Forefront Magazine 2006

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ForefrontC O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G UNIVE R SITY O F CALIFO R NIA, B E R K E LE Y

fall 200

Broken Levees:New Orleans to Sacramento

UC Berkeley engineers lead search for solutions

New center puts Berkeley on the

synthetic biology map

Simulated quake rocks the house

Can biofuels break our oil addiction?

Help make todays students tomorrows leaders.

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Barreling due north, Katrina churned the waters of the Gulf of Mexico

like the blade of a washing machine, whipping counterclockwise as it

spun along a 150-mile-wide path. Wave heights reached 25 feet as winds

piled water into the bay known as Lake Borgne east of the city, spilling

over into Lake Pontchartrain north of downtown. The fact that the eye

passed east of the city was, in retrospect, just as bad as if it had borne

down on the city center. The cyclone winds at the advancing edge of

the storm blew hard, driving water into a blind pocket of bay and lake,

creating high watersso-called storm surge16 to 18 feet higher than

normal in Lake Borgne. Add to that the storm-tossed waves, and the

levees were simply overwhelmed.

The first sign of trouble came even before landfall, at 4:30 a.m., when

water piling into Lake Borgne funneled into the Industrial Harbor

Navigation Canal, a shortcut for ocean-bound ships exiting the Mississippi

River, breaching a levee meant to protect homes in the heart of New

Orleans. This was followed within hours by eight other major breaches,

which together flooded 80 percent of the city to depths of up to 20 feet,

inundating 200,000 homes,killing upwards of 1,300 people and displacing

450,000 more, and running up costs, according to some estimates as high

as $300 billion. Katrina was the most costly peacetime disaster to hit an

urban area in U.S. history.

It was a disaster that neednt have happened, according to Berkeley civil

and environmental engineers Raymond Seed and Robert Bea, and a dis-

aster that could repeat itself in California, they say.

A stunningly similar situation exists in California with the potentially

catastrophic seismic risk associated with the fragile labyrinth of levees

C A N K A T R I N A S L E S S O N S F O R E S T A L L D I S A S T E R I N

T H E D E L T A ?

By the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Plaquemines

Parish, 70 miles southeast of New Orleans, at 6 a.m. Monday,August 29, last year, it had weakened from a Category 5 hur-

ricane to Category 3, its swirling winds dropping from 160 to

114 miles per hour. The citys flood protection systemmore

than 400 miles of levees and floodwallswas ostensibly built

to withstand this level of storm.

Broken Levees: New Orleans to Sacramen

by robert sanders

photo

courtesy

fema


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Forefront Magazine 2006

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