Perspective - Colonel Lewis F. Setliff III

Thursday, June 14 2007

Commander/District Engineer, St. Louis District
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and became one of the largest natural disasters in the history of the United States. It resulted in more than 1,800 deaths and more than $150 billion in damages. Katrina’s storm surge measured up to 30 feet along the Mississippi coast, with winds at 127 miles per hour when it made landfall in Louisiana. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans was under water. In the aftermath of Katrina, Colonel Lewis F. Setliff III of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was selected to command Task Force Guardian, the team responsible for restoring New Orleans’ flood and hurricane protection system to its pre-storm levels before the 2006 hurricane season began.

In the following perspective, Colonel Setliff describes the challenges his team — and local contractors — faced in accomplishing their almost impossible goal of providing a measurably stronger level of protection to the city of New Orleans in a compressed time frame. (Colonel Setliff originally prepared this account of the restoration project for SolidWorks World 2007 in February in New Orleans.)

I want to emphasize two things. The first is to appreciate the scale and magnitude of the engineering effort that was required after Hurricane Katrina. It was an effort that rivaled the building of the Panama Canal. Second is to appreciate the strategic significance of the engineering work we were trying to do.

Before Katrina, there already were three strikes against the City of New Orleans. Strike one: it is a city surrounded by water. You have Lake Pontchartrain to the north, Lake Warren to the northeast, and the Gulf of Mexico to the east, west, and south. Strike two is the topography of the city. The predominant portions of the metropolitan area reside below sea level. Think about that: you’re surrounded by water and your city is predominantly below sea level. Strike three is the fact that the soils around New Orleans, unlike any other city in the country, are very different and that means the city sinks — it subsides at a rate of feet over decades, not inches over centuries. You have a city surrounded by water that is predominantly below sea level that sinks. Not a very good situation.

So what happened? Two very large storms, Katrina and Rita, were brewing in the Gulf of Mexico at Category 5. Some people said that when it hit the mainland, Katrina was only a Category 3. But these storms spent a significant amount of time in the Gulf of Mexico increasing in energy. What did the damage? Water. The storms pushed a tremendous amount of water onto the Gulf Coast, including Mississippi.

Hurricane Katrina was not the “perfect storm.” It actually hit to the east of New Orleans. But the momentum and inertia of the water that was generated by the energy of the storm pushed a tremendous storm surge against the Gulf Coast, specifically in New Orleans. Three weeks later, another Category 5 was in the Gulf and went to the west of New Orleans. Generally speaking, it didn’t do much damage because of the tremendous amount of damage Katrina had already done. Rita came through and basically poured salt in the wounds of an already catastrophically impacted city.

Maximum flooding depths ranged from 8 to 15 feet over entire neighborhoods. Eighty percent of the city was under water, and it wasn’t under water for hours, or even days. It was under water for weeks in the middle of summer in 100° temperatures. You can imagine what that would do to your infrastructure. It was absolutely catastrophic, and I’m not sure even that word explains what happened. The economic damages were substantial. It’s hard to imagine what those numbers were. The infrastructure damage alone was more than $75 billion dollars, with hundreds of billions of dollars in economic loss.