A Flurry of Activity to Drain New Orleans’ Septic Swamp

On the edge of New Orleans, the water is on fire and men are playing God.

Here at the northern point of the city, the broad and murky 17th Street Canal meets Lake Pontchartrain, which acts, in more temperate times, as a massive receptacle for water that collects in the heart of the swampy city below. The canal has become the dividing line between two different sorts of misery.

To the west are the suburbs that, guarded by a levee that stood up to Katrina, were merely the victim of a major hurricane. Trees have fallen on houses, and power lines drape over the streets like bunting, but there is a sense that civility will return soon. A few shops are opening. A handful of traffic lights are on. At many houses, there are still wind chimes and ferns hanging on the front porch.

To the east, the water was stagnant Friday for the 12th day, and though it has fallen more than 3 feet in recent days, it will still be there this morning. A natural gas main has erupted. The water above the break has been ablaze for a week. Bashed-in cars and buses rest grotesquely on their sides, submerged in the ominous muck with a strange assortment of items -- a lawn chair, a football, a sign that says “Welcome to the Jaegers!”

Here, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in a race against time, fighting to rid New Orleans of its floodwater before the city turns into an irreparably toxic swamp.

“All things being relative, the storm was nothing. The flood was everything,” said Matt Milinski, an engineer with the Deerfield Beach, Fla., pumping firm MWI, one of the contractors working with the corps. “We have to get the water out of there. Every day, every hour, it gets more septic.”

From a harried command center at the intersection of the lake and the Mississippi River, the corps has launched a series of ambitious projects aimed at closing the dangerous breaches in the protective levee system and then, finally, draining the city.

Each of them -- including a new pump station being built from scratch solely to create a current again in the lake -- represents a substantive public works project.

Each has demanded round-the-clock ingenuity to conquer problems -- how do you build a lock in a huge canal from scratch with few building materials? -- that are not found in any textbook.

“These things would normally take months,” said Jeff Richie, a corps structural engineer who is directing much of the work on the levee system. “We’ve had to do it in a week.”

And each project is an agonizing and often grisly task, with delays, breakdowns and, periodically, decaying bodies that are drawn into the pumps and pipes.

It is here, too, that some of the earliest discussions are taking place about how to prevent this from happening again.

At the end of each day, the engineers gather to talk shop and think big.

Should enormous nets be laid across drainage canals to catch debris and bodies impeding the pumps? Should a 50-foot-tall levee be built, when the city is stabilized, along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain?

“This is going to change everything about the way we develop levees and coastal cities and do our engineering,” Milinski said. “What is truly sustainable against a 200-year storm? This is going to change how this city is designed and how they will develop new cities, how people can live in an environment like this.”

And if many of the marshy areas to the south of the city, which once acted as a buffer against storms, are destroyed, how can New Orleans ever be fully protected?

“The city is now on the brink of the coastline,” Richie said. “Everyone knew how vulnerable New Orleans was. But you don’t truly consider these things until it happens. That’s reality.”

Authorities said Friday that the last of three major levee breaches that plunged the bulk of New Orleans into turmoil could be closed as early as today. That breach is on the London Avenue Canal, south of the lake and east of the 17th Street Canal, where the worst of the breaches occurred and was filled earlier in the week.

The last breach, which is 250 feet wide, is responsible for much of the flooding in New Orleans East, a district of downtown.

It has been the toughest to fill because it remains largely inaccessible. But substantial progress has been made in recent days through a frenzied sandbagging operation.

On a gravelly parking lot where the 17th Street Canal meets Lake Pontchartrain, Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters piloted by National Guardsmen have picked up more than 2,000 sandbags, each of them 10 feet long and 7,000 pounds, and flown them to the breach in the London Avenue Canal.

Next to a giant pile of sand, Army Corps workers filled the bags as fast as they could to be carted away. The helicopters swept in every few minutes, and workers wearing gauze hoods and goggles waited for them, holding up large metal loops attached to the bags.

In an operation that would impress a top NASCAR pit crew, the helicopters banked sharply over the lake and dived toward the pile of sandbags, where the workers on the ground swung the loops over hooks on the belly of the choppers.

The helicopters never touched the ground; the transaction took less than 10 seconds and they were off again.

“You get what we call ‘bladewash,’ ” said one of the loaders, corps employee Donald Davis. “It happens to you when you’re under there. You get hammered by those rocks. You just slap that thing on the hook and they fly. And then you try to bend over and let the top of your head and your back take the brunt of it.”

The sandbagging project is one of several going on simultaneously to fix the levees and get more pumps online.

At the north end of the 17th Street Canal, engineers have built a lock system with a series of 65-foot-long, interlocking metal pieces, enabling them to separate the canal and the lake. Teams of Navy divers swoop in to clear debris from the intake valves on the pipes and pumps that are starting up.

A new dam has been built around the city’s biggest pump station and water sucked out from the interior of the dam, allowing engineers to reach and fix several pumps there.

Progress is slow, but evident.

Six pumps have been powered, either through the electric grid or through generators, and are moving water through the canals and into the lake. A series of pipes has been plunged into heavily flooded neighborhoods. One of them, adjacent to the corps operation at the end of the 17th Street Canal, cast 27,000 gallons of floodwater a minute -- as well as a rancid stench -- over a new road and into the lake.

And detailed maps are being developed to keep tabs on water levels in different parts of the city.

Levels have dropped by more than 4 feet in the northwest corner of the city, though the floodwater remains as high as 15 feet in areas farther east.

“Once all of this comes together, the city can start to pick up the pieces,” Richie said. “But there is a lot of work to be done.”