“FLOOD PROTECTION GAME”
When you lose, everyone knows the score. When you win, you are ignored. Hurricane Gustav struck on the critical path of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Larose to Golden Meadow Hurricane Protection System. This system was designed to shield against this type of storm and it was successful in protecting the communities of South Lafourche.
On September 1, 2008 a call was received from Will Schafer, a modeler for the National Weather Service, warning me that he had run two models of the storm with one overtopping the levee system and the other not overtopping. We received this call from the levee district’s emergency base of operations, the third floor of the Lady of the Sea General Hospital in Galliano. The winds were over 80 mph when I received the call.
To a certain degree, it was good news. I knew that most computer models lean toward being conservative and that we had raised much of the levee in the past two years, thanks to the 1 cent sales tax in South Lafourche. I suspected that the models did not have our latest elevations. But seeing and feeling the winds blowing over 100 mph consistently for hours, it seems hard to believe that the storm would not blow water over the top of the levee.
Later in the day the wind shifted from east to southeast. This meant that the water was being driven to one area where the levee intersects in an acute angle. There was also a break in the storms bands which allowed the winds to drop below 100 mph. Jimmy Badeaux, chief field manager for the levee district, and I decided to observe how that point of the levee was dealing with the storm surge.
We were able to drive to the shell road which accesses the levee, avoiding debris and power lines on La 1 and Hwy 308. But trees were blocking the shell road only a few feet from Hwy 308. Jimmy and I cut and dragged enough trees to allow our vehicle to squeeze through the remaining trees.
The rain was stinging us as we approached the levee on foot. We had to abandon the truck a few hundred feet from the levee because a power line blocked our path. It was a relief to see that we still had more than four feet of levee above the water.
After the storm we inspected the levee and found that the debris line indicated the storm did not get closer than four feet in the entire 48 mile system. In fact, the water levels reached a little over eight feet in the south near Golden Meadow, but hardly reached 3.5 feet in Larose.
But this success does not insure that the next storm will not find a lower section of levee to push its water. It is our responsibility to continue to find ways to raise the lowest parts of the system. To see the system and its levee elevations, we have a virtual fly over video by Dr. Roy Dokka of LSU. You can view this fly over on our website at www.slld.net.
Windell A. Curole
(985) 852-2084
October 7, 2009
