Seeker Blog

But the ultimate message is likely to be that despite the billions of dollars being spent to improve hurricane protection for New Orleans, it remains a city in the cross hairs for dangerous storms. Dr. Daniel, the University of Texas at Dallas president, said, “It doesn’t take a sophisticated risk analysis tool to say it’s a risky place.”

The NY Times surveys the New Orleans Corps of Engineers risk studies:

The answer is complex, and a wary city has been waiting to hear it. After the New Orleans hurricane protection system failed under the onslaught of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Army Corps of Engineers rethought the way it assesses hurricane risk. It devised new, flexible computer models and ran countless simulations on Defense Department supercomputers to help it understand what kind of storms the region can expect, how the current protection system might perform against them, and what defenses will be needed in the future.

…The new methods employed by the corps have already been adopted by the other government agencies most interested in hurricanes and flooding: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which runs the National Flood Insurance Program and will use the data in its flood maps.

It is the first time all three agencies have agreed on a common method of assessing such risks for the Gulf Coast. Eventually, Dr. Link suggested, it may be used by all of them nationwide.

The corps has all but completed the initial work of patching the damage done to the network of levees, floodwalls, gates and pumps. But as some work continues, there has been a lull in moving on to the next major step: raising the level of protection to meet the challenge of a 100-year storm, the kind of hurricane that might have a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year.

The new report will provide the estimates of the kind of storms that could be expected at intervals of up to 500 years, and the damage and flooding they can be expected to produce. And it will help to develop proposals for protection systems against the strongest storms. The report is an important prelude to the design process.

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This looks like good work — appreciating that the scientific and technical challenges are staggering. Hopefully the consumers of the study product will understand just how fuzzy are the model conclusions.

Glenn has comments and links to Lou Dolinar’s excellent survey of the tragically incompetent press coverage of Katrina. Glenn wrote:

CAN SCIENCE OUTWIT STORMS LIKE KATRINA? Sure. But it can’t do much about human corruption and stupidity, which alas were the real problems…

The corruption and stupidity accounted for 98% of errors in the early days of the post-Katrina response. But the problem would have been relatively small if the levee system had not failed.