Permanent Canal Closures and Pumps Design-Build Project

The City of New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. In response, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers implemented the hurricane and storm damage risk reduction system to reduce floodingrisks faced by the city and surrounding communities. The final piece is the $614 million permanentcanal closures and pumps design-build project, with Stantec as the lead design engineer andarchitect.

There are three main drainage outfall canals in the City of New Orleans - 17th Street, OrleansAvenue, and London Avenue. These canals are a critical element of the flood control system, servingas drainage conduits for much of the city. This project provides a long term solution for reducingrisk from a 100 year storm event. Our solution blocks Lake Pontchartrain storm surges, which canhave wave heights of almost 14 feet, from entering the canals with 18 foot high barrier gates andpumps rainwater from each canal into the lake. The pumps have a combined capacity of 24,200cubic feet per second - sufficient to fill an Olympic sized pool in less than four seconds. Pumping isaccomplished with twenty-four, 2.6 megawatt generators backed up by six redundant units for atotal of 78 megawatts across all three sites. Our site layout maximizes the distance from existingstructures and minimizes acoustic and visual impacts for surround neighborhoods.

Physical scale model testing was an essential component of this effort. The innovation of seamlesslycombining 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D computer modeling with 1:16 physical scale modeling provided insightinto both equipment performance and resulting outfall canal conditions, accurately portraying howthese facilities will perform.

These facilities form one of the largest drainage pumping stations in the world and can operatecontinuously and independently during hurricane events.