Assailing a recent floodgate proposal as an "atom bomb" that would waste millions already spent on safe houses, Jefferson Parish leaders criticized the Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday for unveiling the idea for overhauling the West Bank's hurricane protection system on the eve of constructing a key piece of it.
Corps representatives told the Parish Council that they're considering a second sector gate and new pumping station south of the confluence of the Harvey and Algiers canals as a cheaper alternative to erecting a floodwall and raising more than 40 miles of levees to protect against 100-year hurricanes.
Council members and Parish President Aaron Broussard said the corps' concept surprised them when they read about it in the newspaper Saturday, especially given their expectation that construction would start in January on a long-awaited floodwall east of the Harvey Canal.
"Contrary to everything you had said publicly, that felt like an atom bomb," Broussard told corps representatives. "We had no answers, because we weren't part of that process."
Project manager Julie Vignes said the corps wasn't scrapping the Harvey Canal sector gate just south of Lapalco Boulevard that the corps had hoped to finish three months ago. She announced a new target of July, a month into the 2007 hurricane season, for the control structure designed to stop surges midway up the industrial waterway.
But what riled the Jefferson leaders most was Vignes' acknowledgment that the corps might not construct a floodwall protecting the canal's vulnerable southeast banks to the currently planned 16-foot elevation, even though engineers have spent months drawing those designs. She said they might decide that shorter walls reaching to 10- to 11-foot elevation would suffice as interim protection if the corps follows through with a southern sector gate across the Bayou aux Carps swamp.
Either way, the corps will miss the floodwall's long-touted deadline of September 2007 by at least nine months. Vignes said the taller wall would likely take until June 2008 to complete, while a shorter wall would start several months later to account for retooling the plans but would require less construction time.
Councilman Chris Roberts seized on the uncertainty to theorize that the corps would hoodwink more than 250,000 vulnerable residents by building the shorter wall only to tell them years later that it doesn't have the money or clearance from Congress to build the southern sector gate.
Roberts also pressed Vignes to explain how the proposal would affect several West Bank pumping stations that dump rainwater into the canals. When faced with objections to the placement of the Lapalco Boulevard sector gate earlier this year, the corps shot down the suggestion by saying floodgates farther south would cut off the parish's drainage system.
Vignes said plans for the southern sector gate across the Intracoastal Waterway along the Jefferson-Plaquemines parish line would include one or several pumping stations with capacity of 18,000 cubic feet per second, cfs . She said the corps might pull off the massive undertaking in three to five years.
Roberts doubted her projection, saying it took Jefferson five years just to construct the Whitney-Barataria pump station, which handles 3,000 cfs. He added that a major drainage overhaul would render useless several of the parish's brand-new safe houses designed to keep workers at the pump stations during hurricanes.
"Once that sector gate is built, we could go tear down our safe houses, because they'll never be used. Ever," he said at the same meeting the council formally accepted completion of two of the 10 shelters. "I just wish there would have been more planning and this would have been a discussion we would have had 12 months ago and not today -- which, once again, is in the last inning of the game, when we were supposed to turn the first shovel in January."
Lt. Col. Murray Starkel said he and Col. Richard Wagenaar, commander of the corps' New Orleans district, had tasked their West Bank team with exploring the alternatives once they found major impediments to raising levees on the Algiers Canal -- including relocating as many as 60 homes and 20 business and major work on the Belle Chasse tunnel before it would support higher levees nearby.
Starkel repeatedly apologized for miscommunication between the corps and the Jefferson politicians, though he added that the team floated the concept of the southern sector gate during at least one meeting with them.
"We'll try to work more closely with you," he said.
But Council Chairman John Young lit into his comments. He said any mention of the concept was cast as a far-off solution to possible Category 5 protection that would have no bearing on the ongoing Harvey Canal projects.
Young said he remembers spending 20 to 30 minutes during his most recent conversation with the corps asking for an updated timeline on the floodwall, but the project managers never let on that they were considering a major departure from those plans.
"Never was it ever mentioned that we were going to do this sector gate in lieu of the Harvey floodwall," Young said. "We have consistently been told that by the corps and we have consistently carried that message. . . . We seem to have a failure to communicate."
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Meghan Gordon can be reached at mgordon@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3785.