Keith Magill houmatoday.com 7 Jun 09
U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu just got back from the Netherlands with a familiar message: Louisiana ought to model its hurricane protection efforts after theirs.
“The Dutch are teaching us that we do not have to retreat from the water,” Landrieu told The Courier in a story published Saturday. “They are taking land back from the water.”
It’s the same message Landrieu and others returned with after their first trip to the European nation, whose flood-protection system is considered by many to be the best in the world.
But a story published in December by Wired magazine indicates that incorporating the Netherlands’ aggressive, and expensive, fight against the sea will not be done easily here in Louisiana or anywhere in America.
The Dec. 22 story, written by David Wolman, is called “Before the Levees Break: A Plan to Save the Netherlands.” Here are some of the lessons I gleaned from it, along with some of my own observations:
n The Netherlands spends a massive percentage of its resources — 65 percent of its gross domestic product — on flood protection. This unprecedented dedication to controlling the North Sea, which now costs the country $450 billion a year, came after a 1953 flood that killed more than 1,800 people and inundated much of the nation, threatening to wipe it out of existence.
I’d like to see it happen, but can’t imagine the United States, or even Louisiana putting that much of its resources into saving the state’s coast. Louisiana might not need that much of any investment to save its coastal communities from inundation. But it will take federal money, and though billions in oil revenue are on their way, almost everyone acknowledges that it won’t be enough.
n The technology the Dutch use to prevent flooding makes our levees look like children’s mud pies. Check this column online for a link that will let you see for yourself.
As Landrieu noted, the Dutch protect against a flood that has a statistical change of occurring once every 10,000 years. In Louisiana, we’d be happy with levees that protected us against a 100-year flood.
Statisticians say that over the course of a 30-year mortgage, the chance of a 100-year flood hitting your home is more than 25 percent, Wired reports.
We need to think bigger.
n So, why don’t we just do what the Dutch do? As Wired notes, the obstacles are formidable.
Mathijs Van Ledden, a Dutch engineer, has run wave and water models for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help determine the necessary height of new defenses in New Orleans. He told Wired that 1,000-year protection is economically justifiable in some areas.
And that leads to perhaps the biggest obstacle of all — it’s not cost effective to save everyone. We’ve learned that here, as local advocates and politicians seek to justify the federal investment it will take to save us by citing the billions of dollars worth of oil and gas and fish we produce for the nation, as well as the more than 2 million people who live and work along Louisiana’s coast. Those pleas, as we know, continue to go nowhere in Washington.
“American politicians could never get away with basing flood barrier specs on the value of what sits behind them,” Wired writes. “Ratcheting up defense levels in New Orleans to match those in the Netherlands would lead other areas of the Gulf Coast to demand equal treatment. And what about earthquake zones in California, floodplains in Iowa and Missouri, or blizzard territory in New England? Should similar standards be applied there?”
The problem is already being exacerbated as residents in communities across the U.S. coast have begun paying the same skyrocketing prices to insure their homes and businesses against hurricanes and floods that we do. Add the specter of global warming and rising sea levels, and you have hundreds of communities, some of them major metropolises, competing for money to save themselves. Who do you think will win?
“Van Ledden says many Dutch citizens may not know it, but their government has accepted — even legislated — unequal protection, or what engineers euphemistically call ‘differentiation,’ ” Wired wrote. “Everyone knows that all places can’t be protected up to the same standard; individual cost must be balanced against collective cost, he says.
“The U.S. certainly has variable protection levels throughout the country, but there’s a difference between de facto disparity and an explicit government policy of inequality. Imagine if Congress or the Army Corps were to recommend protecting the French Quarter and downtown New Orleans at the 10,000-year level while giving less economically productive areas such as St. Bernard Parish only a 100-year level of protection. Applying the Dutch model of risk-based design would be a political nonstarter, if not unconstitutional, and the efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers would in no time be halted by an army of lawyers.”
Replace “St. Bernard” in the above paragraph with “Terrebonne” or “Lafourche,” and you start to get the picture.
