Charles M. Hess
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a milestone for reflection, so a few weeks ago I brought a group of graduated students from the Department of Sciences and Engineering of the University of Tulane in the Surge de Lake Borgne barrier in New Orleans. This was not the theory. It was concrete, steel and swamp. This was the true treatment. They had passed a semester studying increased sea level and increased storm.
They were now standing with 1.8 kilometers of barrier that reduces the risk of about one million people, built in less than four years.
We have talked less about science and more about execution, the way big projects require great thinking and relentless collaboration on bureaucratic competence. We also discussed how we refused to “Matoc” our way through the problem: referring to the United States Army Engineers Corps of the use of multiple order contracts for awarding tasks for the execution of the project. There would be no launch launch to 15 competing contractors and hopes of greatness. Instead, we built a team. We focused on the critical results, the rates of contractors linked to program and the performance, and we emphasized the quality from day one. This is what prevents re -elaboration. This is what saves money, time and lives.
It was a beautiful spring day in New Orleans: moisture, quiet water. You could be in the barrier and look west through 8 kilometers of swamp and open water on the horizon of the city without other defenses visible in the middle. This vision was humble and clarifying.
I live in the district of the lower garden of the city, a few blocks of the Mississippi Floodwall River. I know exactly where I sit within the complex risk reduction system that the body, many other federal, state and local agencies and the community of engineering and construction, struggled to deliver after 2005.
But I can’t say the same thing for the Houston-Galveston area, as the New York region of New York City, remains dangerously overexposed to the coastal risk.
In this region, three coastal resilience plans are advancing, including the Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coast Resilience Program, which involves a series of drop-down and permanent barriers. But they all remain in early stages and progress is painfully slow.
Several concepts of overtension barrier proposed in the port of New York, some imaginatives, some simply practical, have been flooded over the last decade. They have been lowered by paralysis of analysis, fight against interest or sticker shock. In the meantime, sea level continues to increase and the intensity of the storm grows.
Throughout the United States Gulf coast, the issues are even more extracted. In 2011, I met Galveston leaders to share Lake Borgne lessons. This was 14 years ago. Despite some design studies, they are still exposed. Every summer, golf reminds us of the vulnerable that this region is left.
I have more than five decades of experience in Civil Works in the United States, emergency response and infrastructure resilience. The urgency I expose is not hypothetical. It reflects a race in the form of lessons gained, lost opportunities and tests that complex megaprojects can be delivered under pressure, if the will exists. For me, the priority must be aligning the parties, resources and results expected in a complete program.
Megaprojects are not impossible. But they require urgency, decisiveness and will to break the mold. We don’t need more perfect plans. We need resistant. We need the courage to act, and the leadership to hold it.
Today, both Houston-Galveston and the New York City Region, the port of Jersey, are still dangerously exposed. Despite a generation of work forces, academic studies and storm overtension modeling, both must move beyond pilot projects and fragmented plans. In the meantime, the risk is growing, not linearly, but exponentially. The infrastructure clock is marking and our national attention is short. At some point we have to move from the conversation to El Commitment.
Overflowing barriers are not the whole solution, but they are a critical piece. They buy time, reduce the risk of infrastructure and offer planners and communities a possibility of struggle. Because when the next great storm arrives in Houston or New York, no one will import who presided over the last meeting of interest. They will ask themselves: Where was our protection?
