New Orleans Negative- 7ws inherency
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New Orleans Negative- 7wSInherencyNew system in New Orleans solves Hurricanes now NYT 6/15 John Schwartz / The New York Times Corps' $14.5 billion 'wall' now shields New Orleans June 15, 2012 12:24 am http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/us/corps-145-billion-wall-now-shields-new-orleans-640440/#ixzz1zHjKR9Zs NEW ORLEANS -- Finally, there is a wall around this city. Nearly seven years after floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina gushed over New Orleans, $14.5 billion worth of civil works designed to block such surges is now in place -- a 133-mile chain of levees, flood walls, gates and pumps too vast to take in at once, except perhaps from space. Individual components of the system can be appreciated from a less-celestial elevation. At the new Seabrook floodgate complex, climb up three steep ladders, open a trap door and step out into the blazing sunlight atop a 54-foot tower that was not here just two years ago. From there, one looks out over a $165 million barrier across the shipping canal that links Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. Two "lift gates," 50 feet across, can be lowered to block Lake Pontchartrain's waters. A navigation gate 95 feet wide, whose curved sides weigh 220 tons each, can be swung gently but mightily into place. When open -- which will be most of the time -- the gates allow easy boat traffic. But when a storm threatens, they will seal off the canal from the kind of surge that devastated the Lower Ninth Ward in Katrina. Yet all that seems puny in comparison to the two-mile "Great Wall" that can seal off the channel from Lake Borgne to the east, or the billion-dollar west closure complex, which features the biggest pumping station on the planet. Hurricane season has returned, as it does each June. Whatever storms might approach New Orleans this year or in the future will encounter a vastly upgraded ring of protection. The question is, will it be enough? When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city's hurricane protection system became a symbol of America's haphazard approach to critical infrastructure. The patchwork of walls and levees built over the course of 40 years was still far from complete when the storm came, and even the Army Corps of Engineers admitted that this was "a system in name only." Flood walls collapsed, and earthen levees built from sandy, dredged soils melted away. What has emerged since could come to symbolize the opposite: a vast civil works project that gives every appearance of strength and permanence. No other U.S. city has anything like it. "This is the best system the greater New Orleans area has ever had," said Col. Edward R. Fleming, commander of the New Orleans district of the corps. New system in New Orleans stops another Katrina now HSNW 1/10 Homeland Security News Wire Flood defense New Orleans flood defense system nears completion Published 10 January 2012 http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20120110-new-orleans-flood-defense-system-nears-completion The Army Corps of Engineers is rapidly nearing the completion of its upgrades to the massive levee and flood defense system designed to protect the greater New Orleans area from another Hurricane Katrina. Late last year the Corps estimated that the $14.6 billion project was more than 97 percent complete and expected to finish the project by the end of June 2012. The new 133-mile flood defense system that now rings the New Orleans area has been a massive endeavor setting many records for the Corps, the United States, and the world. For instance the 1.8-mile canal surge barrier along Lake Borgne is the largest design-build project in the history of the Army Corps of Engineers, while the barrier itself is the largest of its kind in the world with a wall twenty-eight feet above the water line and three gated structures. In addition, the project’s West Closure Complex features the world’s largest drainage pump station in the world and the largest sector gate in the United States. “The system doesn’t resemble what was here before Hurricane Katrina in terms of the level or risk reduction provided,” said Michael F. Park, the head of Task Force Hope in Louisiana, part of the Corps of Engineers’ Mississippi Valley Division. According to Park a significant amount of research went into designing the new flood protection system which is aimed at preventing storm surges from overtaking the 133-mile perimeter and pumping out any water that exceeds it. “The corps did undertake a very thorough hydraulic analysis to determine what would be the potential storm surge at every point around the perimeter,” Park said. Researchers began by modeling more than 150 storms based on history as well as theory ranging from a twenty-five year event to a 5,000-year event. “We’ve also factored in the subsidence that we’ve experienced in the southern Louisiana region and also the effects of climate change and sea level rise so that hard features are designed to be valid through 2057,” Park said. With the new flood defenses, Park is optimistic that the city will now be able to withstand a storm similar to Hurricane Katrina. “We should fare quite nicely in terms of flood risk reduction,” he said. Status quo solves – Gustav proves Sanchez et al. 09 [Thomas W. Sanchez, expert on transportation, land use, urban and regional planning, and environmental justice, John L. Renne, Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans, Pam Jenkins, University of New Orleans, and Robert Peterson] Challenge of Evacuating the Carless in Five Major U.S. Cities Identifying the Key Issues http://planning.uno.edu/docs/The%20Challenge%20of%20Evacuation%20the%20Carless.pdf In September 2008, 3 years of evacuation planning since Katrina were put to the test in New Orleans when the region evacuated for Hurricane Gustav. Although the data have yet to be fully analyzed, most felt that the city-assisted evacuation plan, which addressed carless and special needs populations, was implemented with amazing success in New Orleans. Outreach was a focus of government officials, which led to high participation rates resulting from collaboration across agencies and jurisdictions. New Orleans has adequate mass transit. Johnston and Nee 2006 – Department of City and Regional Planning (Eliza and Brendan “A Methodology for Modeling Evacuation in New Orleans” May 2006, http://blog.bn.ee/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/New_Orleans_Evacuation.pdf , maps and diagrams omitted )//ALo Mode/Route Assumptions Evacuation of New Orleans during Katrina was done almost completely using the road network, and primarily by private vehicle. However, New Orleans has extensive rail infrastructure, including separate bridges over the east and west ends of Lake Pontchartrain. Also, busses could be used more efficiently if they were allowed to make multiple trips into the city, and if their speeds were increased. Bus Transit Evacuation Modeling The Mardi Gras Index reported that at the time Katrina hit, there were 150,000 residents of New Orleans living in car-less households. Additionally, there are a large number of tourists in New Orleans at any given time, and also a number of individuals with cars who are not able to evacuate due to financial constraints. This population could be evacuated by a large-scale bus evacuation. With the numbers needing evacuation so high, an evacuation scheme that did not send each bus on multiple trips would require an enormous amount of busses. Thus, the key to a bus based evacuation is to minimize the delay and the distance that each bus must travel, and maximize the number of trips each bus can take into and out of the city in a given evacuation time period. New Orleans has 33,000 hotel rooms and 9000 rental cars. However, many tourists have their own cars or rent cars and thus have the ability to self evacuate. Assuming 1.5 persons per hotel room, 60% occupancy and that 50% drive their own car, 11,200 tourists will require evacuation. A survey by the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch of the 270,000 people living in shelters during Hurricane Katrina found that 23% in shelters were physically unable to evacuate while an additional 55% were from car-less households. Thus, there are 59,000 and 150,000 from each group respectively. This leaves a total of 262,300 evacuees, when prison and hospital populations are included. The prison, hospital and physically disabled populations will be dealt with in the next section detailing a rail-based evacuation. When these special populations are removed, 182,000 people remain to be evacuated via bus. New Orleans has an existing fleet of busses. The school district of New Orleans has 324 school busses and the transit agency has 364 busses (Infrastructure Final, 2006). The average bus capacity is 72-52 passengers, however the lower-end was used as a conservative capacity assumption. To maximize the number of trips each bus can make, the inbound lanes on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway will be utilized. One will be converted to outbound busses and emergency vehicles only, while one remain open to inbound traffic. This should allow busses to bypass the severe congestion that will occur at every bottleneck leaving the city. Each bus will pick up passengers at designated pick up locations and shuttle them across the causeway to transshipment points in safe areas, approximately 60 miles away. The process for locating these shelters is discussed later in the paper. If 100 busses per hour both inbound and outbound use the dedicated busway, average speeds for the entire journey could be 30 miles per hour. This includes the congested segment within the city of New Orleans, the relatively quick segment across the causeway, and another congested segment to the designated transshipment points. This will allow busses to make the 120 mile round trip in 5 hours, with one hour for loading and unloading. 3,500 busloads of people will need to be evacuated. However, the evacuation is possible given New Orleans current fleet of 688 busses. If each bus makes the round trip in 5 hours, the total evacuation time will be 26 hours, with most busses taking 5 trips. This is a very feasible solution to evacuating huge numbers of people, but it relies advanced planning and coordination to open up the dedicated bus lanes across the causeway, assemble car-less households at convenient pickup points around the city, and obtaining enough divers to operate almost 18,000 vehicle-hours of bus operations. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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