The view from the levee is panoramic

One of the nice things about living by the river is the sky. Every day and every night it is always different. Sometimes stormy, sometimes calm, sometimes completely dark. No matter how many pictures I take, there is always another.

and another

and another

The levee is a wonderful thing

The levee is a marvelous invention. It mostly keeps the water where it is supposed to be - in the river - and out of where it should not - my house.

Also, it makes a great walking, jogging and biking path and a place to chat with neighbors. If you have a dog, he'd enjoy running on the levee. It is a good place to meditate or mull things over, as well.

On our levee, we have pelicans, egrets, herons, cranes, butterflies, mice and opossum. That's what I have seen so far.

Yesterday, I saw a praying mantis - they are supposed to mean good luck. The river makes a fine habitat for small creatures.




Because the levee is so high, you can appreciate the horizon and some marvelous sunsets! There are different colors every night.

From my part of the levee, I see the Crescent City Connection bridge that crosses the Mississippi to the West Bank.

I can also take in the downtown skyline. And ships, tugs and barges pass day and night.

At noon and 7 p.m., the paddlewheeler comes by tooting its horn. On Sunday evenings, the cruise ships head out to the Gulf.

The levee is a good place to sit

and also to fish...

New Orleans gets first-rate levee system

Big bill for levee upkeep comes to New Orleans

By By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press – 20 hours ago  

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In the busy and under-staffed offices of New Orleans' flood-control leaders, there's an uneasy feeling about what lies ahead.

By the time the next hurricane season starts in June of 2013, the city will take control of much of a revamped protection system of gates, walls and armored levees that the Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $12 billion building. The corps has about $1 billion worth of work left.

Engineers consider it a Rolls Royce of flood protection — comparable to systems in seaside European cities such as St. Petersburg, Venice, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Whether the infrastructure can hold is less in question than whether New Orleans can be trusted with the keys.

The Army Corps estimates it will take $38 million a year to pay for upkeep, maintenance and operational costs after it's turned over to local officials.

Local flood-control chief Robert Turner said he has questions about where that money will come from. At current funding levels, the region will run out of money to properly operate the high-powered system within a decade unless a new revenue source is found.

"There's a price to pay for resiliency," the levee engineer said from his office at the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East. "We can't let pieces of this system die away. We can't be parochial about it."

On Nov. 6, New Orleans voters were faced with one of their first challenges on flood protection when they voted on renewal of a critical levee tax. The tax levy was approved, meaning millions of dollars should be available annually for levee maintenance.

Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California, said the region must find additional money to keep the system working properly. "If you try to operate it and maintain it on a shoestring, then it won't provide the protection that people deserve."

Many locals remain uneasy, even though Turner's agency is a welcome replacement for local levee boards that were previously derided.

"It's scary," said C. Ray Bergeron, owner of Fleur De Lis Car Care, a service station in the Lakeview neighborhood where water rose to rooftops after levees collapsed during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Before Katrina, Bergeron said the local levee boards were complacent. "They told everybody everything was fine, 'oh yeah, it's fine. Let's go have martinis and lunch.'"

After Katrina, the locally run levee boards that oversaw the area's defenses were vilified, and quickly replaced by the regional levee district run by Turner.

Congressional investigations found the old Orleans Levee Board more interested in managing a casino license and two marinas than looking after levees. Though the Army Corps of Engineers had responsibility for annual levee inspections, the local levee boards were responsible for maintenance. Still, the boards spent millions of dollars on a fountain and overpasses rather than on levee protection. And there was confusion over who was responsible for managing the fragmented levee system, U.S. Senate investigations revealed.

Still, experts generally agree the old levee board's failings did not cause the levees to collapse during Katrina. Poor levee designs by the corps and the sheer strength of Katrina get the lion's share of the blame.

Since the Flood Control Act of 1936, the Army Corps has given local or state authorities oversight of water-control projects, whether earthen levees in the Midwest or beach walls in New England.

"That's been the eternal problem with flood-protection systems," said Thomas Wolff, an engineer at Michigan State University. "You build something very good and then give it to local interests who are not as well-funded."

New Orleans is an unusual case because the area is inheriting the nation's first-of-its-kind urban flood control system.

"We've given a very expensive system to a place that may not be able to afford it over the long term," said Leonard Shabman, an Arlington, Va.-based water resources expert. Letting the Army Corps run it isn't much of a solution either, he added. "It's not like the corps' budget is flush."

The nation has spent lavishly on fixing the system in the seven years since Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and left 1,800 people dead.

"It is better than what the Dutch have for the types of storms we have," said Carlton Dufrechou, a member of the board of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, which monitors local environmental issues.

Ensuring it remains that way could be tricky. The biggest headaches are several mega-projects with lots of moving parts, all needing constant upkeep. The corps is building them across major waterways that lead into New Orleans.

Take for instance the 1.8-mile-long, 26-foot-high surge barrier southeast of the French Quarter that blocks water coming up from the Gulf of Mexico across lakes and into the city's canals. Water from this direction doomed the Lower 9th Ward and threatened to flood the French Quarter. Maintaining this giant wall alone will cost $4 million or more a year.

"You have to get out there and do exercises, do the preventive maintenance, change out equipment over time on a particular schedule," Turner said, enumerating the challenges. "There are a lot of cases where a single thing goes wrong and that can create a failure, a complete failure where you can't close the system."

There is a mounting list of to-dos.

Already, lightning has knocked out chunks of wall. Grass hasn't grown well on several new stretches of levee. Louisiana State University grass experts have been called in to help seed them.

There are recurring problems with vibrations and shuddering on a new floodgate at Bayou Dupre in St. Bernard Parish. The corps has plans to overhaul the structure in the spring before handing it over to local control. And there will be the inevitable sinking of levees and structures, as always happens in south Louisiana's naturally soft soils. Over time, levees will have to be raised.

Col. Ed Fleming, the New Orleans corps commander, said his outfit will work to ensure the transition to local control is smooth.

"This happens with corps civil projects all over the country. That's the way it works in Iraq, Afghanistan," he said. "We have authority to build, but we have no authority to do operations and maintenance."

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

A new plan for water traffic emerges

Day of the Dead decoration on the neutral ground by the Healing Center

Saturday, I attended the Anba Dlo Water Symposium: Infinite Blessings, Finite Resources at the Healing Center.

Anba Dlo in Kreyol (apparently the Haitian Creole language) means "from beneath the waters." The event planners stated: "Our city's long held paradigm has been to build walls and pump out every drop of water that falls.

Several presenters shared their perspectives on improved water management. Dr. Denise Reed, Ph.D., research professor at UNO, described a plan to shorten the outlet from the port of New Orleans to the Gulf by creating a canal that would go directly south. The reasons to do this are two-fold. Apparently, ships need to carry even heavier cargo into New Orleans to remain competitive. Thus, the channels have to be 50-feet deep not 45-feet. The 100-mile trip down the Mississippi to the Gulf makes dredging another 5 feet a big task - way bigger than is necessary to deepen ports in Gulfport, Miss., or Miami, which are right on the water. New Orleans loses the trade if it doesn't meet the requirements. That's pretty convincing.

Part two of Reed's argument is that building the shorter route would leave silt across Southeast Louisiana, creating more of a storm barrier than exists now. The areas around Grand Isle are unsustainable because the shelf drops right off the coast to almost a mile. So, getting the Army Corp to dig that channel deeper is a non-starter.

The problem is (always) getting Congress to appropriate the funds. I believe she said $50 million - a drop in the bucket - pardon the pun.

Louisiana is just not a national priority, however. And, as journalist Bob Marshall pointed out earlier that day, the country has Katrina fatigue. Americans are tired of hearing about Louisiana's problems and don't recognize the economic importance that the Mississippi holds to the entire United States.

I've presented the statistics in earlier posts. The Mississippi is the world's sixth largest river. Most of the central United States depends on the port in one way or another for imports and exports. Not to mention the seafood. Everyone should have a reason to care.

Marshall said, tell your friends. Do a grassroots thing. I sincerely doubt that will work, but I am telling you now. Call your representative in Congress.

Living on the edge of the Mississippi

Story and photo by John Burnett, NPR

In the netherworld of the batture between the levee and the Mississippi River near New Orleans, there is a small community built on stilts. Locals call them "camps": a dozen eccentric structures — some rundown, some handsome, all handmade — clinging to the river side of the great dike.

One man has been fighting for years to claim this land, which he says belongs to his family, but those living on the batture don't seem too worried about losing their homes.

Jean Brady Hendricks is 88. She wears long dresses and gaudy jewelry, and rides a pink Schwinn. Her home is a ramshackle thing swallowed by river vines and visited by night creatures for whom she puts out cat food. She is happy here.

"It's a very unusual place to live. Somebody did an article in the paper — they referred to it as a very whimsical place to live. People want to live here," she says.

Hendricks used to be a torch singer in the French Quarter at places like Poodle's Patio lounge and the Gunga Din club. For most of her life, she lived in New Orleans; she moved to the batture about three years ago. When she first saw her house, she says, she broke into song.

"'A shanty, a shanty, an old shanty town, the roof is so slanty it's touching the ground.'" she sings. "I think it's the worst looking house up here, but I don't mind," she says. "If I was younger, I'd mind. It's funny how you become more tolerant as you get older."

The Mississippi River winds past the City of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of land and trees. This is the batture, where the water beats against the land, and it is where the river breathes. "Down on the Batture," by Oliver Houck

'A Really Different Kind Of Place'

Life on the batture becomes a different world at night. The breeze is always cool. The willow trees come alive with tree frogs calling out for casual sex. Giant freighters outlined in navigation lights glide past in the gloom. They're surprisingly quiet, until their wake hits the earthen levee.

Macon Fry sits out on his deck, sipping a cold beer over the water.

"I love the sounds here. The place seems alive to me all the time, not just the frogs, but there's always movement, whether it's ships or trains or the water moving under us," he says.

Fry is a wiry, tanned urban farmer and educator, who teaches kids about agriculture. He lives in a house he built from salvaged wood; there's a goat named Sweet Pea on the porch. With spring floods this year, the Mississippi rose almost to his floorboards, but it never flooded his house. Fry says he likes living on the edge.

"It's an edge community. It's not in the city, and it's not really in the river. But it's on the edge, and there's a lot of interesting things that happen on edges," he says. "Things wash up, things show up, animals show up, different plants grow on edges. That's the way it feels, it feels like a really different kind of place."

Once upon a time, camps lined the batture all along the great crescent of river that gives New Orleans its nickname. After the historic flood of 1927, the Army Corps of Engineers decided to enlarge the levees and almost all the camps, teetering on their pilings, had to go.

"So what we have now is a little appendix of about a dozen houses up there which are the remnants of what once lined the riverbanks from downtown New Orleans all the way up here to the parish, a good 6, 7 miles," Tulane environmental law professor Oliver Houck says.

A Long Battle Over Ownership

For his book, Down on the Batture, Houck spent a lot of time exploring its history. He came across a landmark case from the early 1800s that decided the fundamental question of who owns the batture.

"The end of it was the American idea won. This was private, and that eliminated the publicness of the batture," he says.

A New Orleans lawyer named Ashton O'Dwyer Jr. has been fighting in the courts for years to prove that his family is the rightful owner of this riparian neighborhood.

"I don't want to have anything to do with anything that belongs to these squatters and trespassers," he says emphatically. "Get off my property, remediate it and give it back to me — and pay me damages."

In the kitchen of his St. Charles Avenue manse, O'Dwyer is a picture of southern gentility in a blue blazer, pink oxford shirt and a tie with little pheasants on it.

He covers the counter with legal papers, which purport to show that his great uncle, a casino owner, originally bought the batture property from an oil company.

"It demonstrates clearly and unequivocally that George acquired this property from the Texas Company in July of 1945," O'Dwyer says, his finger on one of the documents.

The Jefferson Parish tax office, in fact, produced records that show that the O'Dwyer family has been paying annual property taxes of about $1,500 a year on the disputed batture land.

"Who else do you know lives rent-free and tax-free on land owned by other people?" he says angrily. "These people are scumbags. Get off!"

A 'Dead Issue'?

Yet O'Dwyer's epic struggle to regain what he claims is his family land has run off the tracks, and his personal life has, as well. Once a leading admiralty lawyer in New Orleans, O'Dwyer has been disbarred and banned from all state and district courts for using abusive language and threatening judges.

He has filed for bankruptcy, and he faces charges of threatening federal officials, which are on appeal.

For the moment, the batture lawsuit and his other prolific litigation, have been "administratively closed" by the courts.

As a result, the batture dwellers don't seem overly concerned.

"Nobody really worries or even thinks about that. It's a dead issue as far as everybody up here," architect Steve Schweitzer says. "Nobody up here feels like they're squatters. We're owners of our own property."

He lives with his wife, Sandra, in a modern house they completed last year that's painted a brilliant blue and orange, nothing like the tumbledown camps of old.

They moved to the batture after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their house and their printing business in town.

"It was bad enough that Katrina hit, and then you spent two to three years dealing with insurance companies. It was not a fun time. We built this one not to lose it, so hopefully we won't," Sandra Schweitzer says.

They have decided it's safer to live outside the bowl of New Orleans, down on the batture, with the Father of Waters in their backyard.

(To see historic photos, click on the link to go to NPR's Web site.)

Bike ride atop the levee reveals dangers

Mississippi River's flood a battle for all on the river's edge

Published: Saturday, May 14, 2011, 5:35 PM     Updated: Sunday, May 15, 2011, 1:34 PM

 By James O'Byrne, NOLA.com 

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

-- T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

The flooding Mississippi River is done watching and waiting. And anyone who doubts that the river has become T.S. Eliot's personification of "a strong brown god" need only walk up the slope of the levee and peer over the top.

If, like me, you frequent the levee path that runs along the Mississippi, you have developed a more personal relationship with the river than almost everyone else who lives on the dry side, in the levee's inert, protective shadow.

Bicycling or walking along any part of the 25-mile paved path that runs uninterrupted from Audubon Park in New Orleans to Norco in St. Charles Parish, you get to know the river as a highly changeable organism; as a bit of batture wilderness amid urban and suburban sprawl; and as a bustling, pulsating center of commerce.

For weeks now, on bicycle rides along the New Orleans and Jefferson Parish stretches of the path, we in the community of river watchers have witnessed the river rise and rise, and keep on rising, until the water towers over the homes on the other side of the levee.

On Monday, I bicycled the full 25-mile path, taking photographs along the way, to get a sense of how the creatures, both human and animal, are coping with the worst Mississippi River flood since 1927.

My ride ended at the Bonnet Carre spillway, which was commissioned after the 1927 disaster, along with the Morganza Floodway north of Baton Rouge, in anticipation of just such an event as we are witnessing now. The painstaking process of opening the spillway's 350 bays was underway, and river water was coursing its way to Lake Pontchartrain.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has already determined  that the massive diversion of river water at Bonnet Carre is not enough to prevent big problems in New Orleans. On Saturday, the Morganza was opened for only the second time in its history. That means others farther north will lose their homes and businesses in the flood, so that New Orleans and Baton Rouge can be saved. Such is the cruel calculus of the river's raging rise.

Living on the river

It's just after dawn when my ride begins, and soon I reach the Orleans-Jefferson line near Riverbend, where there remains a small community of homes on the Mississippi River batture, that narrow strip of land that sits between the base of the levee and the water's edge, mostly forested and usually dry, except in the springtime when the high water comes.

It's a foggy morning on the river, as usual at this time of year. Even when there's no fog elsewhere, the river fogs over, as the warm humid air of late spring contacts the much cooler river, chilled by the recently melted snow and cold northern rains rolling to the Gulf of Mexico. On the river, the tankers' tall superstructures poke out of the low fog banks, moving back and forth like skyscrapers floating on a cloud.

At the Riverbend, the water is lapping at the floorboards of some of the batture homes. A man wades in three feet of water in his yard to tie his propane tank to the trees, so that it doesn't float away. I ask him, literally in passing, if this is the highest he has seen the water. "Nope, '73 was higher," he recalls of the flood that sparked the first and only opening of Morganza. "But I know more water is coming."

A resident of the batture in New Orleans ties his propane tank to trees in his yard to keep it from floating away in the flood.

More water is indeed coming. The river crested at Memphis on Tuesday at nearly 48 feet. That bulging torrent of water is heading our way.

A hard time for business

Unknown to many who stay on the dry side of the levee, the river batture is alive with commerce. There are stevedoring companies and boat maintenance yards. There are huge bluffs of river sand that rise as high as the levee. Dump trucks roll over the levees, darting in and out of these sand pits, taking loads to far-off construction sites. Companies specializing in rocks and gravel and other aggregates that move up and down the river stack their products in giant mounds on the high parts of the batture.

All of these companies are engaged in a battle with water. Here, the road is flooded, and a mini-dozer tries to push enough gravel onto the crown to make it passable. There, untended trucks and tractors sit in increasingly dangerous pools of water. Workmen stand in two feet of water, working on a tugboat, its status "in dry dock" increasingly tenuous in the rising river. A couple of more feet, and they'll have to tie it down.

At the Petroleum Helicopters terminal on the batture in Jefferson Parish, near the Huey P.  Long Bridge, several of the landing pads are already under water. The helicopters that I'm used to seeing on my daily rides have been moved to safety.

And at the massive construction site at the Huey Long, a vast area that was bustling just a few weeks ago with cranes, supplies, equipment and workers, is now a pond stretching to the river's edge.

Flotsam and jetsam

Along the river bank near Ochsner, a huge swath of trees has been cleared from the batture, creating an unparalleled panorama where you can see the full breadth of the river  and the wide turn that gives the Riverbend area its name. Outside of the city, such stretches are rare, as usually the forest on the batture is so thick that it blocks out a clear view of the river.

Downriver from curves in the Mississippi, huge jams of driftwood and debris dotted with brightly colored plastic bottles form in the flooded batture space. When the water recedes, this debris will be left behind.

It's a favored spot for the workers at Ochnser Hospital to sit in the grass and eat their lunches and watch the ships and barges roll by. The batture was cleared out over the winter, when the river was low in its banks, so that the Corps could lay out sprawling mats, big as a football field, made up of concrete slabs hinged together like a quilt. These articulated mats were rolled across the underwater part of the riverbank to stabilize the bank, particularly where there's lots of pressure, such as where the river takes a sharp bend. A similar mat was installed at Algiers Point over the winter.

As I watch the river's flow, I am relieved at the unseen armor. Because right now, the Mississippi River, far from looking like the Old Man celebrated in song, seems rather young and impetuous, its surface roiling and surging southward with uncharacteristic swiftness.

At each bend in the river, debris floating along in the flood keeps going straight, and ends up stacked in huge floating fields pressed against the concrete armor that lines the river side of the levees. Woven into the tapestry of driftwood are old tires, wooden spools, strange blobs of orange Styrofoam, rusted metal orbs that must have been buoys, the occasional stray toilet seat and, seemingly everywhere, little pockmarks of bright color, the ubiquitous plastic bottles. When the water goes down, these piles of debris will remain.

A concrete bird habitat

The Mississippi River batture is a bird sanctuary that stretches the length of the continent. In southeast Louisiana, it harbors herons, cranes, egrets, ducks, owls – you name it. If it's native to Louisiana, it's here. As I ride farther into Jefferson Parish, where life on the dry side turns from industrial to residential, the birds become ubiquitous.

The flood has chased all manner of wildlife from the protective cover of the batture forest. Birds live on the water's edge. When that edge becomes the concrete slope of the levee, that's where you will find them still.

Many of these birds live their lives at the water's edge. And now that edge is a swath of sloped concrete. Squeezed in by the river on one side, and the assortment of intermittent bicyclers, joggers and walkers who amble by, these huge communities of birds stand warily and incongruously on the concrete levee, waiting for the water to recede so they can retreat to the forest once again.

I am not an experienced bird watcher. I recognize egrets, but can't say what kind. I see ducks of many varieties. I watch an owl digging away at a tuft of grass growing between the concrete before sensing me and fleeing to the safety of the batture forest. I curse the flood. But I feel fortunate on this day that the water has narrowed the distance between me and the creatures that make the river home.

At the spillway

The scene at the Bonnet Carre feels more like going to a New Orleans Saints preseason practice than witnessing the commencement of a deadly serious effort to tame the wild river. People have lined the levee along the spillway with lawn chairs. They have brought the family, baby strollers and all. They have coolers and snacks and binoculars.

But they are not making light of the situation. It's clear from listening to their conversations that they know they have a front row seat to history. It has, after all, been 84 years since the Mississippi River has flexed its muscles in this way. And the last time it happened, none of these structures – the mighty, armored levees, the Morganza Floodway, the Bonnet Carre Spillway – existed.

People who live in Southeast Louisiana seem to have an innate sense that, no matter how mighty are man's accomplishments, no matter how confident are the "worshippers of the machine" that T.S. Eliot speaks of, this battle between man and nature is often a 50-50 proposition. And after what we've been through, we know better than almost anyone else: sometimes you end up on the wrong end of that equation. 

Each bay of the Bonnet Carre Spillway has 20 pins that are removed one by one by the cranes.

As I watch the Corps workers begin the painstaking, week-long task of pulling the wood and metal pins from each spillway bay – 20 pins per bay, 350 bays, 7,000 pins in all – I know that the war analogy is apt. Each day, across the country, men and women are battling the river, on levees, in boardrooms, at sand bag centers, in homes and businesses, and in front of computers that spit out data about flow rates and river stages and crest models.

I remember a story I wrote early in my career, in 1986, when the Corps opened a new Auxiliary Control Structure at the critical Old River complex, where engineers grudgingly feed 30 percent of the Mississippi River's flow into the Atchafalaya River, to keep the whole shooting match from heading down the shorter, easier route to the sea. The auxiliary structure was authorized after the mighty 1973 flood, which almost destroyed the Old River structure, an event that would have unleashed an unprecedented human and economic disaster.

And so it goes through the years. The river floods. Engineers devise an answer. The river makes a mockery of the new machines. Humans build better machines in hopes of triumphing. Until the next, greater flood. It is a loser's game.  

As I watch the water surge through the Bonnet Carre, I think about the floodway 160 miles upriver, and about the people who will have water in their homes because the Morganza is opened. I have had water in my home, and I don't wish that heartbreak on anyone. But I know that it is inevitable.

In The Times-Picayune earlier this week, a woman in Morgan City contemplated losing her home, so that Baton Rouge and New Orleans might stay dry. "Y'all pray for us," she asked.

It seems the least we can do.

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Sunset on the levee

I parked the car on the levee the other night, just to look at the sunset, which was gorgeous.



As I sat there, a young man pulled out a rope, tying it from one tree to another. He walked back and forth across the tightrope. Now, that's a skill I've never even thought to master.