Federal, state and local officials broke ground July 26 on a levee project along the western shores of Lake Pontchartrain. It's designed to provide hurricane and storm protection to a three-parish area where 60,000 people have little to no defenses in place.
Plans are moving ahead this week for two massive projects that would deliver 100-year flood protection for the lower Mississippi Valley. The question is whether the money and political will exists for the two protection systems to materialize.
Even though flood water has fallen to levels that make some bridges and channel roads passable in the tiny island town of Kaskaskia, Ill., local officials still don't have a good idea of how much damage more than three months of being submerged has done.
New Orleans is facing the biggest test of its post-Katrina hurricane protection system as the region is bracing for up to 20 inches of rain from Barry.
In your story on the Permanent Canal Closures and Pumps project in New
Orleans (ENR 5/9 p. 24), with regard to the severity of Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge in Lake Pontchartrain, wave heights were typically similar to those assumed for the design of the structures (IPET, vol. 1, p. 2).
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has declared 17 levee systems in the California Central Valley—about 180 miles' worth— ineligible for federal rehabilitation assistance should they be damaged in a flood.
With financing agreed between Israel and one of its largest corporations, preliminary planning has begun on an estimated $600-million project to build what could be one of the world's longest conveyors.