Abstract
Even Before Katrina’s floodwaters had drained away, the investigations had begun. One of the patterns to emerge from those investigations is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continues to disagree, strongly, with the critics of MRGO—meaning that the agency’s officials, at least, would almost certainly disagree with almost everything in this chapter. In the interest of fairness, accordingly, we will turn first to the official views of the Corps before summarizing the ways in which independent experts—and affected citizens—view the relevant evidence.
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These calculations can quickly get technical, but the basics are quite straightforward. A reasonable estimate is that the cross-sectional area for this Reach of the canal (the “opening size” of the garden hose) was roughly 575 by 36 feet, or an area of 20,700 square feet. By contrast, a canal with the dimensions of the rest of the GIWW—12 feet by 150 feet—would offer a cross-sectional area of 1,800 square feet, or less than one-tenth as large. To come up with final estimates, the relevant experts will eventually need to factor in the loss of the “friction” from the area’s wetlands and cypress swamps that were healthy before the construction of MRGO, consider the volumes of water flowing above rather than “in” the canals, and factor in the physical fact that an opening of 20,000 square feet can carry more than ten times as much volume as one of 1,800, because the ratio of “side friction” to flow decreases as the “hose” gets larger. For those who are not interested in such technicalities, the key point is that a much larger canal can deliver far more water, and do so at a much higher speed.
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© 2009 William R. Freudenburg, Robert B. Gramling, Shirley B. Laska and Kai T. Erikson
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Freudenburg, W.R., Gramling, R., Laska, S., Erikson, K.T. (2009). The Loss of Natural Defenses. In: Catastrophe in the Making. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-156-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-156-6_7
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
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