find any proof regarding it. The "at any rate" was just a phrase I used thoughtlessly.

Ack! :)
 
Beady said:
My immediate reaction when hearing this was, "So what?" The German navy learned how to operate diesels underwater in WW2; the technology is 60+ years old.

Am I missing something?
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Well, the "combustion" part of an internal combusion engine tends to require oxygen and warm enough temperature, both of which are quite difficult to provide if the engine is sitting underwater.

Those German diesels were inside dry submarines and got their oxygen from above surface via a schnorkel.
 
BTW, I was just browsing the NY Times Online to see what was going on in New Orleans, and this quote caught my eye -

"President Bush and Congressional leaders vowed today to find out what went wrong in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina."

Anyone know anything about that? If true, it clearly indicates an awareness that the Feds fell down on the job.
 
I suspect that the inquiry will actually be an overall inquiry of what went wrong and that the federal line may be a bit of NYT spin.

Of course, it's logical that the federal government would investigate their own response and not the state response, so the title could simply be misleading/incomplete.
 
As far as a comparison between the tsunami and Katrina, there are some differences. What happened in the tsunami is similar to what occured on the Mississippi coast....a mass of water quickly submerging an area and then retreating. This unfortunately took a lot of lives. At the same time, especially with the tsunami, it also eases rescue operations when most of those in the disaster area are killed.

In New Orleans, the water rose slowly and has only started to go down now that the pumps are operating again. This is different even from river flooding in that the latter will crest and then subside. The situation gradually improves whereas in New Orleans it did not really begin until there was human intervention. In addition, the water in New Orleans is stagnant and has quickly become polluted whereas river flooding is fluid and on the move and not usually as easily contaminated. This makes even touching the water now a dangerous situation, both for those in need of rescue and for rescuers.

It's striking how different the challenges are in the two states. And the rescue operation in Louisiana is still ongoing since many were able to escape drowning from the slower water rise...however this also slows relief/rescue operations given the sheer number of rescues that are being done. Recovery in the Mississippi coast, while slow, seems to be going better than in Louisiana.
 
LW said:
Those German diesels were inside dry submarines and got their oxygen from above surface via a schnorkel.
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Precisely. We're talking no more than 20 feet or so of water, so the maximum pressure is going to be negligible. It ought to be possible to build waterproof casings around the engines and fit them with snorkels (schnorkels). For that matter, why can't the pumping stations themselves be made watertight?
 
Blondin said:
I remember reading that in 1975 when cyclone Tracy wiped out the city of Darwin, Australia, three days went by before the rest of the country even realized what had happened. Everybody knew the storm was coming and they knew when it hit but they must have assumed that no news was good news. Nobody reckoned on there being no infrastructure or communications with which to call for help.
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Absolutely not true at all. Cyclone Tracy was well anticipated and Darwin was battoned down for the blow well in advance. It just happened, like Katrina, to be far stronger than the usual tropical storms that regularly come through the area. Further, all of Australia was well aware of the situation before, during and after Tracy. What took some effort was getting external aid into the city afterwards (Darwin is a fairly remote city), and even that was under 24 hours later.

Personally, I experienced a tropical cyclone when I was younger (Althea, 1971), and it's very VERY scary.


[edit:spel]
 
Incidentally, the OP stole my point I made in a few other threads on this subject!


quote:
Originally posted by dharlow
At the same time, especially with the tsunami, it also eases rescue operations when most of those in the disaster area are killed.
That situation didn't happen everywhere, just on the few coastal regions of Sumatra nearest the epicentre. While over 200,000 people died due to the tsunami and its after-effects, the area is one of the most populous on Earth - millions more people are still suffering post-tsunami deprivation.
 
LTC8K6 said:
You have to pump the water out slowly enough to give the saturated levees time to drain. If you go too fast, you will have a very weak saturated levee trying to hold back the water.

I hope that politics does not trump safety.
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This is true for earthen levees. I think most of New Orleans' levees are concrete. Still have to worry about the earth underneath and the weight of the water pushing water under the levees.

Remember these aren't levees like in normal towns that are used only during high water. NO is below sea level and below the lake level and below the river level -- the levees are continually in use just holding back the normal water.
 
Zep said:
Absolutely not true at all. Cyclone Tracy was well anticipated and Darwin was battoned down for the blow well in advance. It just happened, like Katrina, to be far stronger than the usual tropical storms that regularly come through the area. Further, all of Australia was well aware of the situation before, during and after Tracy. What took some effort was getting external aid into the city afterwards (Darwin is a fairly remote city), and even that was under 24 hours later.
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Thanks for the clarification, Zep. I guess I was quoting an unreliable source.
 
dharlow said:
In addition, the water in New Orleans is stagnant and has quickly become polluted whereas river flooding is fluid and on the move and not usually as easily contaminated.
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Depends on your definition of "easily" I guess. In the 1993 floods of the mississippi & missouri rivers the river very quickly became contaminated by ferterlizers from fields it went through and the many sewage treatment plants it overran. During high waters many sewage plants begin dumping raw sewage in the rivers as part of the plan to save the plant.

The water was around for several weeks (I was on levee watch on the Kansas river which feeds in to the Missouri, and the town I lived in across the state line was flooded, although my house wasn't) and once out of the river bed it was stagnant.

http://www.nwrfc.noaa.gov/floods/papers/oh_2/great.htm
 
I think in evaluating the response you have to look at not just what the timeline of events were, but at historical precedent as well.

For example, mandatory evacuations was ordered for the 28th. But Americans have a hard time with mandatory anything. Is there a historical precedent for a local (or state, or federal) gov't making transportation available to those that can't come up with their own way of evacuating a city? What about those that still refuse to leave? Can they be arrested and forced to evacuate?

Where can a local gov't take these evacuees? They can't force other locations to take them, the state gov't could help relocate them but would Texas have opened the Astrodome BEFORE the hurricane if asked?

I think where the local government failed was in a) listening to it's own engineers about the dangers of what was coming (the mandatory evacuation order exempts hotel workers and patrons -- that tells me they didn't think this was going to be very bad), b) screaming louder for help in providing a way out of the city for people that wanted to leave but couldn't because of no money, no car, etc....

even if the local gov't had accomplished b I think there would've been LOTS of people in NO. I think the whole city had blinders on to the dangers.

These failures take us up to the hurricane itself and the levees breaking. Once that happened the failures fall on the state and federal gov'ts. and it's pretty damn clear that if these levees had been blown up by terrorist bombs instead of a hurricane -- our federal government would still fail to rise to even the level of accomplishment we saw at 9/11.
 
Beady said:
Precisely. We're talking no more than 20 feet or so of water, so the maximum pressure is going to be negligible. It ought to be possible to build waterproof casings around the engines and fit them with snorkels (schnorkels).
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Your "so what?" reaction makes me suppose that you think that these waterproof casings could be built right now{/i], after the diesel engines got submerged in the water.

The problem here is that you just can't chuck a diesel engine into water, raise it up, and turn it on without exepecting problems. Well, it might work but it is more likely that something has gone wrong.

Whenever the WWII German submariners managed to flood their engine compartment, they had to spend a couple of hours of maintenance before they got the diesels back in working order. [Events like this are frequently mentioned in German submariner memoirs.]
 
Beady said:
Precisely. We're talking no more than 20 feet or so of water, so the maximum pressure is going to be negligible. It ought to be possible to build waterproof casings around the engines and fit them with snorkels (schnorkels). For that matter, why can't the pumping stations themselves be made watertight?
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If your pump station is behind the levee, and underwater, any water you pump back over the levee will probably just come right back in -- kind of pointless.

The would be better off strengthing the levee walls than making water proof pumps.

From what i've read most of the pumps are located 5 ft above sea level and shouldn't be underwater. From what I'm reading in news reports they've got some of the original pumps running, additional temporary pumps flown or flying in, and the status of the remaining pumps (about 150) is unknown. I'm not seeing any reports of pumps underwater.
 
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