“With New Orleans in ruins, hydrological engineers are looking to new technologies to bolster aging earthen levee systems,” Defense Tech pal John Gartner reports in today’s Wired News.
The Army is currently testing products that can temporarily raise the height of levees to determine if they can be assembled faster than the usual defense of filling and stacking sandbags.
The Rapid Deployment Flood Wall from Geocell Systems is a series of interlocking sections of plastic that are filled at the scene with sand or soil and can be layered as high as necessary.
The Hesco wall is a metal basket with fabric sides that is filled with soil. Hesco walls can be folded flat for easy shipment, according to Hesco Bastion director of operations Jared Lyons, who said his products are being used to protect against floodwaters in Texas and Florida.
The Portadam system is a series of metal rods that are bolted together and do not have to be filled with soil…
But so far, at least, the problem of holding back floodwaters has progressed little beyond the ancient and time-consuming technique of piling on more dirt.
THERE’S MORE: “It occurred to me that there might be a way to use superabsorbent polymers to form self-building flood protection barriers or to slow the flow through a breach,” says reader KP, a CalTech Ph.D. candidate in engineering. “Sure enough, a quick search reveals a couple of solutions already out there.”
http://www.finetech.bz/pages/4/page4.html?refresh=1092815632729
http://www.protectionconnect.com/sandless.html
As best I can tell the mechanism of swelling is osmotic pressure, so these bags would not perform as well for seawater as they would for fresh water. Also, its not clear how well the bag contents would resist deformation due to water pressure. Neverthless, reducing the mass logistics of a flood wall by a factor 10,100, or 1000 is a big deal, and I expect that an imaginative individual could find a way to make it work.
How much of the flooding problem was caused by the Corps past attempt at flood control and easing navigation difficulties on the Mississippi River? I’m remembering the recent decision to go back into Florida and re-do a lot of the past flood control work to stop all of the problems that their past work caused. Like straigntening the rivers , etc. Someone once said that the biggest thing the Corps ever built was itself(Along with pork from Congress)!
I watched not too long ago on National Geographic Television about the Dikes in the Neitherlands. And they have highways going across the large bodies of water and they can control the dames and dikes to eliminate the flooding. Why don’t we learn from them?
Well, how much of New Orleans will need to be rebuilt and how much is safe as-is? Another option, though most likely not the cheapest, would be to just scrap the whole city and raise it above sea-level. Then you wouldn’t have to worry so much about the water pouring in because the city wouldn’t be lower. Just a thought.
I agree, maybe the whole city should be flooded & rebuilt 100 miles north & the new body of water named Lake New Orleans.
OR move suburbs to the N,NE,NW from the dwtn area & the leave the rest as a Flood Plain.
Hell, theyre tearing down the Superdome alone.
80% of the homes are ruined IE to be bulldozed anyway.
OR build a huge dike levee wall from the MS River to the S,SE,SW of city spaces & remove floodwaters alone.
Install better pumps & turbine drives.
Do it on a computer map of the City spaces.
Use CAD CAM.
Relocate the French Qtr to Baton Rogue???
Shereveport?
Bigger French Qtr??
Build a channel to the west to TX for TX crops from NO area alone.
Yeah, but they don’t have to deal with hurricanes in Holland. I imagine it makes there work a little easier.
I read about the interlocking systems that are filled with dirt,sand etc. I would think that time is a factor when you are setting these systems up and putting in sand and dirt would would be time consuming. First you have to have the manpower to bring in the sand or whatever. Then you have to have the manpower to fill the containers. I would think that if you had containers that only needed to be filled with water would be better and quicker. I would think that when a section of the levee fails something that is similar to a barge could be brought in and sunk in place would help plug the breach faster than so many sand bags, but what do I know.
This is not the fault of the corp of Eng. Those guys are top shelf and when it comes down to it they never do anything that they are not asked to do by the civilian govt.
As to New Orleans and other flood planes. I see no reason for the average person to be allowed to live and work in a flood plane. There are businesses (Agro, ports, pertoleum and gas storage and piping center) that are always going to need to be in flood planes, but schools, homes, malls, govt. builds, stadiums, etc are just silly. If people for the most part did not live in the flood planes then most of this problem would not exist.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the advanced levee systems in Amsterdam and London, unless you’re a civil engineer and want the hard math. Noah linked to this article a few days ago.
With a price tag of $8 billion over 25 years, though, I’m afraid that Congressional amd political machinery that cut out preventative levee work in the first place are going to mean that we shall pay any price and bear any burden for such a system, as long as it isn’t too expensive or too difficult.
Its allways the price tag? We will rebuild so we can have people come in as tourist again wich is starting! The Shuttle will go up again so we can watch that, Be glad that we cannot change the weather the way wede like.And most off all no more wars!!
In an article about Shell’s oil shale experiments the technique they used to prevent the contaminated waters from the extraction process from leaking into the water table was to freeze the walls of the chambers (ice is impermeable to water turns out, so long as it stays frozen).
This has me thinking that a possible fast temporary levee breach patch could be done using refrigeration units to create a temporary ice dam that could withhold the constant erosion of the water pressure so long as you keep it frozen.
There are probably physical limitations I haven’t considered as to why that method hasn’t been tried, or maybe someone who knows something can tell me why this would or wouldn’t be possible.
I was schocked to see the New Orleans Levees on CNN.
In Holland the most populated land lies till 30 feet below sea-level. After severe storms in 1953 many levees (dijken) blow away. Many people drowned. We decided to rebuild the levees and put all the knowledge we had in our levees. Millions of people would be drowned now if the levees would break. From the moment I saw your New Orleans levees it was clear to me that they never could withstand the water. You can’t let people live behind such levees. I don’t know if there is enough knowledge about levees in the United States, if not, I would immediatly contact the Dutch authorities to see what they could do for you.
Half a million people behind such levees is a criminal act.
how old is the oldest part of the levee system in new orleans?
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