The New Orleans Hurricane Protection System Assessing Pre-Katrina Vulnerability and Improving Mitigation and Preparedness (2009) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2 The IPET Draft Final Report
2 The IPET Draft Final Report
Pages 13-20
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From page 13... ...
Adequate assessment of the five IPET study objectives required an ambitious and extensive research program, which is described in eight volumes of over 7,500 pages of report chapters and appendices. In addition to its evaluations of the design and performance of the New Orleans HPS during Hurricane Katrina, and its evaluations of Katrina's waves, surges, and impacts, knowledge gained in answering these questions: 1)
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From page 14... ...
The IPET did a good job of explaining the storm surge generated by Hurricane Katrina, how waters from the surge entered into the New Orleans metro region from the east and from the north (across Lake Borgne, into Lake Pontchartrain, and ultimately into the city's outfall canals and the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal) , the role of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet in exacerbating storm surge (minor, if any)
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From page 15... ...
The nature of the performance of the hurricane protection system during Hurricane Katrina was an important area of investigation in the IPET studies, especially the geotechnical assessments of the four sites of foundation failures in the HPS. Special explorations were conducted in the field, which were complemented by laboratory centrifuge studies and analytical investigations using numerical modeling and limit analysis.
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From page 16... ...
The Executive Summary, however, is followed by a more detailed Summary section that includes a succinct list of the primary economic, environmental, and other consequences of Hurricane Katrina, along with useful discussion of the implications of Katrina's extensive impacts. RISKS TO NEW ORLEANS AND THE REGION POSED BY FUTURE TROPICAL STORMS The IPET volume on risks to the region posed by future tropical storms is Volume VIII of the report and is entitled "Engineering and Operational Risk and Reliability Analysis." Volume VIII was the principal focus of the final two years of the IPET study.
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From page 17... ...
The IPET draft final includes some discussion of varying vulnerabilities in different sections of the city and region, and it does include the inundation maps; this crucial information, though, is scattered and still is not well discussed. Volume VIII contains extensive discussions on the details of technical issues including crest elevations, reach descriptions, overflowing rate models, wave exceedance curves, breach elevation and volume models, and event tree branch probabilities.
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From page 18... ...
The IPET Volume VIII of June, 2008 provides a detailed description of the risk assessment methodology to characterize the potential for failure of HPS levees, flood walls, and related facilities. Although considerable attention is devoted to justification of the climatological and hydrodynamic methods and models, there is little treatment of the approximations and extrapolation of sparse geotechnical data that is also part of applying the risk assessment methodology.
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From page 19... ...
Given the major investments that are being discussed for marsh restoration projects in southern Louisiana (see USACE, 2007; State of Louisiana, 2007) , and the partial justification for these projects based on their value for increased hurricane protection, it is important that additional efforts be taken to improve understanding of the effects these features have on hurricane wave and storm surge across this region.
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From page 20... ...
The IPET and the Department of the Army should enlist the services of a firm that specializes in technical writing of scientific and engineering reports to produce a final, summary document of the entire IPET report. The summary should be written in layman's terminology in order to communicate clearly the IPET study results to decision makers and citizens.
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