I had lunch last week with a group of my former Michoud coworkers in town on business, and of course the subject of "Tropical Wave 12" came up. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about it...but then, who would have expected it to suddenly turn into a Category 5 hurricane with "New Orleans" written on it? Watching the weather coverage, I don't see how this can not be a bad thing for New Orleans. In the six-plus years I lived there, there were a number of hurricanes which appeared to threaten the city, but then swerved into Biloxi or Gulfport at the last moment. This doesn't look like one of those times. The only bright side in this is that Katrina is not coming from the east -- conventional wisdom has it that a hurricane from the east will push the Gulf into Lake Ponchartrain and the lake into the city. Of course, when you're looking up from twelve feet below sea level, it really makes little difference from which direction a Category 5 hurricane is coming at you...a slightly-less-major catastrophe is still a major catastrophe.

As far as space interests go, it bears reminding that New Orleans has an important role in the U.S. space program. Stennis Space Center is located in Harrison County, MS, about 40mi from NOLA and just inland from the Gulf coast, and is home to the bulk of this country's liquid rocket engine testing facilities and part of Lockheed Martin's commercial satellite manufacturing capacity, as well as part of the Navy's meteorological service. The place to watch is Michoud Assembly Facility, where the Shuttle's External Tanks are built (facility status can be found here). Michoud is behind levees on the Intercoastal Waterway, on swamp-reclaimed land. There are two new major welding fixtures for the ET, which are built into tension-pile pits in the floor roughly 20ft deep, in addition to partially-sunken fixtures for other ET and non-ET hardware. And then there is the irritating tendency (when I still worked there, anyway) of the rooves of the engineering buildings to leak like showerheads in heavy rain, saturating ceiling tiles until they burst over the desks below like water ballons full of wet kleenex (I learned not to stick around when everyone else started leaving ahead of a major rainstorm after an Indiana Jones-like episode of dodging exploding ceiling tiles while running down the second-floor hallway of Building 102).

Of particular sentimental concern is the booster (S1-C-15) parked in front of MAF. After watching the History Channel's "Save Our History" episode on Apollo artifacts last night, and seeing the extreme corrosion restorers have discovered while working on the Saturn V at JSC -- and recalling the corrosion already externally visible on the MAF booster in the intertank and interstage skirt -- I have to wonder whether it can survive 150-175mph winds.

Looking at the Shuttle program, the six month delay in returning to return-to-flight, combined with the ten or so ETs currently in inventory, means there is enough cushion that even massive damage to Michoud will likely have little immediate effect on the Shuttle program, depending on how much RTF-prompted rework of tanks in inventory has to be done at MAF rather than KSC and how quickly the MAF VAB and final assembly cells can be restored. On the other hand, if the damage is severe enough (particularly in monetary terms), it may add political strength to the calls for early retirement of Shuttle -- for example, if the cost of repairs to MAF to support a 2010 flyout ends up being dramatically out of line with the value of Orbiter flights beyond those for which tanks are currently available. As for the stack-derived heavy lifter, there has been talk for several years that the Boeing Delta facility in Decatur has at least the physical capacity (tool sizes, hook heights) to produce ET-sized tankage, so at least a potential alternative to MAF exists if NASA were to choose to close the plant altogether rather than repair it.

Aside from the effects on spaceflight, I'm curious to see how well River Ridge stands up to the flooding. I moved there from an area near MAF in New Orleans East in 1998 in part because it was one of the higher areas between the lake and the river (+12ft) -- and even at that I moved to a second-floor apartment in 1999 after Hurricane Georges came just a little too close to the city for my comfort. But seeing as how Big Muddy is just down the street, I wonder how the place will fare in a 25ft storm surge and a couple of feet of rain.

Like the potential for Michoud to be closed due to excessive damage, I have to wonder what will be done about NOLA if it takes a direct hit. Will it be worth pumping out and rebuilding, given the city is already below sea level and sinking at a rate that will require major civil-engineering intervention (beyond the current levee system) in another thirty or forty years? It's highly unlikely that a city as large as New Orleans or one with its long history would simply be abandoned, so what would rebuilding look like? If the city is deemed worth rebuilding, will it just be a haphazard restoration to something approximating the pre-storm conditions, or will the city take the opportunity to address the flooding and subsidence issues early (Netherlands-like sea barriers, raising whole areas of the city to above sea level, etc.) while everything in the city is already disrupted? And who will pay for the reconstruction? A category 5 hurricane hitting any U.S. city would be a hard thing for the insurance industry to swallow, and it can only be worse for New Orleans given its peculiar nature: below sea level, full of old and neglected buildings predating modern hurricane building codes, structures weakened by rot and termites, etc. I expect the fedgov is probably going to be picking up the bulk of the tab to rebuild the city.

New Orleans by its nature has long been a disaster waiting to happen, but by luck the city has been spared by the recent large hurricanes which seemed headed for it (at the expense of Biloxi and Gulfport, unluckily for them). It looks like that luck is now running out...no matter what changes with Katrina in the next two days, it isn't going to be pretty, and there's going to be a whole lot of people ruined by it.

ADDENDUM: I wonder just how much of the delta will disappear under the storm.

ADDENDUM: A FEMA official on the Weather Channel just described the potential flooding as turning the city into "a giant cesspool of disaster". Now they're talking about the various new floodproof bridges and levees -- should be interesting to see if they live up to their specs.

ADDENDUM: The weather bouys in the Gulf have been knocked out. That can't be good. Katrina is being compared to Andrew and Camille. That's not good either.

ADDENDUM: Commenter rps points to a Spaceflight Now article which gives the ET inventory as two at KSC and seven complete at Michoud, plus 8-10 in various stages of construction.

And Max "The Veil Baby" Mayfield is on Fox right now showing a storm surge model, with the track of the hurricane passing directly over MAF.

It's not looking good for New Orleans or the Shuttle program.

Posted by T.L. James on August 28, 2005 11:30 AM