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DD3 covered in Dutch daily NRC-Handelsblad
The Dutch Dialogue 3 conference has been covered in Dutch daily newspaper NRC-Handelsblad by writer Tracy Metz. The article can be read in the preferred English translation below, viewed in English on the NRC-Handelsblad International website, or read in Dutch as a PDF.
In New Orleans the water is invisible
Tracy Metz, Staff reporter at NRC Handelsblad
First it was the water, now it is the oil. For the second time in five years Louisiana has been struck by a natural disaster caused by human error. Actually, the disasters reinforce each other: the oil spill increases the region’s vulnerability to flooding. Oil can destroy the coastal wetlands that form the last natural line of defense against storm surge. These wetlands also protect the pipelines that transport gas and oil from the Gulf of Mexico to the refineries on land.
New Orleans Architect David Waggonner sees even more disturbing similarities between the Katrina and Deepwater Horizon disasters: “It is unbelievable that for both disasters no emergency plan was in place. What do we do if the levees break? Or what do we do if the one pipe of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico breaks? It really tells you how blind we are when it comes to water.” Moroever, says Waggonner, the response to this disaster has been as slow as it was with Katrina and the public was just as poorly informed.
Louisiana’s coastal wetlands have been eroding since 1927. After the Great Mississippi River Flood that year, the national government has channelled almost 2000 miles of the Mississippi River in order to promote shipping, commerce and trade. However, this deprived the wetlands of nourishment from the sediments carried by the river, causing further land loss. For decades now these sediments have been disappearing into the deep sea. The US Geological Survey estimates that approximately 5000 square kilometers (2000 square miles) of Louisiana coastal wetlands have disappeared. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita added to their further destruction.
Waggonner and others are frustrated that the State of Louisiana does not share in the profits of the gas and oil industry. “Recently a law was adopted stipulating that beginning in 2017 the State of Louisiana will receive one-third of the federal royalties associated with the oil and gas leases. But up till now we are just feeling the burden of it.” Together with Texas, Alaska and California, Louisiana is one of the top four oil producing states in the US. Indirectly the State does benefit from the industry. According to the lobby organization Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, the industry pays about $ 500 million in salaries, while the industry itself pays about 13% of the overall state taxes.
Waggonner, and the Dutch Embassy in Washington, are the initiator of the Dutch Dialogues, a collaboration between Dutch and American landscape architects, engineers and urban developers. Waggonner is convinced that New Orleans, three quarters of which is below sea level, can learn a lot from the Netherlands. Since Katrina, various delegations from New Orleans have visited the Netherlands. Another visit is planned for the end of May. Right before the Deepwater Horizon spill, Dutch and American experts met in New Orleans for the third gathering of Dutch Dialogues 3, a three-day workshop organized to develop proposals for the internal water drainage systems of the city. The results were presented at the annual conference of the American Planning Association, held in New Orleans this year, which introduced a new theme: Delta Urbanism.
A new storm surge barrier, currently being built by the US Army Corps of Engineers in cooperation with the Dutch engineering firms Arcadis and Haskoning, should be ready before the hurricane season starting in the summer of 2011. Piet Dircke, Director of Global Water Management at Arcadis was active in the Dutch Dialogues. “We would like to extend the question of safety to all the other water issues that are at stake,” he says. “For instance, the improvement of the ecosystem, the creation of a sense of living with water in the city and the prevention of further soil subsidence. In addition we would like to demonstrate that water can be economically beneficial. If the city is safe, it will become more desirable to live in, you can attract more businesses and the real estate value will increase. In New Orleans people think they need high and ugly concrete flood walls to enclose the outfall canals – but in the Netherlands you don’t see those anywhere.”
One of the Dutch Dialogues working groups designed outfall canals without concrete flood walls. Neighborhoods will be reconnected, people will be able to walk along the water, and the canal will be widened to create green zones, which at times can be used for overflow.
“Do you know what they do here when it rains very hard?” landscape architect Lodewijk van Nieuwenhuijze of the Dutch firm HNS asks. “Everybody gets in his car and drives to higher grounds. There they wait until the rain stops so it keeps their cars from flooding. There has to be a better way.” New Orleans buried its drainage system under ground. Due to soil subsidence the sewer pipes break; the city then pumps harder, causing even more subsidence. In the meantime the ground level dropped over three feet and will drop another three feet in the next century.”
Five years after Katrina the city has been rebuilt exactly the way it was before, only with even bigger pumps. The only difference is that the insurance companies now require you to build your house on stilts or on a mound. That may be good for the individual owner, but definitely not for the community. The Dutch belief that these things need to be collectively organized and managed is not the way it is done here.
Another working group dealt with the reconstruction of the connection between Lake Pontchartrain and the French Quarter, via the Bayou Saint John. “That waterway is in fact the cradle of New Orleans,” says Han Meyer, Professor of Urban Development at Delft Technical University. “The Indians showed the French explorers that this was the way to transport their goods from Lake Pontchartrain to the banks of the Mississippi. That artery has been totally neglected: there are still some beautiful houses along the bayou, but it dead-ends. If there is one area in this city that has a historical identity with water, it is right there.”
In various areas in the city, in the parks, but also in people’s own yards, water retention areas need to be created in order to catch storm water which can also help to recharge and maintain adequate groundwater levels during dry periods. One of the working groups suggested doubling the surface water area in City Park; that way the water can be held in the park instead of being diverted to the lake. Another added benefit is that this would increase water storage capacity so that the city does not flood as easily.
According to Meyer this requires a change in attitude of the citizens as well as a change in institutional relationships. “Institutional turf battles and policy stovepiping is evenworse in the US than in the Netherlands. The US Army Corps of Engineers believes it is responsible only for safety and not for integrated water management or urban water management – that is something the municipality has to take care of and pay for. We are lucky that Rijkswaterstaat is not a military organization.”
The Dutch Dialogues proposals have one thing in common: they all imagined a measured and controlled introduction of water into the city. One thing is very remarkable in New Orleans: although you know there is water everywhere, you don’t see it anywhere. The water in the drainage canals is hidden behind flood walls of ten or twelve feet high; surface water has been covered by concrete slabs; the powerful Mississippi flows in a deep trench, behind high levees, and you can’t get close to it at all; so waterfront parties are not an option.
For many years New Orleans defined water safety as keeping water out of the city as much as possible. A new mindset will be required, by both the population as well as local politics, to understand that the city will be more livable and safer if water is allowed in.
Hurricane Katrina (2005) was the largest natural disaster to date in the United States, with 1800 deaths and a total cost of $80 billion. The current oil spill spreading in the Gulf of Mexico already has the potential to surpass the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. At least that was a known and finite amount of oil. Governor Bobbie Jindal, who as a matter of principle originally declined federal stimulus funds, has now asked for extra funding and criticizes the slow emergency assistance from the federal government. The oil threatens not only nature, but also the Louisiana economy, a poor state with an average annual income of $32000 (euro 25.000). The $ 2.4 billion fishing industry has already been affected: the shrimpers and oystermen have been unable to work for many days. They are now lining up to see if they can get work cleaning up the oil that put them out of work.
(Translation courtesy of Nell Neal, the Royal Netherlands Embassy)
