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Hurricane Barry touches Louisiana and New Orleans avoids dangers
By
Tom Hall
July 15, 2019
Hurricane Barry, the first hurricane of the year, landed in Louisiana on Saturday at 1 pm local time. The storm quickly weakened to become a tropical storm after touching the ground.
Flooding has been reported along rivers in rural areas throughout the state, including Mandeville, a suburban town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and large areas of southwestern Ontario. Louisiana. The danger of sudden floods has resulted in the closure of several roads in Lafayette, the largest city and cultural center in southwestern Louisiana, as well as all nearby New Iberia roads.
In Plaquemines Parish, storm surges surged the dikes along the Mississippi River, forcing a limited evacuation. A dike in the parish of Terrebone, located on the central coast of the state, was pbaded and flooding occurred along the Atchafalaya River in nearby Morgan. Portions of Highway 1 were flooded, isolating the coastal towns of Port Fourchon and Grand Isle.
No deaths have been reported yet. However, 12 residents had to be rescued from the island of Jean Charles in the parish of Terrebone. About 130,000 people lost power over the weekend.
Although the storm weakened to become a tropical depression, officials warned that the effects of the storm were continuing and more rain would be expected by the end of the week. The National Hurricane Center said that there was still a danger of "life-threatening" floods in the area. Yesterday, about 11 million people in the region were under surveillance.
As always, the storm has demonstrated the extremely poor level of disaster preparedness and infrastructure in what is supposed to be the richest country in the world. Although the region, one of the wettest in the United States, is constantly exposed to seasonal Mississippi floods, heavy rainfall and hurricanes, few resources have been identified to mitigate these hazards. This is especially true in the most remote rural areas, where drainage is often little more than ditches along the side of the road.
The remnants of the storm are expected to return from Arkansas to the Midwest until mid-week. Arkansas has already experienced record floods last month and portions of the state are expected to receive up to 8 inches of rain.
However, the impact of the storm turned out to be much less than initially feared. Storm surges and precipitation were lower than most forecasts. Crucially, the storm has also moved further west than expected, bypbading almost entirely Baton Rouge and New Orleans, by far the largest cities in the state, which received only low rainfall this week -end.
However, if Barry had struck New Orleans with the force initially planned, a combination of factors would have created an unusually hazardous situation for a Category 1 hurricane. The predicted precipitation would have overwhelmed the city's aging drainage system, centrally located. which is a system of 120 drainage pumps used to evacuate water from the lower city.
Only last week, a major rainstorm caused widespread flooding throughout the city, including in the rarest-flooded neighborhoods, such as the French Quarter. It was only the last of a series of floods after the heavy rains of the past two years, which occur almost regularly in the city.
An important factor was that large parts of the city's pumping system were virtually inoperative. While officials of the Sewage and Wastewater Commission (S & WB) insist that the city's pumps are running at almost full capacity, the floods of 2017 have revealed a concealment by those responsible for the actual situation of the system, which was barely working. At one point, only one in five turbine turbine units used to power the pumps worked, leaving only enough power for 38 out of 58 pumps in the city's most populous city center.
The floods due to rainfall would have combined with the more serious threat of floods caused by the Mississippi River. The water level on the river is already officially in the flood stage since the longest period in history, swollen with rain and snow from the Midwest. In March, the US Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carre spillway west of New Orleans to divert water from the Mississippi River to Ponchartrain Lake. Although the spillway is usually only open for a few days or weeks, it is still more than four months later.
It was feared that an additional two to three feet of storm surge in the river could have pbaded the lowest dikes in the area. The data suggests that the neighborhoods of Algiers and Lower Ninth Ward (which were destroyed and depopulated after Katrina) in New Orleans, as well as the suburbs of St. Bernard Parish, were the most endangered.
Even though these predictions did not come true (many companies remained open in town over the weekend), the fact that they could have been reasonably established, in response to a relatively modest storm by the standards of the region, shows nearly 14 years after Hurricane Katrina.
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