Corps Cutting It Close at Floodgates this Year
May 23rd, 2008 by LokiOnce more HumidCity is proud to syndicate the emails of engineer Matt McBride, the man who formerly helmed Fix The Pumps. He is one of our best voices for New Orleans.
Dear New Orleanians,
Last week, the Corps held a public hurricane readiness exercise under the rubric of a simulated storm called “Hurricane Zeus.”
There wasn’t a lot of press attention to it, and the even the Corps hasn’t put out a press release detailing how the exercise went.
However, the Baton Rouge Advocate wrote an article about it.
In there is this paragraph:
“Ray Newman in the operations division of the corps’ New Orleans District said a hydraulic winch system lowers the gates. A backup system for the hydraulic winches and redundant electrical systems ensure continued operation, he said.”
That backup system is a crane to lower and lift the individual gate segments at each floodgate structure. Cranes were used exclusively to lower and lift the gates during the 2006 hurricane season, before the hydraulic winches were installed. A picture of a typical crane is attached.
There’s nothing wrong with using cranes. They are slower than the automatic system, and they generally can’t operate in particularly high winds, but as a backup system, they work fine.
The problem is you have to actually have them at the site. It seems the Corps doesn’t, and is scrambling just days before hurricane season starts to rectify the situation. Read the rest of this entry »
