CNN featured Levees.org's nomination of levee breach sites for national historic recognition

The story was featured all day today on National and International News.

We believe CNN’s Joe Sutton did a good job.

But we note with interest that many readers left comments complaining of the expense to taxpayers for recognizing the worst civil engineering disaster in U.S. history.

In fact, Levees.org absorbs the great lion’s share of the expense in preparing the 39-page documentation.

A small share of taxpayer funding would include a Louisiana expert panel which voted against Levees.org’s nomination in November 2011. Some of the members were “uncomfortable” with the nomination because it faulted the Army Corps of Engineers for the levee failures.

UPDATE: Today, January 30th, the Corps of Engineers’ Federal Preservation Officer has finally confirmed receipt of our Levee Breaches nomination at the Pentagon, which FEDEX records show was received on December 30th, a month ago. One may ask does it take almost a month for mail arriving at the Pentagon to finally make it to the appropriate person’s desk?

Be that as it may, the FPO has confirmed receipt at 10:07 a.m. January 13, 2012. Under regulation 36 CFR 60, the FPO has sixty days to respond, or not.

Click here for the CNN article by Joe Sutton.

Red indicates predicted land change along the Louisiana coast over the next 50 years if we do nothing. Photo/CPRA

Lindy Boggs Conference Center Auditorium
2045 Lakeshore Drive, New Orleans, LA
1-5:30 Tour Master Plan
5:30 – 7:30 Public Hearings

Everyone should review the draft blueprint. Stop by between 1:00-5:30pm to explore the exhibits in the open house and learn about project selection, flooding risks, how Louisiana’s landscape is changing, and more. You can tell them your thoughts about the draft plan any time during the day or stay for the public hearing starting at 5:30p.

The final version of the plan will be submitted to the Louisiana legislature on March 26, 2012 for vote.

Sad mementos at base of Historic Plaque at 17th Street Canal breach site. Photo/Roy Arrigo

This misinformation, promulgated by senior corps officials, and printed in major media from 2005 – 2007 was unsupported by data (e.g. memos, circulars, legal briefs, letters, articles, meeting minutes, etc).

Levees.org has looked for five years for the supporting data and has not found it. At the date of this printing, the Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District, the folks with the most to gain from location of this data, also has been unable to locate it.

Furthermore, the Hurricane Protection Decision Chronology published in 2008 soundly refutes the baseless legend. The Chronology, a 333-page thoroughly researched technical document appears to be the “research of choice” for Ed Link, former director of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force who now is an engineering research professor at the University of Maryland. The Chronology also appears to be the preferred resource for Wayne Stroup, ERDC in Vicksburg for information relating to the Corps of Engineers’ decision to abandon peripheral barriers in favor of higher walls in the late 80s and early 90s.

So in closing, if you are looking for data pertaining to the catastrophic flooding of regional New Orleans during Katrina, we recommend the Chronology researched by water experts Douglas Woolley and Leonard Shabman and published in 2008.

Site of the 17th Street Canal breach before repair crews arrived. Photo credit unknown

A professional academic board in Louisiana recently voted against placing the sites of two catastrophic levee breaches in New Orleans during Katrina on the National Register of Historic Places.

Two-thirds of the 9-member board voted down the flood protection group Levees.org’s quest to list the breach of the 17^th Street Canal and the east side north breach site of the Industrial Canal to the prestigious Register.

The majority of the board members effectively signaled that they didn’t believe the sites of the worst civil engineering disaster in U.S. history were historic and thus deserving of being listed on the NRHP.

Some board members said they were ‘uncomfortable’ with the nomination text because it faulted the Army Corps of Engineers for the levee and floodwall failures.  Several members thought the text contained too much information.

“You have made this very difficult for us,” noted Board Chairwoman Glenna Kramer of Franklin.  “It’s so long and so complicated.”

Despite the Board vote, the State Historic Preservation Officer, Ms. Pam Breaux and her staff continues to support the eligibility of the two breach sites.

On December 29, Ms. Breaux confirmed to Levees.org that she has sent the 39-page nomination – along with her letter of support and other documents pertinent to the breach sites’ eligibility – to the Corps of Engineer’s Federal Preservation Officer in Washington, DC.  This is in accordance with regulations 36 CFR 60 which govern the National Register process.

“We believe the document to be procedurally and professionally correct,” stated Ms. Breaux in her cover letter to the FPO.

We are extremely pleased that Ms. Breaux and her staff believe in this important project which has broad support both in the state and nationally.

According to regulations, the corps’ Federal Preservation Officer, Mr. Terrence Salt has 60 days to respond with the federal agency’s position on the eligibility of the two levee breach sites.

To see who voted and their comments, click here for transcript of Louisiana Review Committee Meeting.

To see who submitted letters of support click here.

Stanford Rosenthal, third year student at Washington University in St. Louis

This is a guest post by Stanford Rosenthal, designer & developer for Levees.Org since 2005.

Levees.Org’s success would not be possible without online services such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, Paypal and Scribd. YouTube alone has allowed us to broadcast our message to nearly 400,000 viewers. These services have flourished amid a free and open Internet protected by a law called the DMCA. Each of the companies behind these services publicly opposes a bill called SOPA.

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill in Congress intended to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted material such as music and videos. However, the bill’s broad language poses a threat to the Internet as we know it. For the first time in history, the United States Federal Government will be able to dictate which websites you have access to. As a group of 83 engineers instrumental in creating the Internet put it in an open letter to Congress:

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

My mother and I are fully aware of how powerful organizations can violate our First Amendment rights. We believe that SOPA goes against the best interest of Levees.Org supporters, and we have already taken action by transferring one domain away from and canceling our automatic renewals on GoDaddy.com, a supporter of SOPA. Godaddy has since reversed its stance following customer outrage.

We encourage you to urge your members of Congress to vote against SOPA.

Universal flood symbol created by Stanford Rosenthal

A flood symbol created by Levees.org website designer Stanford Rosenthal is now a universal icon.

Chosen for its clarity, the symbol was created through Iconathon, an initiative to collaboratively design new civic symbols for the public domain.

The very first Iconathon took place in San Francisco and was focused on creating new public domain civic symbols for 311, or non-emergency city services.

Iconothon is a collaboration between Code for America and the Noun Project. In August and September 2011, a half dozen cities across the US participated in a series of design charrettes – day long collaborative workshops to create the symbols.

Click here for more about  Iconathon.

Levees.org founder Sandy Rosenthal. Photo/Craig Kraemer

The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mount Holyoke College President Lynn Pasquerella has invited Sandy Rosenthal founder of the flood protection advocacy group Levees.org to attend the launch of The Women in Public Service Project and Colloquium in Washington DC next month.

The 4-hour colloquium will take place at the U.S. Department of State on December 15, 2011 followed by lunch and a program at the John F. Kennedy Center to discuss how the legacy of leadership at Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Smith and Wellesley Colleges can inspire women in public service worldwide.

This initiative is aimed at preparing a new generation of women leaders from around the world for success in public service, politics, and government, and will host a series of training institutes starting this summer at Wellesley.

Women waiting for admittance at Dept of State program hosted by Hillary Clinton. Photo/Sandy Rosenthal

The Colloquium will be webcast between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. Eastern. To see the webcast, click here. For the full schedule for the webcast, click here.

With Lower Ninth Ward as backdrop, Levees.org announced its intention August 4, 2010 to list two major levee breach sites to National Register of Historic Places. Photo/Stanford Rosenthal

On Thursday at the Louisiana State Capitol, Levees.org will defend its quest to list two major levee breach sites to the National Register of Historic Places.

The group will state its case, again, before the Louisiana Advisory Board to nominate the breach site of the 17th Street Canal and the east side north breach of the Industrial Canal.

Levees.org will do a repeat performance after being wrongly tabled this past August when a Corps of Engineers representative showed up minutes before the quarterly meeting and announced the corps did not own the breach site of the Industrial Canal. Subsequent record checking showed that the corps did, in fact, own the site just as Levees.org’s attorneys had stated.

Where: Capitol Park Welcome Center, 702 North Third Street, Baton Rouge
When: November 17 at 1:30 p.m.

If the Advisory Committee approves the nomination, it will be sent along with its forty-three (43) letters of support, to the Federal Historian in Washington DC. If there are no objections after a 45-day comment period, the breach sites will be formally listed on the prestigious National Register.

Levees.org originally announced its quest to list the breach sites at a press conference in the Lower Ninth Ward in August of 2010. At that time, the group notified the Louisiana Office of Historic Preservation of its intention to also nominate at least four more breach sites which retain integrity.

Click here for more about the important nomination.

Homeowner Wade Frey of Chalmette, Louisiana spent a week on his roof after Hurricane Katrina. The town of Chalmette is considered part of the basin which federal Judge Stanwood Duval ruled was flooded due to the Corps of Engineers' improper maintenance of a nearby navigation channel known as the MRGO. Photo/Wade Frey

Justice Department lawyers argued before a three-judge panel from the 5th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals that the federal government is entitled to sovereign immunity as stipulated in the Flood Control Act of 1928.

The federal government sought for the appeals court to reverse a decision by federal Judge Stanwood Duval who ruled that flooding in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans was a man-made disaster caused by the corps’ negligence.

As reported by the Associated Press, Justice Department attorney Mark Stern noted that the 5th Circuit and Louisiana Supreme Court have heretofore ruled in other cases that the catastrophic flooding was caused by Katrina. While AP story did not state which cases Mr. Stern is talking about, there was another important ruling on the Corps’ role in the New Orleans flood.

That case was January 2008 by the US District Court for Eastern Louisiana and the court did not say Katrina caused the flooding. The plaintiffs said the corps — not nature, not a record-breaking storm surge and not local politics or local negligence — was to blame. The court “heartily seconded that notion…suggesting that the corps was guilty of “gross incompetence.”

But the court was powerless to rule favorably for the plaintiffs because the Flood Control Act of 1928 granted legal immunity to the government in the event of failure of flood control projects like levees.

“The federal government has basically conceded on the science of the case, “ said Paul Kemp, Vice President of the National Audubon Society who has read the brief.

Pierce O’Donnell, lead attorney for the plaintiffs spoke to Levees.org before boarding a plane back to Los Angeles.

“The federal attorneys are attempting to argue that it’s irrelevant why the levees and floodwalls failed,” he said. “They are saying that even if the levees and floodwalls failed due to an independent act of negligence, the corps is still immune.”

Mr. O’Donnell observed that Judges Jerry Smith, Edward Prado and Jennifer Walker Elrod were well prepared. They conscientiously asked very penetrating questions, he said.

The judges will likely issue their ruling in a month or two, but according to Mr. O’Donnell, the losing party will undoubtedly seek review from the Supreme Court.

So no matter what the decision is on yesterday’s hearing, there may not be a final outcome until late 2013. But that didn’t seem to concern Dr. Ivor van Heerden, former deputy director of the now closed LSU Hurricane Center and expert consultant in the case.

“I am confident that the judge did a great job, and I am confident the case will survive an appeal,” said Dr. van Heerden.

“…By funding ecosystem restoration projects, we protect our culture, strengthen our hurricane protection, and ensure that Louisianans can continue to support their families through fishing and shipping on our waterways…”
Cedric Richmond, Member of Congress