Us > Draining New Orleans could take 80 days- Army

Work crews gained control over one of the breaches in the levee on Friday and expected to have another major gap closed on Saturday, Brig. Gen. Robert Crear told reporters at a briefing in Baton Rouge.

"We're looking at anywhere from 36 to 80 days to being done," Crear said.

The bowl-shaped city is mostly below sea level and ringed by 350 miles of earthen levees designed to hold back floodwaters as well as Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

The levees are configured in 13 rings and Hurricane Katrina gouged major breaches into two of them, allowing the lake water to gush in and submerge 80 percent of the city.

Lake Pontchartrain was still receding on Friday and was expected to drop by another foot.

But when it reaches its normal level, the lake will still be about a foot above sea level. The city sits an average 6 feet below sea level so that will still leave much of New Orleans under 7 feet of water that cannot drain on its own and must be pumped out.

Crear said engineers "affected closure" of the 17th Street canal breach but "we left it open while water is draining out."

He said crews dropped giant 3,000-pound (1,360 kg) sandbags into the hole.

Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said at a Pentagon brief that it would take several weeks to drain the city but declined to be more specific, citing such variables as the number of pumps to be used, their relative efficiency and electricity availability.

Strock rejected suggestions that the Corps' response to the disaster was hobbled by being stretched too thin as a result of U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We are spending a lot of money and the Corps of Engineers is involved in the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "But we're able to balance that with our human resources. And it is not directly affecting our budget."

Strock said the Corps had expected the levees that broke to protect the city for 200 to 300 years without failing based on projected storm threats.

"That means that an event that we were protecting from might be exceeded every 200 or 300 years," he said. "So we had an assurance that, 99.5 percent, this would be OK. We, unfortunately, have had that 0.5 percent activity here."

(Additional reporting by Jane Sutton in Miami and Jim Wolf at the Pentagon)

2005-09-03