Le Show; 2008-07-20

Here it is from deep inside your radio. This is La Show and the time has come for another discussion at some length about water and New Orleans and also because of what's been happening recently. The big part of the United States, it sits on top of New Orleans and today it's my pleasure to have a friendly acquaintance, we don't know each other enough to be real friends yet, but we're getting there. And a fellow member of an organization or two and a distinguished scholar of these subjects, John Barry, best known I think outside New Orleans for being the author of Rising Tide, the seminal study of the 1927 Mississippi River flood. But best known here in New Orleans for being a stubborn and smart and personickity advocate of a better and smarter way of dealing with some of these problems.

And now a member of the Southeast Louisiana, what's the formal name of the organization? Well, the Southeast Louisiana flood protection authority east as opposed to west and the acronym would be, I don't know that it has an acronym, we've never been able to figure out everyone just calls it the levy board. It's after Katrina, there are several different levy districts that handle the metropolitan area because they're obviously different parishes, each one has end and they didn't consolidate the districts, but they consolidated the levy boards. So we now oversee several levy districts in the metropolitan New Orleans area. First of all, welcome. Thank you and thanks for the introduction. My pleasure and let me start there because an awful lot of people who comment to me when I blog about these subjects on the Huffington Post and just in conversation seem to be of the opinion that what happened in the Katrina event, some of the blame for that can be laid

at the feet of the, quote, corruption and cupidity of the old levy board. Was there anything that the levy board, even in the battle days, could have done to prevent what happened? Well, actually, there is one decision that they were complicit in, but it had nothing to do with cupidity and maybe stupidity, but not cupidity. The levy's are 100 percent designed and built by the federal government, 100 percent. However, the core of engineers did not want to make the drainage canals, these, part of the things that failed in Katrina, part of the system. They wanted to put gates at, I mean, to your audience, these drainage canals carry rainwater out of the city into Lake Pontchartrain and the core wanted to seal them off from Lake

Pontchartrain, which is what they're doing now, so that Lakewater storm surge, the ocean goes into the lake and then goes into these, could go into these drainage canals. The core did not want to expose those canals to storm surge, and the Orleans levy board fought that idea because it would have added expense to the Orleans parish in the city of New Orleans, and they were successful because they had friends in Congress who took care of it. That, however, had nothing to do with the design of the flood walls along the canal. If it had actually been a greater storm, and Katrina was a great storm the way it hit the Gulf Coast, but what destroyed New Orleans, what devastated New Orleans, was actually not a great storm. It was 100 mile an hour winds, the storm surge wasn't that great on the lake, and the flood

walls that failed, failed in front of a storm they were designed to hold easily, in fact, the... They were advertised to hold. It was just a bad design. There were actually experiments done by engineers who worked for the core, in Vicksburg, that concluded these flood walls would fail exactly the way they did fail, the precise mechanism of failure, but that information was never conveyed, although it was published, but the information never made it to the people actually building the flood walls or designing the flood walls. What was the date of those studies? Oh, 80s, 19 year, you know, mid-80s, before the plans were finalized, so that's just bad management and competence, terrible design, nonetheless, if the lake had been shut off from those canals, which we are doing now, then that part of the city, which is most

of the city really that got devastated, would not have been flooded. For those studies, the basis of federal judge Stan would devile saying that the core knew that the system would not hold, is that what he based his finding on? I don't know. I haven't read his decision, so I can't really comment on something that's, you know, I don't want to take the lawyerly... Well, you're not in the squad, you don't play one on TV, so... Well, just today, as Harry and I were talking about this, as we were coming over here, for the first time, our levy board, we inherited billions of dollars in lawsuits, in fact, we're being sued for $200 billion dollars. Wow, that must make you feel good. Wow, it's really cool. But today, we got the first lawsuit actually filed against us, so now we're like grown-ups. Oh yeah, it's like a bar mitzvah for the levy board. We in New Orleans have learned to look a scance when something is described as a natural disaster based on our experience with Katrina, was the flooding in the upper Mississippi basin

this year a natural disaster? Well, a little bit of both. It, you know, obviously there was more rain than the system could handle. The question of how well the system was designed and what contributions were made by man to the disaster, that gets a little bit more complicated. I think, to a large extent, though, these were local decisions, rather than core of engineers' decisions. In fact, one of the problems is that there's no coordination on the upper part of the river and the tributaries between different jurisdictions, even to the extent that there's no information exchange, so that there's no central point that even knows where all the levy's are, how high they are, how well made they are, and obviously if you're trying to figure out a flood fight or where the water is going to create the most problem, and

you don't even know how high a levy is or how well made it is, it's pretty difficult to plan your defense and coordinate and build a system. After the 93 flood, there was actually a terrific study by the White House that was hailed by everybody. It was hailed by agricultural interests. It was hailed by barge interest shippers on it. It was hailed by environmentalists. Everybody agreed. It was a great study. It came out with something like 84 recommendations, and only one of them was any action ever taken on. Well, one out of 84 is good. Yeah, that was not a flood insurance, and it's obscene, really. You had the flood in 93 on the upper Mississippi, which was significantly greater than this year's flood, vastly greater as bad as this one was.

We had Katrina, we now have this flood in 2008, and frankly, the country still does not have the will, the political will, to do anything. And indeed, after Katrina, the Congress ordered the Corps of Engineers to take an inventory of the levies around the country, and the Corps started this in 2006, but then Congress stopped appropriating money for them to do it. So it's only two years after the law passed, and they already stopped appropriating money to pay for this inventory of levies. Was that the program under which the Corps came out with that report last year that said there were like 126 defective levies, including in the Sacramento Delta of California? That's correct. And Sacramento is the next disaster waiting to happen. And friends of mine and Sacramento know that. Yeah.

There are people who are, there are developers who want to build land that is 20 feet below sea level there, that this is much lower than any point in New Orleans. In fact, this is kind of off the direct line of questioning, but it's relevant. People talk about New Orleans being below sea level, the actual data is that just over one half of the city, and I mean just over like 51% is at or above sea level. But sea level is a little bit of a misleading way of approaching the question, because New Orleans is a major port. So it starts at sea level, virtually every major port in the world, and absolutely every major port in the world that's built on an alluvial river, like the Mississippi, is start, you start out at sea level. So as soon as you develop it, you start effectively draining the land so you sink below sea level. You know, anybody who's ever flown into the airport outside Amsterdam has landed about,

I think it's around 13 feet below sea level lower than any point in New Orleans. You know, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Tokyo, a third of Tokyo is below sea level. Two-thirds of Osaka is below sea level, Lagos below sea level. It isn't just New Orleans, if you have a port on a river system, it is going to be below sea level. The question is what you do to protect it because you need to have the port. People around the country don't realize Pittsburgh is a port with direct access to the ocean because of the Ohio River to the Mississippi through New Orleans. Tulsa is a port with direct access to the ocean, and it's actually reasonably, it's not a tiny port.

And the value of New Orleans is to make the whole interior part of the country accessible to the ocean and to shipping, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than rail or truck. Especially now. Especially now. Another thing that people don't realize, you hear of the Lower Ninth Ward, first it's called the Lower Ninth Ward because it's downriver night because it's low ground. Some of the ground is as high as any ground in New Orleans. Well, the Lower Ninth Ward was flooded by the industrial canal. That is a man-made canal, it's a canal. People dug it. And it was flooded by the Gulf Intercoast of Waterway, again, a man-made canal. These are for the shipping industry. The Gulf Intercoast of Waterway was actually built to protect shipping from German submarines in World War II. It stretches from Texas to Florida. Well, but it's worked.

There hasn't been an attack by German submarines in years. That's exactly right. It's been very effective. If it weren't for these canals, this area would have been dry. It would not have been flooded by Katrina. And the benefits of the Gulf Intercoast of Waterway is the entire country. It's just the connection through the Mississippi River system to the rest of the country and to the national interest. I mean, these are reasons why I personally, and I think most people who are informed, realize that it is a national responsibility to protect the city because these attributes, such as the Gulf Intercoast of Waterway, that benefit the entire country have actually made New Orleans more dangerous, that New Orleans, naturally, before they built these things, was not particularly vulnerable to hurricane, certainly no more than any other coastal city

and much less than most coastal cities because it's- We have the wetlands as a buffer. Exactly. More with John Barry Moments from now here on the show, but first, the apologies of the week. Two weeks in a row, Jesse Jackson, delivers himself in an apology about the same incident. This week, quote, I'm deeply saddened and distressed by the pain and sorrow that I have caused as a result of my hurtful words. This is closing the quotes for a moment. Just because it became known this week that in the off-air, on-mic, whispered episode in which Jesse Jackson spoke disparagingly of Senator Barack Obama, he reverend Jackson used the N word, quoting again. I apologize again to Senator Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, their children as well as to the

American public. It really is no justification for my comment, and I hope that the Obama family and the American public will forgive me. I also pray that we as a nation can bump up up up up up up up up up up up up up up up up up. Jesse Jackson, we'll be waiting for next week's apology. Pope Benedict, the XVI, has apologized to people sexually abused by members of the clergy in Australia. He raised the issue during a ceremony to concentrate the alter of St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney. Pope has been participating in World Youth Day activities for a week. It's a long day. I would like to pause to acknowledge the shame which we have all felt as a result of the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy and religious in this country, Pope Benedict said. Indeed, I am deeply sorry. For the pain and suffering, the victims have endured, and I assure them that as their pastor, I too share in their suffering. These misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation. They have caused great pain. They have damaged the church's witness.

And I get an unquote. I also said victims should receive compassion and care. The recent weeks have seen a case exploding on Australian television news in which a victim of priestly sexual abuse had his complaint rejected by the Archbishop of Australia, who was in possession of a report saying the event happened and was in possession of a report saying that the same priest committed a similar act. The Archbishop said he rejected this particular case because he'd had no reports of similar conduct by the priest in question. Pope didn't specifically address that UBS executive Mark Branson surprised the Senate subcommittee on Investigations, UBS the Giants Whist Bank, by saying that the world's largest wealth manager would stop offering offshore banking services to U.S. clients, oh crap, through branches in Switzerland or other areas that aren't subject to U.S. regulations.

Quote, UBS genuinely regrets any compliance failures that may have occurred, said Branson, chief financial officer of the Global Wealth Management Unit. On behalf of UBS, he continued, I'm apologizing and committing to you, the Senate, that we will take the actions necessary to make sure this does not happen again. So now we have to manage our own wealth, ladies and gentlemen. The Oklahoma, hey, attention all in Nebraska corn husker fans. The Oklahoma publishing company and a sports writer this week sued in a Nebraska football fan who admitted creating a fake internet article about two University of Oklahoma quarterbacks. A opubco and sports writer Jake Trotter sued James Conrad, the alleged perfect creator of the hoax, accusing him of libel copyright violations and trademark infringements. Conrad published a defamatory article on the internet July 9th that falsely stated Oklahoma quarterbacks had been arrested for intent to distribute cocaine. Conrad is a Nebraska fan who works as a computing services manager in the information technology

department at the University of Texas. Last week Conrad admitted to Oklahoma columnist in a telephone interview that he was responsible for the hoax he said he wasn't thinking. I want to express my deepest apologies to the families of the quarterbacks Conrad said, I didn't want to hurt anyone. He added, I think anonymity brings out the worst in people. The apologies of the week, ladies and gentlemen, a copyrighted feature of this very broadcast. This is Lesho and we're talking with John Barry who is the author of the, a claimed book about the 1927 Mississippi River flood rising tide and Secretary of the East Bank, New Orleans levy board. I'm going to give it its brief name. Your study of the 1927 flood, I think, is essential understanding for people who want to know what the history of this place is and based on that, and people have seen Spike Lee's movie, People Have Heard from a lot of other sources, rumors believed to a greater

or lesser extent by a lot of folks here that based on noises, people heard and other things that there was some deliberate dynamiting or other attacking of the canal, the flood walls, the levies. Do you have any data at your disposal? Yeah, I mean, I personally was on that led the industrial canal, levy, I was inspecting it with actually with Ivor Ran, here who ran the state of Louisiana's forensic team and it was entirely obvious what caused that collapse. The flood wall was overtopped and when the water was pouring like an agro falls over the top of that wall, flood wall, which looks like these noise, you know, you drive down an interstate highway and they have on the side the noise barriers to protect the suburban complex.

That's exactly what the flood wall looks like and it's probably about as strong. Anyway, when the water poured down the top of that flood wall over a period of time, it ate away at the earth that held that flood wall in place and then the flood wall collapsed. Now, I don't doubt that there was an enormous noise, you know, when a flood wall 20 feet high suddenly topples over because of the force of that water, that's going to make a loud noise and the water itself is enormously loud. So I can understand why someone would say they heard an explosion, but I was personally on that levy. It was totally obvious that levy was overtopped and gave way because of the overtopping. You could argue again, engineering, they did not put some sheet piles that are supposed to anchor that flood wall, they didn't put it deep enough, it's supposed to be 60 feet,

they decided to make it 17 feet and you know, that may have been a stupid decision, but at least that levy or did what it was designed to do, you know, it wasn't designed to hold that water, whereas the flood walls on the 17th street canal, the Orleans canal, Avenue canal, the London Avenue canal, those things just gave way in front of a flood they were supposed to hold. They were not overtopped, the water on those canals didn't come any higher than two feet below the top, but that was still enough pressure because of bad design and perfectly good construction. In fact, this is another thing about the course stupidity. Even contractor actually sued, you know, it's funny, normally I go on shows and find myself defending the core and I'm not known as, you know, one of the course harshest critics of life, though I've certainly criticized them, but this was done, you know, a contractor

who was building that flood wall on one of the spots told the core what they were doing wouldn't hold. The contractor told it and he sued the core trying to get the core to build a better product that would work and also, of course, to get more money for it and the core fought his lawsuit in one and they never sent any engineers to evaluate his claims, it was entirely done by lawyers. Well, you know, the result is what we have when you need flood protection call a lawyer. So now we hear a New Orleans reports about seepage into the neighborhood on the so-called protected side of the newly rebuilt newly refurbished 17th Street Canal and we see pictures in the paper of puddles and core saying it's brackish, it's coming from seawater, meaning it's coming from the other side of the flood wall or in some cases saying it's not brackish,

but saying in either case it's nothing to worry about and I think there's a historical memory in this town of a year and a half before Katrina, homeowners in pretty much the exact same location were saying, hey, there's water bubbling up in my lawn on that side of the 17th Street Canal flood wall and core officials were saying it's nothing to worry about. Are we reliving the past here? I hope not and as a member of the levy board actually, you know, we're obviously quite concerned about this. To the core is credit, they've they've changed since Katrina. They are by a wide margin, the best federal agency or any governmental agency to deal with since Katrina, far better than any other federal agency and probably better than a state of local agency.

With us, they've been responsive, they've been extremely helpful. When we've had questions about something and said we'd like them to do a peer review and have some experts come in and they've they've done it and there are some explanations for the seepage that are, you know, which is what the core believes that, you know, are nothing to worry about and that will eventually go away. We don't know that they're right. So we have asked as the levy board has actually not just requested, we've said we need people independently looking at this and telling us what's wrong. Is the core correct or the critics of the core correct? We will find out because of that, I think relatively rapidly. I have, you know, just a layman's acquaintance with all these subjects. My sense of what's been going on the last three years is that the core has repaired the

parts of those levy's and flood walls that breached. But have they done anything to the parts of that structure that didn't breach? On the industrial canal and the Gulf Indra goes to waterway and this is where we're Gulf outlet, those things have been protected from over topping and you can understand the difference that a hurricane storm surge is not like river flood can last for days or maybe even weeks, a hurricane storm surge is a matter of hours. So if you can protect the levy from over topping for a few hours, then, you know, it will survive. The water goes away and you're okay and all that the only water you'll get water, you get some flooding but only the amount of water that goes over the top like over the lip of a bathtub and that could create some problems but it's certainly not a disaster or much less a catastrophe.

So they have done that. The biggest change, however, has been on the drainage canals. They are, I hope this isn't getting too technical for listeners who don't have a sense of the geography in New Orleans. Again, these drainage canals take rainwater into Lake Poncho train which sits north of the city. These are like three fingers from the lake. Exactly. The lake, it's certainly not as big as the Great Lakes but it's a big lake. It's, you know, 50 miles long and more than 20 miles wide and has the direct, it's almost a bay with direct access to the Gulf of Mexico. So the main thing they've done is put gates at the miles of those canals so that the water from the lake cannot and from a storm surge coming through from the Gulf of Mexico cannot get into those canals anymore. So even if they haven't dramatically improved the strength of the walls along the sides of those canals.

They're keeping the water from getting in and forth. They're not going to be stressed that way they were before. Now, as a board, we are still not happy with this and we have been pushing them to improve the walls on the canals anyway for redundancy. On the other side of the city where the industrial canal runs from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and then we have these shipping channels that go out one parallel to the Gulf Coast in land and, you know, we have a little bit of a bigger problem. There will be a gate eventually that protects that region from storm surge coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. It's that part of the 100-year plan that's supposed to be done by 2011. And there will be an interim gate that will be finished by next hurricane season. But this year we're still vulnerable right there.

But that gate will be an enormously significant addition to the flood protection for the city. Now when we talk about a 100-year event, people who've been following the news in the Midwest know that there have been 200-year events in the last 15 years. Right. It's an idiotic way of describing the West. It's just stupid. And even before this, actually, I was talking to people at the National Academy of Sciences and in the Corps of Engineers about the terminology and I'm not the only one other people have realized this is a stupid way of thinking about it because people here, 100-year storm, which means it's got a 1% chance of hitting any particular year. And it just sounds like, well, if I'm protected against 100-year storm, I don't have to worry about it. That's not the case.

I personally would like the terminology to change so that we talk about somebody's lifespan. You know, if the average lifespan in the US is now called at 80 years, it's not quite, but foreign numbers. What is the chance during somebody's life that they will see a catastrophic event like Katrina in their community? And the reality is, in the rest of the world, they laugh at the standards we use in the US. I mean, in Holland, they protect against river floods using a standard of a minimum of a 250-year flood going up to a 1,250-year flood. That's for a river. For the ocean, they use a standard of protecting against a 10,000-year flood. And in Japan, depending on how populated the area is and what the economic value is, they go anywhere from a 100-year flood to a 10,000-year flood.

Now protecting against a 10,000-year flood sounds like it's over the top and something you don't really need to worry about. But if you translate it into a lifetime event, a 10,000-year storm actually has almost a 1% chance of occurring in the lifetime of an average person. A 100-year storm has roughly a 60% chance of occurring in the lifetime of an average person. Whether people here who've seen two of those, Betsy and Katrina, and some have seen three in their lifespans, right? Yeah. Yeah. Right. That sort of proves that. Well, obviously, we never had a disaster as bad as Katrina before, hard of that was the engineering, but the storm itself, it was an enormous storm. The Gulf Coast got hit by a storm surge that was 28 feet.

That's as big as the tsunami in Asia. And speaking of tsunamis, what's again, news of the war, ladies and gentlemen, watch it? Yes, this is a show. Climate change will pose substantial threats to human health in the coming decades. That's not Al Gore saying that. That's the Environmental Protection Agency, issuing its warnings about heat waves, hurricanes, and pathogens, just days after the same agency declined at the behest of Vice President. Dick Cheney, to regulate the pollutants blamed for the warming, they say, will pose substantial threats to human health. The EPA says it's very likely that more people will die during extremely hot periods in future years, and that the elderly poor and those in inner cities will be most at risk. Other possible dangers include more powerful hurricanes, shrinking supplies of fresh water in the West.

Who needs that? And the increased spread of diseases contracted through food, strong warnings. Coming from the EPA. In the West, it found changing weather patterns could thin the snowpack that feeds rivers affecting hydroelectric dams and water supplies in coastal areas. It could bring a sea level rise. We've just been talking about that, that eats away a dry land and storm surges that can wash the land away in a flash. In Washington, another eastern city, the report said a warmer climate is likely to produce more bad air days. Welcome to the club, boys. And girls, because heat speeds up the process by which exhaust byproducts are cooked into smog. The report also found that rising temperatures are likely to mean more periods of sustained summer heat. Yeah, it's going to be hotter, it's going to be hotter sooner in the year than it was in the past. It said one of the report's authors. She said young people living in Washington, for example, will notice a difference before they reach middle age.

They're going to look back and think about how nice the summers used to be. Well, kids, people always do that when they look back on their youth, don't they? Oh, man, the summers, they were so nice. But wait, there's more. The loggerhead shrike, once common, is now severely imperiled. Hundreds of species of birds, including many once common songbirds, such as the meadowlock and Bob White, are in the, the Bob White, are in the United States, falling in population by as much as 90% since the 60s. Scientists and government officials and conservation groups told Congress this week. Chief cause is destruction of habitat. Scientists said, they said rising food prices in the push for alternative fuels are putting intense pressure on farmland set aside for conservation. Other killers include invasive plant species that take over the native, nesting sources, wind turbines located near critical flyways, whoo, there goes another bird, lighted and glass encased buildings, lighted cell phone towers, domestic cats, disease pesticides, and climate change, which is also shrinking habitat ranges.

That's, that's quite a list there, I don't know if we can handle everything on that list. We can get rid of domestic cats, I know that, don't you dare. Farmers racing to plant corn for ethanol, which is subsidized by the federal government, falling in millions of acres out of the nation's private land conservation program. Even green building codes that aim to make structures environmentally friendlier, mainly by conserving energy, pay no attention to bird destruction, says Karen Cotton, a bird crash specialist. Now, they never told you about that job in career day and high school today. You could be a bird crash specialist. At the American bird conservancy, Cotton said as many as 975 million birds are killed by crashing into buildings each year. Many migrating species of neotropical songbirds, which breed here and winter in the Caribbean, you know, that's a good life. Are attracted to internal and external building lights as they migrate at night.

The light fields entrap night migrating birds. A new analysis suggested biofuels grown in the tropics are not a much greener source of energy than drilling for oil, at least in the short term. The research paints an even gloomier picture of biofuels than previous studies, which have begun to cast doubts on the greenhouse gas benefits. They might provide plants that produce palm oil or corn, ethanol, recycle carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. But two studies published in science suggest that the carbon benefits from biofuels are delayed for centuries when farmers knock down carbon absorbing forests like the rainforest in order to grow the plants. One estimated that cutting down Brazilian rainforests to grow soybeans for diesel fuel would result in a so-called carbon debt that would take 319 years to repay essentially rendering the fuel as carbon unfriendly as gasoline in the short term. To get a better sense of just how green biofuels are, Holly Gibbs, a tropical land-use scientist

at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and colleagues used new data on the yields of 10 crops in various seasons and ecosystems within the rainforest areas, even when Gibbs assumed the plants would perform in the top 10% of all global varieties, with corn, ethanol varieties, way up producing what they currently can, the picture remained gloomy. Oh, don't be gloomy, we're not a happy face. It's warm, I'd say. Shrieking sea ice is significantly increasing the rate at which icebergs scour the Atlantic Seabed by a study released Thursday of this week has found. Yes, even the sea has to sleep somewhere. About 80% of Antarctic marine life is found in the sea bed and these scours crush the animals and plants living up to 500 meters below the surface by the ice. They do promote biodiversity by creating space for marine animals to live. Too many scours could change the distribution of key species and affect the type of number of creatures living in Antarctic waters, researchers warned.

The number of ice scours is expected to increase as global warming continues to reduce the size and duration of winter sea ice. Study was published in the journal Science. And add kidney stones to the growing list of possible consequences of global warming and new study warns that as many as 2.3 million more people may develop the stones in their kidneys as a result of warming. There's a greater risk they will be subject to dehydration in more salt reclimes, which is believed to be a major contributor to stone formation. This and proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those are the warm ladies and gentlemen. Copyrighted feature of this broadcast. But wait there's... There's more right here. The federal government has dropped two investigations into the Inspector General overseeing Iraqi Reconstruction Projects.

He was the guy who was finding all the waste fraud and abuse so of course they open an investigation into him. In a July 3rd letter, federal prosecutors said they closed the criminal investigation of steward Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction. No charges being brought, Mr. Bowen has gratified this inquiry has concluded, says his lawyer. He's gratified. And Bush administration initiative to defend the nation against a smuggled nuclear bomb or biological outbreak or attack, those initiatives remain poorly coordinated, costing billions of dollars while basic goals and policies remain incomplete. According to new reports, by congressional investigators, the grownups, I blame the grownups. Clean safe, too cheap to meter. The French nuclear giant Ariva, this week confirmed there was a radioactive leak from a broken pipe at a nuclear fuel plant in southeastern France a week after a uranium spill at another of its plants polluted the local water supply. The latest incident comes as an embarrassment to the French government.

While in Dua, as it struggles to contain environmentalists' anger and reassure residents near its nuclear plants, that they are safe, meanwhile a Scottish beach contaminated by nuclear waste is a radioactive minefield that should be closed immediately, say the worried locals, sandside beach and attractive bay two miles west of a decommissioned fast breeder reactor, 5,000 particles have been accidentally discharged from the reactors, crumpling storage shafts with many being washed ashore at the popular beach spots. It's just radioactivity, babe, and the US government has calculated a new total cost to open and operate the nation's first nuclear waste dump over 90 billion dollars. It's too cheap to meter because you don't meter the cost of the dump. It's the first official estimate since 2001 when the figure was 58 billion, so the cost of building it is doubled and they haven't started building it yet. Now, any of you who've dealt with contractors know what the next chapter of that story is.

The Energy Department official in charge of managing Yucca Mountain, Ward Sprote, I say Ward Sprote, disclosed the new number to reporters this week, includes 9 billion already spent and covers about 100 years of operation until the dump is sealed up forever, and that won't cost anything, because that's cheap. News of the warm and of your nuclear power miracle to come, ladies and gentlemen, it's all copyrighted. Don't worry about it. This is Lucio. Once again, we're talking with John Barry of the New Orleans Levy board and author of Rising Tide. Let me backtrack just to give people a greater understanding that when you said the Levy boards were merged and reformed, what was the difference in the composition of the membership of the old Levy boards and your colleagues? Well, the old Levy boards were purely political instruments, and in fact, they were actually reserved, in some cases, by statute, to be appointed by local politicians.

The new boards, there's actually a nominating committee which is made up of deans of the colleges of engineering, of every university in the state, and good government groups. They form a nominating committee. People have to apply to be on the Levy board. By law, we have to have five engineers on the board. People on the board is a past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. We have a PhD hydrologist expert on soils, and the movement of water through soils. We have a former head of regional U.S. weather bureau, so he's a very skilled meteorologist who, in the past, has made hurricane predictions. This is really one of the probably best qualified board of its kind in terms of technical expertise in the country.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to that suitcase. All the engineers are skilled. We've got one lawyer. I'm not really a technical person. In fact, not only I'm not really a technical person. You're not a technical person. You're not a technical person. But you're a smart person. Well, you know, I've been involved in policy, and I think there's a place for that. So, you know, I can go talk to congressman, maybe, and more easily, or at least communicate more clearly than some other members of the board, and, you know, plus I have access to the media, and frankly, that's a useful tool. Are you paid? Oh, yeah. We get, every time the board meets once a month, we get $179. Cash? No, it's not cash, but the checks haven't bounced yet. We get $0.44 a mile, too. Oh, good.

So, you know, unfortunately, I'm not president of the board, because our board president probably works. I am not exaggerating. I would guess he puts in 35 to 50 hours a week on this. Wow. You're secretary? I'm secretary. I probably put in somewhere between 10 and 20 hours. I don't think, frankly, then any of us, if we had realized what we were getting into, I don't think any of us would have, would have volunteered. I don't think any of us, you know. You're not quitting. No, we're not quitting. Back to the rating of protection, what would it take to say people on the upper Mississippi people in New Orleans are going to get engineering that provides, so-called, 10,000-year protection as opposed to 100-year protection? Well, it would take a lot of money, which would take a lot of will, which would take a lot of, you know, political, you know, you have to name your priorities. What's the total of the damage done in Katrina and the Mississippi River floods this year?

Do you know? Well, that's too rational on approach. I'm sorry. I'll go goopy now. After any disaster, we have this urge to pour money in. Two, three years later, people have already forgotten about it. As indicated, we were talking earlier, in 2006, Congress ordered the Corps of Engineers to start inventorying levies around the country, and the Corps started that. But already, Congress has stopped funding that program. It's still on the books, but they didn't give the Corps any money to do it. And the reason? It just wasn't a high enough priority for this administration, nor did Congress step in. You know, money is tight. I guess the bottom line is, this city is lurching along a kind of very slow motion recovery. I think it's really has picked up though in the last six or eight months, significantly.

Part of that is money from Road Home finally started to flow. That's the homeowner assistance program that the state has run. And one of my favorite lines is yours, that the illusion of leadership is more dangerous than lack of leadership. We do not labor under that burden. There is no illusion that there is any political leadership here. So people do recognize they have to do it themselves, and they are doing it themselves. And you live here, and do you feel a certain twinge every June 1st and a certain relieved exhale every November 1st as the hurricane season begins and ends? Yeah, sure. I feel a lot better in a couple of years when the 100-year protection is in place. The reality is, for the most heavily populated parts of the region, 100-year protection is actually better than 100-year protection.

It's approaching, you know, fortify 100-year protection, which begins to almost be reasonable. That's not the entire region. But as I say, the most densely populated areas of the region do have will-have. They don't yet, but they will have effectively much better than 100-year protection. We mentioned in passing, beginning the matter of the coastal wetlands, which is historically acted as a protective buffer for this city from the coastal impact of hurricanes, and which have been eroding and dying away. Does the levy board get involved with issues of the wetlands restoration, or is that- Well, a little bit, but the restoration project is really being run primarily by the state. The state wetlands, the reality is, all this land that melted away, some of it is every bit as solid as where we're standing, or at once was solid.

It's not just marsh. What people don't understand, the Mississippi River carries a lot of sediment. It actually created all the land from Cape Gerardo, Missouri, your good friend, Rush Limbo. Yes, sure. Just sign that big $400 million deal. Well, Rush is from Cape Gerardo. All the way from Cape Gerardo to the present mouth of the Mississippi River, that land, roughly 35,000 square miles in seven states, was made by the deposit of sediment. If you step off the main street in Cape Gerardo, Missouri, that land is just as solid as some of the land that has melted into the ocean down here in Louisiana. People lost roughly 2,000 square miles, which is about the size of the state of Delaware. If you put the state of Delaware, wrap it around the city of New Orleans, then New Orleans doesn't need any lefties.

It's fine. You take that land away, and New Orleans is suddenly very exposed. That's why I said earlier that nature did not leave New Orleans, particularly vulnerable to hurricanes, who's actually fairly safe, particularly for a coastal city. But man has intervened, and things that we've done, such as the navigation channels, have had an enormous impact on erotation of this land. Other things that have eroded the land that have also benefited the entire country, is the oil industry. They've cut 10,000 miles worth of canals and pipelines through the coastal marsh, and that let saltwater intrusion is very rapidly led to the erosion of a lot of this land. Even there are dams in North Dakota and South Dakota that were built in the 50s and 60s

to generate electricity and to irrigate those areas and provide some flood protection, and those dams actually have withheld one-third of the sediment that used to go down the Mississippi River. You take in one-third of the natural flow of sediment is actually in the Dakotas, that used to come down here, and it's not in the river anymore. The rest of it gets dumped off the end of the continental shelf, right? An awful lot of it for the shipping industry. The jeddies carry what remains, so between depriving Louisiana of sediment and drilling for oil in the shipping industry, that is why Louisiana's lost so much land so rapidly. The last question I want to ask you is, when I talk about this with friends sometimes or people who email sort of a glib response will be, well, what difference does it make?

Global warming is going to raise sea levels and it's all going to go away. What do you say to that? Well, it's really kind of funny, and the irony is that New Orleans is in better shape regarding rising sea level than most coastal communities. The reason is the marsh is alive, and the marsh will adapt to rising sea level and rise with the sea level if they get the sediment. If they get enough sediment, they will adjust and rise so that instead of that land going under water, a lot of it will just get higher. Not all of it by any stretch, but that's still a lot better off than a place like Miami or New York. New York, if you're on a rock, there's nothing that's going to grow, it just goes under water. But because of the way this land was built and the sediment in the misses that be river,

there is the potential for the adjustment here that does not exist for much of the rest of the world, really, and it is a great irony. But that doesn't mean that rising sea level does not threaten New Orleans, and as you build or we build a flood protection system, obviously, we need to recognize that rising sea level is a real threat, and as we speak, the core of engineers is working on a fairly detailed plan. They came out with an early draft of it in May. They're supposed to be finished in November. They're actually supposed to have finished it last November, but it's complicated. November's or November's? Yeah. I mean, on that one, I'll give them a pass. They were told to deliver in November, but it's enormously complex technically. It's more important they do it right than they do it fast. As a New Orleansian and as a official involved with this, are you basically optimistic, pessimistic

or neutral? Well, like almost everyone else in the city, you know, you have your good days in your bad days. And it used to be you'd have two good days in a row and four bad days in a row. But it's been more recent, you know, I'd have four good days in a row and one or two bad days intermittently. I had a recent bad day and that was when the Congress passed a supplemental appropriation without much of a break for Louisiana in terms of 100-year protection. In fact, I think we got screwed, you know, Bush, to my way of thinking, certainly broke his promise. The Jackson Square Promise. The Jackson Square Promise, you know, but it's not so much that he broke his promise. He just forgot to tell OMB about it. And he allowed his budget people to pretty much slash and burn.

To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, St. Bernard Parish is immediately adjacent to New Orleans. It's just a boundary drawn in the dirt. There's no physical difference. You can't protect New Orleans without protecting St. Bernard because earlier we were talking about building gates to keep storm surge from coming into New Orleans while those gates are actually built in St. Bernard Parish. However, the plan that the administration has would require every family in St. Bernard to pay roughly $60,000 in taxes in the next three years just for the levy system. That's their cost share. And this is an area that whose housing was 99% destroyed. This is not exaggerating. Every single home in St. Bernard Parish was flooded.

Every single home. There were almost 70,000 people living there. And most of those homes were completely destroyed. John Barry, thank you for being smart enough to know this stuff and being clear enough to explain it to me and I hope our listeners and it's a great pleasure to have you on. I hope I can call pine again as time goes on. Well, thanks very much for having me on. It's a pleasure and I'm a fan. Thank you. I love you, Fidra. Meanwhile back in Southern California from the Los Angeles dog trainer, this correction, in Thursday's California section, forecast high temperature for Southern California beaches was listed as 145 degrees.

It should have been 75 degrees. That's good editing, baby. It's going to put the sealant on this particular edition of the show. The program returns next week at the same time over the same stations over NPR worldwide throughout Europe. The U.S. and 440 cable system in Japan up and down the east coast of North America via the shortwave giant WBCQ, the planet 7.415 MHz around the world through the facilities of the American Forces Network on the mighty 104 in Berlin on Sirius and XM satellite radio. Have they merged yet? On the globe via the internet at two different locations live or archived, whenever you want it on your computer, harryshear.com and kcrw.com, available as a free download for members at www.autable.com slash the show and available as a free podcast of kcrw.com.

To be just like a skettin' through another hurricane season in New Orleans, you'd agree with me that. Would you? Thank you very much, y'all. A typical a show-shap hoe to the Pittsburgh San Diego and Hawaii desks into Jenny Lawson here at WNOMFM in New Orleans, which still hasn't carried a show. But to Jeffrey Talbot at AudioWorks here in New Orleans for helping to make today's show possible. The show comes to you from Century of Progress Productions that originates through the facilities of kcrw Santa Monica, a community recognized around the world as the home of the homeless.