Posted on 08/28/2005 5:00:35 PM PDT by gitmo
THE BOXES are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of dead bodies."
New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh-an area the size of Manhattan-will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldnÆt go very far.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciamdigital.com ...
oh man, this could be worse than anyone ever thought.
But a legitimate one.
You've got to be kidding, how would one loot 20 or 30 feet under water?
I have never heard that song before but the songwriter was mistaken. Galveston had no seawall in 1900, it was built AFTER the 'great storm of 1900'.
Anyone see the whatif documentary "Oil Wars" in June of this year? It was based on New Orleans getting nailed with a cat 5 hurricane. The entire oil industry was wiped out for 1 year and gas went up to $9.00 a gallon. The economy basically shut down. No one could afford gas.
The LOOP handles 50% of ALL INCOMING PETROLEUM
A lot of swamp creatures will be out of their habitats too. In south Louisiana there are MANY snakes. I feel sorry for all those people in the superdome. It kills me to think of losing the plantations on the River Road and all the historical buildings.
The gas prices will be bad, but what about all those people trapped in the bowl? How on earth do we recover from that?
Luckily, most of the refineries are further upriver.
Yes. Of course the residents could have also tuned into the news and maybe figured out that there could be a weather issue. We've braved huge blizzards in upstate NY and took precautionary measures. We cut down trees that would have fallen on the house, turned off and drained water when we lost heat and power so the pipes wouldn't freeze and burst. Stocked wood on the deck for heat in the fireplace, and to heat canned goods to eat. Filled up the tubs and sinks for fresh water.... The list was endless. But we prepared.
In the Gulf situation, things are different. I'd say that most should have taken a bus or train and left in order to not drown, or whatever risk they feel that they might be in.
And God has had mercy on NO. How many cat 4 & 5's have veered or suddenly dropped to a 1 or 2 before making landfall in the last few years? One of these days He won't.
Another example of how a group of smart people can become so stupid. There’re probably not 100,000 people in or near New Orleans now.
This is that same kind of academic environment in which global warming models are created.
As is the Coast Guard, working hard to assist whoever needs it.
I travel a lot, and I always make it a point to check the weather before I leave, and then I watch the news wherever I am. How do you propose the tourists should have been warned?
We don't recover from it if we're smart. NO is sinking because it's built on sediment. Without the river depositing more sediment in and around NO, it started to sink. We've held back the Mississippi in an artificial course for decades. We've paid a price for that. Perhaps it's time to stop looking at the short term benefits and look at the long term costs of our actions.
The hotels should put up a sign about it. I've seen hotels do this in other places where I've visited, most notably Grand Cayman Island when a tropical storm was due. It sounds like you travel mostly for business. When I'm on vacation, I'm really and truly on vacation. I don't turn on the news, I don't read newspapers. The whole point of a vacation is to relax, not get up tight about the latest news.
Yes, they should have. But guess what? According to what I've been hearing, they shut down the city buses so those employees could get out of town, too. When this is over, perhaps they can come up with a better plan.
That is ALWAYS the case with the USCG! My husband is a retired Coastie, and we know first hand. (We lived in New Orleans for a number of years.)
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