NEW ORLEANS — The Army Corps of Engineers is breaking ground on a 2-mile-long floodwall across canals that funneled Hurricane Katrina's storm surge into greater New Orleans. The $695 million project calls for building a barrier near where the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway meets the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, to keep storm surge out of the gulf outlet and the Industrial Canal. The navigation canal carried Katrina's storm surge into the 9th Ward, washing houses from their foundations. The gulf outlet is blamed for flooding in St. Bernard Parish and eastern New Orleans three years ago. When Hurricane Gustav dealt a glancing blow to New Orleans in September, water overtopped parts of the Industrial Canal's flood wall and caused minor flooding in the 9th Ward. "This is territory we must defend, and we must defend it with all of our ingenuity," John Paul Woodley, Jr., the Army's assistant secretary for civil works, said at a ground breaking ceremony Thursday. The corps calls it the largest design-build civil works project in its history. "This is going to be an incredible piece of work," Woodley said, "and the significance of it is truly historic." On Thursday, Corps officials watched from a barge as workers prepared to drive piles into the waters of a bayou off the gulf outlet. Dredging is scheduled to begin later this month. About 1.1 million cubic yards of soil will be dredged. The project is scheduled to be completed in 2011. By then, the surge barrier's walls will be up to 26 feet high. Wide gates will let shipping through the Intracoastal Waterway. Garret Graves, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's coastal affairs director, said the Industrial Canal has been "Achilles' heel" of the city's hurricane protection system. "During Gustav, I was quite literally on my knees when the water was coming over the top," he said. "Eliminating this vulnerability is absolutely on top of the priority list." The federal government is paying for the project, although the state purchased land where the surge barriers will be built, according to Graves. The Corps awarded the contract for the project to Shaw Group Inc. in April. Lt. Gen. Robert Van Antwerp, the Corps' chief of engineers, said roughly half the project already has been designed. The rest of the blueprints will be drawn during construction. "You may say, 'That seems like a recipe for failure,' but it is not," he said. "It's a recipe for ingenuity."

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Winter looks likely to be mild in the Midwest and dry in the Southeast, the government said Thursday. Warmer-than-average temperatures are expected for the nation's center, especially Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center said above normal readings are also likely in a large area extending from New Mexico, Colorado and Nebraska in the west to southeastern South Dakota and southern Wisconsin. Most of Michigan is in the warm area, which extends east to western New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, the western edge of Virginia and North Carolina and northern Georgia. The rest of the 48 contiguous states have equal chances of being warmer or cooler than normal, the forecast said. Most of Alaska is expected to be warmer than normal, as are the westernmost of the Hawaiian islands. The Big Island of Hawaii is expected to be cooler than usual for winter, which meteorologists define as December through February. Turning to rain and snowfall, the outlook is for wetter than normal for the season in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas. Dryer than normal is expected the southeastern and Gulf Coast states, extending westward across Texas to New Mexico and most of Arizona. The strongest chance for unusually dry weather is in north Florida, southern Georgia and the coastal Carolinas, as well as along the southern New Mexico-Arizona border. The rest of the country, including Alaska and Hawaii, have equal changes of wetter, dryer or normal conditions. The forecasters said long term forecasts are especially challenging this year because neither the El Nino or La Nina conditions are underway in the Pacific Ocean. Those warmer or cooler-than-normal water readings tend to affect climate across the country. Because other patterns are harder to predict, Michael Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center, said, "We expect variability, or substantial changes in temperature and precipitation across much of the country."

 

 

 

 

CONSTABLEVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — A blast of cold wind spread snow along the Great Lakes from Michigan to New York on Monday, dumping 2 feet on this central New York town. Snow doesn't usually fall this early in Constableville, librarian Dorothy Valenti said. "Yesterday morning we had none. So it's quite a transition to go from no snow to all this. When you open the door, it's amazing," she said in a telephone interview. "It's strange to have a snow day before Thanksgiving." Moisture from the lakes produced lake-effect snow on the eastern and southern shores of the lakes. The deepest was in this snow-prone section of New York, where the National Weather Service said 24 inches had fallen at Constableville, at the east end of Lake Ontario on the Tug Hill Plateau. In western New York, moisture from Lake Erie had turned into 23 inches of snow by midmorning at Ellicottville, south of Buffalo. In northwest Pennsylvania, Erie reported as much as 14 inches of snow Monday morning and several schools districts in the region closed or delayed classes. Police reported numerous accidents on slippery roads in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. The weather system producing the snow was moving toward the southeast, and a foot of snow was forecast in parts of Michigan, Indiana and Ohio on Tuesday. It wasn't the first snowstorm this season in the Northeast. In late October, a storm spread just over a foot of snow over parts of northern New Jersey, northeast Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains and New York's Catskill Mountains, and heavy snow also fell at higher elevations of northern New England.