(Washington, D.C.) — The Royal Netherlands Embassy commends New Orleans and Greater New Orleans Inc. for awarding a contract for the development of a ‘Comprehensive, Sustainable Integrated Water Management Strategy’ (WMS) for St. Bernard, Orleans and Jefferson Parishes.

Having worked extensively with New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina, the Dutch applaud this critical step in learning how to live with water. The development of an integrated WMS demonstrates New Orleans’ leadership to mitigate flood risk and flood impacts, prepare vulnerable urban areas for sea level rise, strengthen community and ecosystem resiliency, and use water to enhance an area’s economic value. We are pleased that Greater New Orleans Inc. has named an embassy official to serve on GNO Inc’s WMS Advisory Council.

As with the “Water Plans” in the Netherlands, the WMS goal is to give New Orleans a ‘fundamental’ lens to view infrastructure and community development plans, thereby ensuring that businesses and citizens can thrive and, as the Dutch say, “Keep their Feet Dry.”

Since 2007, Dutch experts in water management, landscape architecture, hydraulic and civil engineering, and urban planning have worked with Waggonner & Ball Architects, the American Planning Association (APA) and Louisianans in the Dutch Dialogues program to develop sustainable methods to reduce flood risk and alleviate the impact of tropical storms in New Orleans. Through a series of three workshops and ongoing projects, Dutch Dialogues identified integrated urban design and engineering approaches that will reduce flooding impacts, better manage storm, surface and groundwater and make New Orleans and surrounding parishes  safer.

The Netherlands possesses 800 years of water management experience and Dutch experts will work side-by-side with Waggonner & Ball and New Orleans stakeholders to create a water strategy to guide the Crescent City’s future. Dutch input comes from officials from Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Technical University of Delft, principals from landscape and design firms Bosch-Slabbers, H+N+S,  De Koning, and Palmbout, engineers from Arcadis and Royal Haskoning, and scientists from Deltares.

The Embassy values the fruitful relationship it has developed with Waggonner & Ball, GNOInc, Parish officials and community leaders in south-east Louisiana. We look forward to an ongoing dialogue as we make our cities and environments safer and more dynamic.”

“Corralling storm water for good use is immensely appealing in a city that’s still dubious about leaving its safety in the hands of the levee builders. Drainage structures designed to fit into neighborhoods could make the city infinitely more attractive. And the building could be in manageable chunks.

“I don’t see this as a 5-year plan,” said Waggonner, “but a 50-year one.”

Elements of Waggonner’s living-with-water proposal have been included in the city’s masterplan, which is close to adoption, and the idea has the backing of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu. Yet his vision could vaporize, as so many post-Katrina plans have.

Its unique power is the promise that New Orleanians need no longer cower in the shadows of their endless, dispiriting levee walls. They could begin living gracefully with their age-old aquatic enemy.”

David Waggonner shared his expertise on urban water management with planning professionals from around the world at the Shanghai-Rotterdam Water Conference, part of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.  According to the Rotterdam Water City website, “[t]he Shanghai-Rotterdam Water Conference offered an excellent opportunity to share and exchange knowledge and experience. A number of lectures addressed topics such as storm-surge barriers, adaptation strategies, rainwater storage and ecologically sustainable flood management.”  The presentation included ideas developed through the Dutch Dialogues research initiative, which aims to embrace water for new public amenities and improved safety in New Orleans.

A short video was prepared on site summarizing the complex implications of this disaster and is available here. A Working Group on the Delta is forming and a report summarizing their concerns and proposed solutions will be available soon.

David Waggonner’s commentary is featured at the midpoint of this video:

Putting A Stake in the Heart of the Earth: Actions-Response to the BP Oil Drilling Disaster New Orleans, Louisiana May 25, 2010 from The New Orleans Institute on Vimeo.

To view the video in MP4 format, click here

To view the video on LPB’s web video player, click here (click the second story in the “playlist”)

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)

The planners hope to spur redesigns of sections of the city where waterways, urban wetlands and green, open areas can be used to store additional rainfall or where developed areas are redesigned to better hold rainwater through use of new absorbent street and sidewalk building materials or adoption of cisterns and other water-storage containers.

Planners from the Netherlands will share their knowledge of similar efforts adopted in that country, with a recognition that differences in New Orleans’ geology and climate will require significant adjustments.

Former wetlands on which Gentilly and other suburban neighborhoods were built used to keep the city’s geology buoyant, Waggonner said. Today, vast areas of the city have sunk to as much as 6 feet below sea level, the unintended result of those areas being drained by canals that suck up the water that had kept the soil elevated.

The trick, he said, is to find ways of reintroducing water into soils in ways to reduce subsidence, and in finding ways of transforming the canals into spaces attractive to the public.

Alternatives could include the adoption of plans already backed by state and city officials to turn the London and Orleans avenue canals into a gravity-fed drainage system by building permanent pump stations at the lakefront that would replace existing interior pump stations.

Read the full article over at nola.com:

http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/2010/04/dutch_planners_architects_want.html