Washington D.C. said to be unprepered for hurricane

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When the big storm hits D.C., the resulting disaster may not kill as many as Katrina, or flood as much physical real estate as Harvey, but the toll it takes on American institutions will be unfathomable. The storm will paralyze many of the agencies that operate and defend the nation, raising the specter of national-security threats. Imagine, says Gerald Galloway, a disaster and national-security expert at the University of Maryland who served 38 years in the military, "the world waking up some morning to see an aerial photograph of Washington, D.C., with everything from the Lincoln Memorial to the grounds of the Capitol under-water – that certainly does not speak well for the United States' preparedness."

The problem D.C. faces is largely one of geography. America's capital lies on the Potomac, an extremely powerful river that drops from 3,000-foot mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. And like all big rivers, the Potomac produces major floods. In September 1996, Jeff Kelble, the president of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, watched a set of rapids known as Great Falls, located 17 miles outside D.C., rise in the wake of Hurricane Fran. "The river took houses off their foundations and rammed them into other houses," he says. Steep hills further downstream funnel the Potomac through Little Falls; according to Dean Naujoks, who works for Kelble, kayaking this stretch at flood stage "is like driving a car – you just start accelerating." From the falls, a flooded Potomac could sprint, in a muddy torrent of engorged fury, into D.C. Heavy rains over the headwaters of the Potomac released a deluge into the city 13 times between 1877 and 1996. The most notable floods were 1936, when the Potomac destroyed every single bridge but one along a 185-mile stretch, and 1942, when the river inundated the National Mall.

For scientists like Resio, a big concern is if a storm system in the mountains unfolds just before a major hurricane hits near the Outer Banks of North Carolina, then tracks inland, pulling a small mountain of water up the Chesapeake, then up the Potomac. This happened in the Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane of 1933, which carried a deadly 11-foot storm surge; with Hurricane Hazel in 1954; Hurricane Connie in 1955; and Hurricane Isabel, a Category 2 storm that hit in 2003 with a nearly nine-foot surge that severed power at two of Maryland's largest sewage treatment plants, sending 96 million gallons of sewage flowing toward D.C. "Isabel is a reminder," wrote David L. Johnson, then assistant administrator for Weather Services, in a government assessment of the storm, "that if the impact of a Category 2 hurricane can be so extensive, then the impact of a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) could be devastating."

Resio estimates that there are better-than-even odds that a one-two punch will descend on D.C. within the next 50 to 200 years. Though, "like with many situations," he says, "when it hits, people will say it was the perfect storm." Floodwater coming down the Potomac from the mountains would crash into water moving up the river with the storm surge from the ocean. This would set the stage for a dramatic physics experiment that even the world's most advanced meteorological computer models have had trouble simulating. "You end up with an interaction," says Ed Link, a former chief scientific adviser with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "It is one plus one equals three"

Part of the problem is the city could already be flooded: Persistent rainfall over downtown D.C. could send sheets of water into the Federal Triangle, a wedge between Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues containing seven crucial federal buildings, overwhelming the city's century-old sewer system and causing additional water to erupt out of storm drains. This happened in 2006, flooding the subbasement of the Internal Revenue Service headquarters with more than 20 feet of water and shutting down the Department of Justice, the Department of Commerce, the National Archives and the National Gallery of Art. Constitution Avenue, a vital D.C. artery built on the path of an old creek, flooded nearly nine feet deep with enough hydrostatic pressure to blast a hole through the foundation of EPA headquarters.

And if the river blasted through D.C.'s levee system, which has a slate of weak points, the entire area would essentially become part of the Potomac.

Washington's defense begins with a little-known levee system. "There probably aren't 10 people in Washington," says Galloway, "who even know this levee exists." The Potomac Park Levee System is operated by the National Park Service and consists of an earthen berm that begins near the Lincoln Memorial and runs along the National Mall, passing just below the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Constitution Gardens to the Washington Monument. At 17th Street, a busy thoroughfare that cuts right through the berm, a 140-foot-wide gap marks the levee system's greatest point of vulnerability. For the city to be protected, this must be manually patched.

In past floods, the hole in the system was filled with sandbags, a task that took 1,000 man-hours. In 2007, the Army Corps inspected the levee and gave the entire system a failing grade. This led FEMA to de-accredit it, meaning much of downtown D.C. was forced to pay into the National Flood Insurance Program. Three years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers unveiled a potential solution: a removable flood wall comprising eight steel posts and 27 aluminum panels that is stored in a maintenance yard a 30-minute drive from 17th Street.

Deploying the wall falls to the National Park Service's Division of Facility Management, whose workers have practiced setting up the barrier on just three occasions, though never at night, in the rain, or in the face of an actual hurricane or flood. The wall is stored in a National Park Service maintenance yard in northeast D.C., amid picnic tables and garbage bins. To keep water from coming through, says Jeff Gowen, acting chief of facility management at the National Park Service, a thick plastic sheet would have to be pulled over the entire length of the wall – a part of the process his team does not currently practice. To hold the sheet down, sandbags would be stacked along the bottom.

According to Resio and other disaster experts, the list of things that could go wrong is long:

And that's provided workers can even get the wall to 17th Street. A rain event that hits the region a few days prior to the approaching hurricane – what meteorologists call an antecedent storm – would mean the streets and subways could be flooded, preventing National Park Service staff from reaching the maintenance yard. Or, workers could make it to the yard but be unable to haul the wall's pieces to 17th Street because the route the tractor-trailers need to take is blocked by downed trees or power lines. Bureaucracy can be an issue too. "There are all sorts of interesting stories," says Galloway of urban levee systems, "where a flood comes and people can't find the parts."

The wall is not the only part of the Potomac Park Levee System with serious problems. A pretty patch of trees along the north side of the National Mall is growing around the earthen berm that serves as the city's critical levee, a potential violation of Army Corps of Engineers guidelines.

Any breakdown in D.C.'s ad hoc flood-defense system would unload a sizable portion of the pent-up Potomac on downtown D.C. If the river broke through the levee system at 17th Street, or at the low points near the Lincoln Memorial or Constitution Gardens, a wall of water would spill down Constitution Avenue and rush east into the Federal Triangle. At the National Archives, the water would hit up against a pair of flood walls installed after the 2006 inundation. They've been set to automatically rise when the city's storm drains fill, and may well hold. Other Federal Triangle buildings would not be so lucky. The General Services Administration, which operates a number of agency headquarters, has been working with a private company to design a floodgate to protect a series of moats surrounding the IRS. But the congressional approval required to deploy the gate has not been granted, according to GSA public-affairs officer Renee Kelly. The substantial basement and subbasement flooding that occurred at the IRS in 2006 and shut sections of the building down for six months would likely occur again.

At vulnerable points along the departments of Commerce and Justice, and the Environmental Protection Agency, GSA would have to deploy some 10,000 sandbags. At the National Gallery of Art, workers would have to be quick to install a chain of interlocking barriers to block the flood. But these laborious efforts are not the type that impress flood-risk experts. "If you have to rely on people to put barriers in place," says Randall Behm, the Army Corps lead engineer on non-structural floodproofing, "there is always the opportunity for something to go wrong." Twelve feet of water, the depth of the flow that could potentially be coming down Constitution Avenue, would likely swipe anything not bolted down, smashing windows, pouring down air-intake shafts and seeping in through utility lines.

The deluge would lap against the grounds of the White House and the Trump International Hotel; cross the National Mall; pour onto the lower grounds of the Capitol; and begin rushing down 2nd and 3rd Streets Southwest, near NASA headquarters. Not only would the metro system be grounded, water may well pool across the runways at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and most of D.C.'s major highways would be at least partially underwater. "People would be stranded on little islands," says Resio. When I asked the city's Department of Energy and Environment which backup routes the city would use should the main ones become impassible, the query was passed along to Washington's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. "It's HSEMA's position that this information is sensitive," external-affairs specialist Nicole Peckumn replied via e-mail, "meant to prevent or mitigate potential acts of terrorism."

Although flood maps show the Pentagon outside the flood zone, "the map," says Galloway, "shows that with the storm surge the Pentagon parking lot will be under-water, along with many of the roads that come into it." For certain employees trying to navigate flooded streets and reach the massive Department of Defense headquarters, he says, "the Pentagon is right across the street from Arlington Cemetery, and that's on a hill, so people could walk through the cemetery."

On the other side of the river, the Washington Navy Yard, the site of the Naval Sea Systems Command – a complex of shipyards and a warfare center – was almost entirely submerged in the 1942 Potomac Flood. Yet Behm, at the Army Corps, tells me the facility has no formal levee system, just "some small individual walls and a little bit of an earthen berm."

Across the Anacostia River, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling faces even more serious challenges. Among other important entities, the base houses the Defense Intelligence Agency, the office of military intelligence for the secretary of defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff. The facility is protected by a rutted and crumbling 80-year-old seawall and levee system that has been decertified by the Army Corps of Engineers. During a 2012 inspection, engineers noted "unwanted vegetation" on the levee's embankments, "erosion," "section loss and sliding along landslide slopes," as well as a problem with culverts and discharge pipes. Each of these issues on its own would have caused the levee to fail inspection, which it did. Earlier this year, the Army Corps inspected the levee again, and nothing had changed.

In a major flood, the base's levee system, according to a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers, "would most likely be overtopped or incur a floodwall failure." D.C.'s bureaucratic jumble appears to have contributed to the levee's lack of attention. "It is unclear under whose jurisdiction this parcel falls," a 2008 National Capital Planning Commission report stated, referring to a section of the levee that runs under the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, "and which entity ultimately has responsibility for repairs and maintenance."

Unlike the parade of recent storm tragedies, the fallout in Washington, D.C., would be felt around the globe. It will be hard to play the role of leader of the free world with major federal agencies flooded, defense bases and parts of the intelligence community waylaid, and the president and members of Congress unable to portray any semblance of normalcy.

The old running joke about "the city on swamp" is actually BS.