Word: lake
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Plug the holes, power the pumps ... As repair crews descended on the inundated city, the first step was to plug the breaches that let Lake Pontchartrain pour in. Less than two weeks after the storm, the major breaches had been filled, primarily with sandbags dropped from helicopters. Next, workers began getting power to the city's electric pumps...
...briefly exhaled when it looked as if the threat had passed. Several hours after the storm moved through on Monday, some streets were essentially dry. Then shortly after midnight, a section almost as long as a football field in a main levee near the 17th Street Canal ruptured, letting Lake Pontchartrain pour in. The city itself turned into a superbowl, roadways crumbled like soup crackers as the levees designed to protect them were now holding the water in. Engineers tried dropping 3,000-lb. sandbags, but the water just swallowed them. As the days passed, the Army Corps of Engineers...
Hurricanes kill people because we refuse to settle out of their way. Nowhere was that more apparent than in New Orleans, built in a bowl between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. "It was a fool's paradise," says Stephen Leatherman, who has studied hurricanes for 30 years and runs the Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University in Miami...
Once the city was there, nestled into what was essentially a lake bed, no one expected New Orleans to move someplace safe. But there were other options. Governments could have built stronger, higher levees and shored up the disintegrating coastline. As it was, the levees, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, were designed to handle storms as strong as Category 3, even though experts warned that worse storms were inevitable. "The Corps has been pushing for years for Category 5 protection," says retired Lieut. General Robert Flowers, past head of the Corps. "Decisions have been made to accept...
...according to figures supplied by the office of Louisiana's Democratic Senator, Mary Landrieu. The Administration cut the requests back to $166.5 million. Congress eventually approved $249.5 million, but that was still half of what the Corps wanted. The Corps' other major effort to shore up New Orleans, the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project, was also underfunded: as of this spring, seven of its contracts were delayed because of lack of money, according to a May 23 Corps report...