With the 2006 hurricane season just a few months away, the raw memories of Hurricane Katrina and other history-making hurricanes of the past few years surely have those living in states bordering the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean biting their nails.Hurricane Katrina–one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States–was the mother of all stormwater events, putting most areas of New Orleans under a significant amount of water as levees meant to hold back the water broke, allowing it to engulf the city.
“This is a natural disaster like none we have seen before,” EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson told reporters more than two months after the event. “While I understand there’s been a lot of speculation of what could have been or what people might have thought, what we have been continually reporting on is what we know.”
The agency’s massive response effort–coordinated with the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LADEQ), and other state and local agencies–involved ongoing water, air, and soil sampling to test the consequences of the weather event, including monitoring five major oil spills.
Early and extensive sampling efforts showed floodwaters testing for excessive quantities of bacteria, lead, and a variety of other materials. The agency focused on five National Priorities List hazardous-waste sites in the New Orleans area. While chemical concentrations were detected in the water samples at one site, they did not exceed the region’s screening levels for tap water. At another site, four metals were detected in water samples, but no contamination was found in private wells.
Katrina proved a major catastrophe with far-reaching consequences in the loss of life and infrastructure. Agencies addressed the challenge through an extensive pumping effort, however, drying the city and bringing water quality to reasonable levels within two months.
“While it was a huge stormwater event, it ended up–with all the testing so far–not having a tremendous impact on our lakes,” says Jean Kelly, an information officer with the LADEQ. Kelly notes that subsequent testing shows Lake Pontchartrain, into which most of the water was pumped, has “recovered beautifully.”
From public to private firms, those involved say they learned many lessons from the massive weather event, though two months after it Jan Cedars, an environmental scientist supervisor in the Permits Division of the LADEQ, noted, “We’re still shaking our heads, trying to figure out what the heck happened.”
The destruction still registered as “incomprehensible” as the city was just beginning its rebuilding efforts, including getting rid of more than 300,000 vehicles, trying to decide what to do with residences that had been completely destroyed, and removing other trash from the city. Noting that it would take quite a bit of time to get the job done, Cedars says part of the effort focused on area stormwater managers checking the condition of outfalls. She expects “huge” drainage problems as stormwater managers move to find the outfalls and clear them of everything from refrigerators to cars.
“If we have to rebuild, we will rebuild with the thought of things we’ve seen that might help us–heaven forbid–the next time this happens in applying some of the newer stormwater knowledge we’ve learned,” Cedars says. “But for now, we are learning our lessons, assessing everything.”
A vice president in the New Orleans office of MWH Global, whose Broomfield, CO–based environmental engineering firm has been doing work in New Orleans, Martin Dorward says one of the lessons emanating from Katrina is the need to develop a system that eliminates the “complicated bureaucracy process for getting early decisions and emergency response from housing to utility improvements to security.
“There has to be a methodology set up so people can respond quickly, and that is a lesson everyone is learning from the top down,” he adds.
Chris Brantley, a biologist with the New Orleans District of the US Army Corps of Engineers, says Katrina provided real-time lessons for the agencies involved, but ones for which the corps had done its homework. “We were prepared for it from an environmental standpoint,” he says. “We knew exactly what we needed to do as soon as the data came in as far as what kind of bacteria we were dealing with and how we needed to proceed.
“As far as industrial, chemical, or even medical waste, we probably would have dealt with it in a different fashion,” Brantley continues. “A lot of the people who worked on this didn’t panic–they just went about the business of how we had to deal with the water.”
A History of Flooding
It’s part of New Orleans’s DNA, it seems: The early inhabitants of the city, settled by the French in 1718, could not uncommonly be found wading and rowing through the main business street, flooded with up to 3 feet of water from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain for as long as a week after a moderate weather event.
Such events were often documented in late-1800s newspaper illustrations, and the history is recounted on the city’s Sewerage and Water Board Web site (www.sbnola.org). At the turn of the 20th century, New Orleans addressed the problem by constructing a water treatment distribution system and a sanitary sewerage system.
The Web site also proudly points out the city’s accomplishments since those times, including a 1973 honor bestowed by the Louisiana Engineering Society naming the city’s water, drainage, and sewerage systems among the 10 most outstanding engineering achievements in the state.
Government officials, cognizant of the city’s precarious position below sea level, have attempted to address the challenges such a location presents. In 1997, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans entered a cooperative agreement for urban drainage improvements.
The board sought to comply with EPA mandates and avoid fines by seeking millions of dollars in revenue to repair and upgrade the sewerage collection and drainage systems as part of a matching-funds agreement with the federal government.
Then Hurricane Katrina came calling on August 29. And despite all of the best-laid plans and the work toward meeting the goals of those plans, government agencies went from a proactive to a reactive mode for this history-making event.
Pumping the massive amounts of water out of New Orleans was among the first priorities in the aftermath. Under normal conditions, there are 22 drainage pumping stations in New Orleans. There also are several underpass stations, each with two or three pumps. Brantley says some are subsurface pumps and some are sea-level surface pumps that pump into the drainage canal. He describes New Orleans as a big bowl with higher-elevation areas on the outside so water runs toward the center.
Pumping stations situated in areas near the center take the water after it collects into the subsurface pumps and pump it into largely underground drainage pipes toward outlying pumping stations. Thus, water might pass through a series of two or three pumping stations before it actually gets out of the city, depending on where the water is, Brantley says. The water is then pumped from the outlying drainage pumping stations out of the city either into Lake Pontchartrain or to some of the marshes to the east. Rainwater is pumped into Lake Pontchartrain, except for that pumped from four stations into the Intracoastal Waterway or the Industrial Canal.
The system’s pumping capacity is more than 29 billion gallons a day, with a flow rate of 45,000 cubic feet per second.
“During a flood, there are often rumors and reports to the Sewerage and Water Board and media that pumps or entire pumping stations are out of service for any one of a variety of reasons,” the board posts on its Web site. “In fact, this is an extremely rare occurrence.”
After Hurricane Katrina, however, “The pumping stations were under water to a large degree, and that not only puts them out of commission for that period of time, but it damaged all the motor and electrical components, and everything had to be refurbished. That’s why it took several weeks to get things working,” Cedars says.
The Corps of Engineers used sorbent booms when it began pumping into Lake Pontchartrain to catch oils and other floatables, using screens to catch solids before they entered the lake.
Brantley was assigned to an EPA command center, typically established during disasters when the agency is called upon to collect, analyze, or interpret some of the environmental data. He worked in conjunction with the EPA to collaborate with those in the Army Corps of Engineers on where pumping should take place and which pumps should be activated or turned off.
Assessing Water Quality
An affiliated concern was the materials being pumped out. “Because all of the sewage treatment plants were down, we had fecal coliform, E. coli, household hazardous waste, oil, gasoline, bleach–we had everything you would expect with approximately 150,000 houses under water, as well as cars and boats,” says Kelly.
Cedars was uncertain what other kinds of waste–such as medical waste from submerged hospitals–was present in the runoff. “We’re so much in the infancy of this and there’s so much sludge that is going to have to be removed that we may find something like that, but at this point it hasn’t come up,” she says.
Officials kept a close eye on water quality throughout the aftermath. “There was a lot of sampling going on, and a lot of sampling continues,” says Cedars. “We were concerned, of course, about the constituents. There were reports of “˜toxic soup,’ but we didn’t find that in the data. We did not find high levels that would be of tremendous concern at any point.”
The LADEQ tested the outfalls on all of the pumps pumping into Lake Pontchartrain in order to assess the impact on the lake, finding “what you would expect to find in any water under the same circumstances,” Kelly says.
Cedars notes that early on in the testing, metals were found to such a concentration that one would not want to consume any of the water, but she adds that as time went on, the state was pleased to find few high levels of anything of great concern in the water.
Brantley says that to address the situation of extremely high bacteria levels found in New Orleans, the Corps of Engineers aerated the water as it was being pumped into Lake Pontchartrain to create conditions for beneficial organisms. Within a few weeks of the pumping, the waters in the lake were back to conditions acceptable for swimming, Brantley says.
Meanwhile, in another water-quality sampling, overall data collected by the EPA and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) showed that few water-quality criteria were exceeded.
“In areas where elevated contamination levels were found, the EPA and MDEQ will continue to evaluate the need for additional site-specific studies that determine if there is any further short-term environmental impact,” Johnson says.
The state had previous data with which to compare water quality before and after Hurricane Katrina, Cedars says. “There was a very close comparison done between what’s in normal stormwater in the past coming out of New Orleans and the water after the hurricane, and we were very relieved to find it wasn’t as bad as had been feared. There were fecals and a few other things, but there are always fecals in runoff, so we did have data to compare it to and were glad.”
Kelly echoes the findings that Lake Pontchartrain was not a “toxic soup.” “Fecal coliform and E. coli die very quickly when they get into a lake like that,” she notes. She says the state was fortunate to be able to pump to the lake, “because that’s a tidal lake, it’s an estuary, and it has a lot of room in it. It has fresh water coming in from the top, sea water coming in with some passes, and it works counterclockwise with a big mixing zone in the middle.”
MWH Global had been halfway through a $650 million contract with the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans to serve as program manager for the Sewer System Evaluation and Rehabilitation Program for the city’s aging sewer system. The contract was put on suspension, and MWH switched its efforts to working on a FEMA-funded project for the Sewerage and Water Board to assess the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the sanitary sewer system. The board is responsible for large drainage pipes and all of the drainage pumping stations.
MWH Global also is working for the city, whose Department of Public Works is responsible for the catch basins and stormwater collection pipes up to 36 inches in diameter.
The company spent a great deal of time clearing catch basins of debris. “When the city was flooded, there was a lot of mud and dirt that floated and then deposited into the storm drain system,” Dorward says, adding that after the company cleaned out a significant amount of debris from the catch basins, it began pipeline monitoring.
The sanitary system is driven largely by lift stations or pumping stations, and with many of them having been out of commission, the company was engaged in the task of getting them up and running. Employees found debris and pipeline damage–especially in house laterals–caused by uprooted trees.
“There are numerous areas of the city where there have been washouts of the area around the pipes and where the soil holding the pipes in place has been eroded, especially near the levee breaks,” Dorward notes.
Cleaning Up Oil Spills
Meanwhile, according to Brantley, there had been a number of oil spills on the portion of the Mississippi River south of New Orleans. “We tried to contain a lot of the oil or industrial waste until we could get recovery vehicles in there,” he says. “There were several pump stations there encountering oil. We had the engineers shut those off and try to put other pump stations online to draw the water away but leave the oil in place.”
One oil spill came from the Murphy Oil Refinery in Meraux. Some 25,000 barrels of crude oil spilled in a single square mile of St. Bernard Parish as a result of the hurricane. Two months after the spill, workers had recovered 18,000 barrels of oil and more than 36,000 tons of oiled soil, sediment, and debris.
“It took awhile before they could get the oil company and the first responders in there to clean up the oil because of the amount of water, but once those people came in, they were able to finish the cleanup by pumping the oil back into tankers so it could be recycled or disposed of,” Brantley says. Absorbent booms were placed in the area to contain the oil.
The EPA engaged in ongoing assessments of samples of the spill. A few months after the spill, its analyses showed that several samples exceeded screening levels for residential soil of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons and arsenic. Residents had been warned to avoid direct contact with the crude oil sediments. Some 1,700 residential properties were affected.
Lessons for the Future
The effort to dry out New Orleans involved help from throughout the world. Dorward notes that there were some Dutch and German maintenance firms assisting with the large drainage stations, setting up temporary pumping to assist in draining the city.
After the city was drained, the focus shifted to supplying water and sewer services. Both the sewage treatment and water treatment plants were left operational–despite some damage to the water treatment plant–and the subsequent job became mending the numerous breaks throughout the water system, which created the challenge of maintaining pressure in the outlying areas.
Dorward commended employees of the Sewerage and Water Board in playing a pivotal role in New Orleans’s rehabilitation. “Most of their employees lost everything as they lived within the city, and we worked side by side with Sewerage and Water Board employees who had no home and were living in temporary quarters,” he says.
The Katrina event was the most extensive in Brantley’s experience. “It was the largest we ever worked with in such a short period of time to get the water out,” he says. “I have some background in water and sewage treatment with using wetlands to assimilate wastewater, so we viewed it as a large wastewater treatment project. A lot of experience we used on wastewater plants went into how we dealt with this problem.”
Lessons learned from Katrina stem from the many challenges, one of which was determining who was going to foot the bill for cleanup. FEMA is the overriding agency, but the state was unsure what percentage of the cleanup the federal government would cover.
“Funding is going to be a big, big issue because the damage is so extensive,” Cedars says. “The state is probably going to have to absorb a lot of it. The EPA will have to absorb some of the cost, and it’s just an unimaginable amount of money to even get the infrastructure back where it needs to be. Without the infrastructure, we can’t rebuild the city. You’ve got to have drinking water, hospitals, and sewage treatment.”
Dorward agrees, noting his biggest challenge was working with the various levels of government trying to determine the what, how, and when of funding repairs and redevelopment.
Local entities are strapped for cash. Because of residents’ homes being destroyed, forcing them to leave the city, Dorward points out, “There’s no property taxes being paid, and sales tax revenue is almost completely off. From a water and sewer standpoint, when you don’t have people coming back, your revenue stream is cut off because your rates aren’t being paid.
“It’s difficult for these agencies to commit the large amounts of money that need to be spent on this recovery without being confident they will be able to pay the contractors doing the work,” he adds. “They are forced to rely on the federal government, through FEMA, to provide this funding.
“All of the work has to be related to the damage caused by Katrina. The issue as things go on is which work existed before the storm hit and which work existed after the storm hit. Whenever you involve multiple layers of bureaucracy, it’s going to take time, and time is not what anybody has when there are decisions that need to be made fast.”
Time was indeed a challenge for federal agencies involved in the effort, Brantley notes. He says the challenge for the Army Corps was trying to get all of the water out of the city as fast as possible.
“The engineers really worked hard to get these pumps online and get the water out of the city,” he says. “From a biologist’s standpoint, we had a number of environmental professionals who worked with those engineers to make sure there was no environmental impact. We tried to lessen the environmental impact, and we did a fairly good job at that. We were able to keep a lot of the debris in place with the various types of booms we used, and by putting the aerators in place, we alleviated some of the water-quality impacts that may have taken place with some of the industrial waste coming from other areas.”
Within weeks of the pump-out, environmental reports were positive–shrimping, crabbing, and fishing resumed, Brantley says. “That’s a reflection on how we handled the environmental part of this discharge,” he adds. “Two months after the event, the people were back out there, starting to make a living again or doing recreation.
“At the beginning of the event, there was talk of this “˜toxic soup,’ which didn’t play out. There wasn’t a whole lot there other than a lot of bacteria, and that just takes time and treatment of the water in the way we knew how to treat it. And now they are starting to see a lot of environmental improvements immediately instead of waiting for a year or two.”
Johnson says the EPA will continue to partner with state and local agencies in bringing New Orleans information about potential hazards during the recovery and repopulation process in the Gulf Coast region.
“There may be long-term effects of the hurricane; certainly additional data will be collected,” he says.
Two months into the recovery period, Johnson says that while there has been significant progress, there are still some “brick and mortar systems and wastewater treatments that are not fully operational,” and infrastructure is an issue the agency continues to address.
A major concern “is the sheer volume of debris and the nature of the debris, ranging from vegetation to hazardous waste,” says Johnson. He notes that while the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and state and local agencies “are making great progress, the sheer volume is still staggering and will take many months to deal with. That needs to be done in a healthy and environmentally responsible way. We are working collaboratively to help ensure that happens.”
From everything he has heard from the media, Dorward doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the levee repairs and the prospects of them holding up under future storms. “I have some concerns about the original design and the ability of the underlying soils to support the eye wall construction that was used in some of the wet areas,” he says. “I think that overall concern is causing pause in a lot of the redevelopment areas.
“I believe most people are willing to reinvest in New Orleans; however, they want assurance this reinvestment is not for naught come next hurricane season. There is a large debate going on about the cause of the levee breaks and what is necessary from a technical and funding perspective to make sure this doesn’t happen again. It only takes one storm to put us back where we are right now.”