The Oil Drum

17 comments on Pictures from the Lower 9th Ward

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Heading Out on January 1, 2006 - 4:21pm

The damage in the lower Ninth Ward was caused in large measure, by the wall of water that came from the industrial canal when this barge went through the floodwall.

Notice that as the floodwater level dropped, the barge sat down on the bus. You can see the damage effect on the floodwall from the way in which the steel piling that formed the wall has been flattened and pushed out into the Ninth Ward. (The original position is where the white stone levee has been placed to the left of the picture). We drove from that wall directly away from it and found that houses were moved off their foundations for more than ten blocks.

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Stuart Staniford on January 1, 2006 - 5:19pm

HO:

My understanding from Zoe is that there's three breaches in the levees into the lower 9th. One is clearly caused by the barge (of which she has amazing pictures of the crushed houses under the other side of it from where it looks like you took your shot), but the reasons for the other two are unclear (at least to her). Some activists she spoke to expressed conspiracy theories that the levees were deliberately breached with explosives as a preemptive measure to drain water away from the business center of NO. Did you see any other breaches, or check for them?

More cheerfully, we were in the French quarter this afternoon, which is pretty much business as usual - even more so than the garden district - 90%+ of businesses open. I'll add some pictures from it as an update to this story after I get home (we're about to leave for the airport).

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Heading Out on January 1, 2006 - 7:24pm

The team I was on visited all the breaches in NOLA and a fair number of those down the delta. In most cases it was clear that the walls were first overtopped (as they were by the barge) this softened the ground and the pressure then pushed the pilings over - because of time I was only at the barge failure on the Industrial Canal, and at the 17th Street failure (shown here), before most of the wall was covered with the new temporary levee.

This latter was still leaking a fair amount of water while we were there, and is the one where there was dredging on the canal side before the Hurricane.

You had better luck with food than we did, in the French Quarter they had only enough electricity to either wash the dishes or keep the beer cold - guess what?