http://www.spl.usace.army.mil/cms/index.php
The site noted above is for the US Army Corps of Engineers, Los Angeles District. You can find local Corps offices and also learn more about different projects here in California.
Please copy and paste the URL noted above into your browser to access the Corps of Engineers’ web site.
We had a recent membership push for the California Chapter – and our Golden State Chapter has grown to over 260 members. If each member brings in just one more new member, just a click to join, we can have our membership represented with 500 members before the end of 2006. That’s my goal for this chapter – CA takes the lead in so many initiatives relating to environmental, safety and well-being issues. Please help us be heard and help us develop a larger presence within levees.org. (Thank you to all of our newest members for taking one minute to click and join us!)
I spoke with Dr. Robert Bea recently (with UC Berkeley) – Dr. Bea lived in New Orleans years ago and experienced first-hand losing everything to a major flood there. He mentioned historical parallels between the failed 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans and the levees in our Sacramento Delta area: marshland, stories of levees breaking, built by Chinese workers in the 1850s. The lifeblood of our fresh water supply is protected, guarded and held back by “piles of dirt.” Think about that…
Loss of our fresh water supply won’t just affect us as individuals; life as we know it here in the Golden State will be seriously altered for weeks – months – perhaps years. Major industries will be affected: petroleum, energy, nuclear, technology, transportation… get the picture?
According to Dr. Bea in comparing the New Orleans and CA challenges, “…the critical exceptions are that this state (CA) has a very strong technical arm in the Department of Water Resources, the Corps has a reasonably strong technical presence, we have the experience of Katrina to show us what can happen, and the state is trying to take action to “get ahead” of the major problems: flooding Sacramento, and loss of the fresh water supply in the Delta.”
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
www.sacbee.com/303/story/44358.html
Earthquakes, not hurricanes, could destroy levees built on unstable land, professor says. Raymond Seed, a professor of civil negineering at the University of California, Berkeley, calls it the most expensive inch of soil in the history of the world.
Seed and a team of 37 engineers and hydrologists found that layer of soil beneath the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans when they investigated why the city flooded so badly during Hurricane Katrina last year.
It was a layer of organic material laid down across much of the city by another hurricane 250 years earlier. It had a consistency similar to “peanut butter and jelly,” Seed said, and it was not detected by soil tests prior to construction of the modern 17th Street levee.”
Please copy and paste the URL noted above into your browner to read the full article.
