Herculean pumping task

It probably will be at least four days after the hurricane before the corps attempts to begin removing water from the city, Combe said. After a 1947 hurricane flooded the east bank, it took several days for the lake to return to its normal average 14-foot depth, slowing efforts to drain floodwaters from Metairie and Kenner.

Pumping won't be an option. Swamped existing pumping systems in Orleans and Jefferson will be useless. Pumps can be brought in, but their capacity is limited.

"If one goes to construction equipment rental firms, you can rent pumps with a capacity of 6,000 to 8,000 gallons a minute, but that's just not enough capacity," Combe said. "After Betsy the corps employed six dredges with a combined capacity of 243,000 gallons per minute. It would take 44 hours to drain a half-inch of water from the New Orleans metro area that way."

The most likely alternative is simply blowing holes in the levees or widening existing breaches. Breaches in the levee totaling a half mile would allow the water to drain in one day, Combe said. With a more modest effort, totaling 100 feet of openings, draining would take four weeks. If they do dynamite the levees, officials must also weigh the risk of another hurricane hitting in the short term against the urgency of getting the water out.

Water levels will drop only to the level of the lake, leaving areas lower than that with standing water that must be pumped out. Workers will then focus on restoring existing generators throughout the city that operate the pumping system.

Harold Gorman, executive director of the Sewerage & Water Board, said his agency thinks it can get most of its pumps working in a month, based on its experience in Hurricane Betsy in 1965. But it may take longer than that just to get replacement parts for the various pumps and electric motors used in local drainage systems. "You've got a lot of apples and oranges out there," Combe said. "Sometimes it takes six months just to get parts. Sometimes there are no off-the-shelf parts available."

It will take six months to pump out Jefferson Parish, Combe said. But at that point, areas of New Orleans will probably still be underwater and may take many more months to empty.

Getting the water out is just the first step to making the city livable, officials say. "Imagine the city of New Orleans closed for four to six months," said Jefferson Parish Emergency Preparedness Director Walter Maestri. "We'll have to re-evaluate all our sanitary systems, completely evaluate the water and purification systems, evaluate half to two thirds of all buildings to see if they were structurally damaged by water pressure and wind. Restoring electricity will be another complicated problem. Will houses catch fire when they throw the power switch All that's going to have to be handled."

With few homes left undamaged, Red Cross and FEMA officials will have to find property for long-term temporary housing for a possible 1 million refugees. After Hurricane Andrew, some of the 250,000 residents of south Miami-Dade County forced to find temporary housing remained in federally financed mobile homes for 2½ years.

"You'd have manufactured housing brought in and set up in Baton Rouge and Folsom and so forth," Maestri said. "It's going to have to be north of Mandeville and Covington, because they're probably going to have hurricane damage as well. They'll probably use military bases like Camp Shelby in Mississippi, too. They'll be urban refugee centers, where people will stay while officials do an analysis to say, 'Yes, you can come back' or 'No, you can't come back here.' "

New Orleans would face the future with most of its housing stock and historic structures destroyed. Hotels, office buildings and infrastructure would be heavily damaged. Tens of thousands of people would be dead and many survivors homeless and shellshocked. Rebuilding would be a formidable challenge even with a generous federal aid package.

"You wouldn't have an infrastructure, that's for sure," said Hucky Purpera, natural and technical hazards chief for the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness. "What would you be going back to Residents might be going back in, but would businesses rebuild They'll make decisions based on what's best for the company. And if you do decide to rebuild, do you rebuild there A lot of that we don't know."

But it's unlikely the city would be completely abandoned, economists and disaster experts say. Most cities do eventually recover from major disasters -- though no precedent exists for the wholesale destruction of "filling the bowl."

No single storm would wipe out the entire New Orleans area. If the east bank floods, the west bank and St. Tammany Parish would take heavy damage from wind but be spared heavy storm-surge flooding. The city's location on the Mississippi River near the Gulf of Mexico would still be strategic for trade. Industrial plants upriver would remain largely intact.

"It's always recoverable. People own that property. They are not going to walk away. If someone does walk away, there will be a bank that will foreclose and ultimately resell that space," said Mary Comerio, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of a book on postdisaster reconstruction. "It will all be at fire-sale prices, and it will end up a different place, owned by different people."

After a Category 4 hurricane destroyed Galveston, Texas, in 1900, the entire island was raised 7 feet before rebuilding began. To avoid a repeat catastrophe, officials would likely consider how to hurricane-proof the city, or even think about moving it.

"We've not tried to tackle that yet," said Lowder, the FEMA official. "What's the best way to -- I won't say rebuild -- but where do we go from here How can we make sure that our recovery doesn't put things back the exact same way they were"

John McQuaid can be reached at (202) 383-7889 or john.mcquaid@newhouse.com.
Mark Schleifstein can be reached at (504) 826-3327 or mschleifstein@timespicayune.com.