Posted on 11/03/2012 4:26:34 AM PDT by Bulwinkle
I've seen an estimate that there is/was up to 300 million gallons of water in NY subway system.
Katrina? "The unwatering team successfully removed 250 billion gallons of water from Orleans, St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes after Katrina " http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/2012/10/new_orleans_corps_employees_jo.html
Sandy, though wide, was not Katrina... FEMA ain't close to handling a large storm.
living in a high rise with the power out is a mess. that was one of the problems in the place I lived back during Agnes ~ no power no elevator but we had water so we had flushing toilets. friends from work who lived out in Fairfax County stopped by for showers after work ~ they had no water no power.
The crybabies are all in NY / NJ now. Most took no precautions because they assumed living in the shadow of the Greatest City In The World meant nothing really bad could ever befall them.
Btw, the French Quarter lost power too. I cannot think of a single place in Nola that didn’t. It wasn’t like sandy, where you could scoot a couple of miles upriver and find everything up and running. 80% of nyc never lost power in sandy. The homes flooded in Ny /Nj are a fraction of the thousands inundated by Katrina. Close to 20 times more people died.
My power was out for 88 hours just this year after Isaac. You probably never even heard about Isaac. Let me assure you that being out of electricity in 95f weather is far worse than 55f. Of course after Katrina I was out of power for a month.
It is not easy to feel sympathy for people whose hardship is not so severe and could have been mitigated even more if they had had the responsibility to keep a week’s worth of food on hand, fill their gas tank, and buy some propane and charcoal and batteries. What the hell were they doing with the week’s warning they received, besides wring their hands or watch tv?
You have no clue what you’re talking about. That is some pretty extreme myth making. Makes you look silly, I have to say.
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/cia-tried-to-save-envoys-in-libya-660276/
Here is a great picture of a chinook dropping sandbags into the levee breach of the Industrial Canal.
Basically correct. The i10 twin span in lake pontchartrain lost one span to storm surge. The causeway was closed to all but emergency vehicles. Returning on Laborious day I took the inland route from Florida, where trees were mowed down in ranks and power was out in Laurel, 200 miles from the coast.
I returned to my home via i55 to airline hwy, then to causeway which I took to river road, which took me to st Charles ave.
I would trade Katrina for sandy any day. Shoot, Isaac just this year hit me way harder than sandy hit most folks this week. Irresponsible,spoiled crybabies.
I’ll gladly stand corrected, if I’m wrong. I thought that was why New Orleans began flooding long after most media reports indicated that it had “dodged a bullet” when Katrina made landfall to the east in Mississippi.
Add to that the surrounding metropolitan area that includes northern New Jersey, the lower Hudson River valley, Long Island, and southwester Connecticut ... and you've got another 10-15 million people and a disaster in the making. There simply isn't any effective way to do disaster preparation for that many people in an urban area, especially when you consider that the single most popular disaster preparation measure most people in this region took -- namely, the purchase of portable generators in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene last year -- is losing its effectiveness as fuel becomes scarce.
Personally, I think this is the flaw in any urban environment where constraints on space and the tendency to take things for granted really erode a lot of the survival instincts that humans should have.
We were without power in our home in LA (Lower Alabama) for about a week and a half but managed to make do with ice chests, and by periodically running the generator. We had twelve adults, two toddlers, six dogs, two cockatiels and too many cats to count. We spent a lot of time outdoors listening to radios trying to catch news on WWL. It wasn’t easy, but I was just thankful they heeded my urging to get out of Slidell before the storm.
My parents ended up staying with us for six months ‘til they got a FEMA trailer in their front yard.
Yes, sandy affected a much bigger population area. For 90% of them sandy was a stormy night. For 9.9% it was a Multi day inconvenience. For only about 0.1% was it traumatic and life changing.
A year after Katrina I saw a black woman in the grocery store. The front of her t shirt said “where’d you go? “ The back side said “how’d you make out? “ Everyone within a hundred miles would have understood.
If you’re saying that many of the preps taken for sandy were ill considered or hopelessly inadequate, I agree. Urban life does seem to attenuate survival skills.
I may have been the last to cross the east bound I-10 bridge. I was going about 80 in order to get to Mobile before dark. Just as I heard the bridge was closed,(which was news to me seeing I was on it), I saw the barge and went over the split. Luckily the west side of the bridge was a little higher than the east. WHEW!
I agree with what you write, as it aligns with the report. I’m curious to know if you toured the disaster zone. If you have, you would understand why I refer to the Lower 9th as a “catastrophe”. If memory serves me, the university staff that took us out described the “flood” as a wall of water 6 feet high moving at about 10 feet/sec in the Lower 9th Ward. I saw houses that were moved intact two blocks from their foundations, cars stacked one upon the other, and the area generally looked like a war zone.
Did the MRGO failure lead to flooding with the city proper, or mainly St. Bernard’s and Plaquemines parishes?
* rote:
Didn’t you have to detour at Pascagoula? IIRC, the east-bound bridge lost a section or two, or at least was damaged by floating barges.*
You are correct hotshu
I’ve been to NOLA many times… at least two or three times a year since Katrina in a professional capacity as I’m one of the organizers of an annual energy and engineering conference that is held there. There are also a number of power plant customers in the vicinity who I have to visit from time to time. I’ve toured the disaster area quite extensively (almost each visit in fact to see how things are progressing… or not progressing) and talked to many local residents. My nephew and his family live there although they moved there post-Katrina…he’s a bright scientist albeit not in earth sciences and between us, we’ve made it a bit of hobby to try to understand how it all came down. Regarding the MRGO failure, I have to confess that I don’t know the answer with certainty… it is my perception that it just lead to the flooding of St Bernard’s Parish and the Lower 9th Ward but that is just a semi-educated guess. Since the Corps did not do anything to truly shore up the channel, it grew substantially in size to perhaps 3 times the width of its design… this then put enormous pressure on the levee that protected St Bernard and the Lower 9th Ward. One of things that I’ve been hoping somebody would do is create the best animated model that was possible of the whole area to demonstrate the timeline of the devastation right from the point of the Katrina coming in to the point where the water had all been pumped out….including the reflooding a month later after Hurricane Rita damaged some of the levee breaches that weren’t fully repaired. This model is quite interesting but it could have been a lot better yet…. http://www.nola.com/katrina/graphics/continuous.swf
FEMA = Giant Useless Government Appendage
Thanks for the information and link. NOLA has always been one of my favorite cities; I’ve been there many times in my life, perhaps 4 or 5 times since Katrina. I hear many misconceptions about the disaster, but clearly am not into it as you and your nephew are. My main reason for addressing this is that so much of what the media reported about the aftermath just wasn’t so, presented in a partisan fashion to hurt the GWB Administration. Just my $0.02 worth.
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